Young Justice: Outsiders episode 16 review: Ableism overshadows the episode

Young Justice: Outsiders episode 16 is not a Barbara Gordon-approved episode. The ableism alone makes this episode difficult to finish.

There’s a lot of great things that happen in Young Justice: Outsiders episode 16, “Illusion of Control.” From the steadily building foreshadowing to a new generation of teen heroes to the interesting villainous plot twists. Yet, a severely ableist scene squanders the powerful character growth and of all of the artfully animated scenes.

Well, that happened. Young Justice isn’t immune to mistakes or questionable character development (we’re looking at you, M’gann). While previous episodes have lightly touched on Paula, Artemis’ mom, and her internalized ableism, episode 16 exacerbates it and clearly ignores their audience in the process. As a show primarily geared toward kids and young adults, this episode propagates a harmful message about disabled people and using disability as a scare tactic.

When Paula uses her own disability and Barbara’s disability as a possible outcome for Artemis’ continued heroics, she clearly resorts being disabled to a threat — a punishment. But disability isn’t a punishment. The harmful connotation here is clear. Considering the longstanding misconstrued portrayal of disability in the media, this brief scene outweighs any possible message, scene, or subplot in this episode. Nonetheless, namedropping Barbara Gordon in such an ableist scene is an insult to Oracle and an even great insult to the disabled comic readers who’ve resonated with Babs for years.

After the Killing Joke, Gail Simone helped reconstruct Barbara into a powerful disabled character. Oracle is a symbol of disabled pride and for being unabashedly disabled — because we should never feel like our disability is a punishment. By explicitly using disability as a curse, Young Justice: Outsiders projects their negative outlook on disability or how they think disabled people should feel about their disability onto Paula’s character. It’s an ugly outlook, but this dialogue contradicts everything Barbara stands for.

As a character who was reimagined into a symbol for positive disabled representation — both with her physical disability and her plights with her mental health — this episode goes against everything she stands for. To use her name in this ableist scene disrespects her character.

Sure, many Oracle writers have a habit or retconning her disability or instilling a varying degree of ableism in her solo runs (e.g., The Batgirl of Burnside… on both accounts). However, these out-of-character and ableist missteps within them don’t make the ableism in this Outsiders episode any less harmful to the disabled community.

Paula might not have accepted her disability, but dedicated screen time to her blatant internalized ableism broadcasts this abhorrent message to a younger audience who could mistake this ideology for something normal or acceptable when it’s neither.

Given Halo’s ongoing mental health arc, the ableism in this episode doesn’t offer us much hope for positive mental health portrayals. In fact, this episode makes us worried for the rest of the show given how the tone of this one scene stifled the positive familial-focused messages in the rest of the episode.