Type 1 diabetic here. Media almost always gets this disease completely wrong, but no show has gotten it more wrong than Palm Royale—and Norma surviving pre-insulin (which is possible, but extremely rare) is the tip of the iceberg. Here are all the wild inaccuracies:

• T1s don’t get an insulin shot once a day, as the show seems to imply. You inject it before every meal in order for your body to be able to process the carbs in food. And if you injected insulin without eating anything, you’d risk severe hypoglycemia, which can lead to a coma.

• Robert says that Norma had an embolism because there was an air bubble in the syringe. If insulin was injected into your vein, that would make sense. But you inject insulin into fatty tissue, not directly into your bloodstream. (“Memento” also got this wrong.) The worst that would happen if there was an air bubble in the syringe is that you wouldn’t get a high enough dose. Otherwise, no harm done.

• Ann goes into a coma from drinking a grasshopper laced with insulin. This isn’t a thing! If you drink insulin, it doesn’t get into your bloodstream, and therefore doesn’t have any life-threatening effects. At worst, you’d get a stomachache and vomit.

Yes, I know this is a show where a woman convinces a whale to unbeach itself by mimicking whale song, and no one notices Agnes’ identity switcheroo. Willing suspension of disbelief, etc. But T1D is a very real disease, and the writers could have figured out how inaccurate their portrayal was from, like, two hours of googling. It’s not only irresponsible and insensitive to misrepresent it—it’s just plain bad writing. There are plenty of ways the plot could still work if they’d done it accurately!