This Week’s episode of Speechless feels like it has found it’s way back to it’s roots and what I loved about the show from the pilot. This episode does a great job of capturing the honest emotions that people in wheelchairs feel, while also depicting what their families go through in a way, that’s played for comedy but yet still so grounded and real.
The episode opens with Dylan and Ray trying to recreate a wheelchair BMX video with JJ. This causes his wheelchair to break sending Mya and Jimmy on a mission to get the insurance company to pay for a proper replacement wheelchair.
Ray wants to use JJ as the topic for his My Hero essay to win a contest at school. But he is shocked when JJ says no because he doesn’t want to be seen as someone’s hero or inspiration when he’s just a person like everyone else. (I totally relate to how JJ feels in this moment. Because on the few occasions that I have been told that I’m inspiration or I will inspire people, it’s always a very weird feeling. I’m just a normal person who has a different way of navigating life and being in wheelchair doesn’t make me anymore an inspiration than if someone were to tell an able-bodied person they’re an inspiration because they walk, it’s just part of my everyday life.)
Meanwhile, Maya takes her Insurance Company contact out to lunch where he tells her he is no longer in that department and she has to deal with someone new. When Jimmy and Mya go to the insurance office to meet with the new agent, she is very rude and Mya realizes she can use the agents love of horses as a way to connect with her. So she goes to the Agent’s horse stable and pretends she rides horses too. ( Which I thought was very sweet and funny) Jimmy checks the agents car to see if there is anything else they can bond over. When Jimmy goes to check out her car he notices a track Mom bumper Sticker and he realizes her and Mya can bond over that.
When Mya says she loves Dressage but has no idea what she is doing, Janet realizes she was there to talk about JJ all along. When Janet realizes Mya is Dylan’s Mom, Janet offers to make her a deal. (Which is wrong on so many levels.) If Dylan will let her daughter win the track meet she will get JJ his chair. Dylan agrees to do it so JJ can get the chair he needs. Mya has a change of heart while watching Dylan throw the race and tells her to run like she always does and Dylan wins. (More on that later).
When Ray tells JJ that a kid JJ doesn’t even know, named Donald Bronson is writing his My Hero essay about him, JJ decides to help Ray write an essay about him even though he hates it, so that Ray can beat Donald Bronson. Halfway through his speech Ray has a change of heart and says what it’s really like to have JJ as a brother and that sometimes JJ can be a jerk, which makes JJ really happy.
( Again I can really relate to JJ in this moment some of the happiest moments in my life so far have been when I was treated like everyone else. On the flipside, some of the saddest moments in my life have been when I was treated differently than everyone else. The point that I’m trying to make and the one that was so well illustrated in this week’s Episode of Speechless, is that even though there will be times when things need to be done differently to level the playing field, like fighting hard for the proper wheelchair. What means the most to us is not when you give us special treatment or say that we are inspirations it’s when you treat us just like everybody else).
At the end of the Episode Janet tells Maya that she heard Donald’s speech about JJ and that he is such an inspiration and she will get him what he needs.
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