Even for a show with as little regard for continuity and common sense as Glee has, this episode was something else:
-Lauren is bad from more than a year of mysterious absence, and no one remarks on it
-A show choir is using HUMAN GROWTH HORMONES???
-A performing arts college has a show choir that is at the bottom of the totem pole, where all the dorks hang out. At a PERFORMING ARTS COLLEGE?!!??!!??!!??!!?!!!???
For all that, not an unentertaining episode…
Like I tell my friend Karen after every episode, I think you’ve forgotten what show you are watching lol. Lauren wasn’t absent, she just hasn’t been featured because she left the club. We don’t see other non regulars every episode either. She was featured because they needed a bunch of desperate girls for the dance. HGH is over the top but intentionally so. And at a performance arts college, the lowest people on the totem pole are still going to be performers, and a glee club doesn’t translate into serious performance careers.
My only issue was with Tina not understanding how Blaine’s gayness would be an obstacle to romance.
Well that and for some reason I had thought Kurt and Blaine had actually gotten back together, not just gotten to forgiveness. But I do like Kurt’s new crush.
I’m actually a little disappointed that they are back on the competition track. There’s not much room to grow there.
From the moment when Tina got all weepy because the proudly, happily, openly and flamboyantly GAY GUY wasn’t interested in dating her, I had a real bad feeling about this episode. I was right. I know, I know, the plot is just there to fill the time between the musical numbers. But even the songs this week were unappealing.
They are just going through the motions now. It is like this show is being written by a committee - you write for Rachel, you write for Sam, you pick some random songs, you find some costumes over there in the back lot - and we’ll slap something together with whatever gets filmed.
Yeah - the whole idea of a show choir being the kiss of death at a performing arts school was just stupid. Do you think Julliard’s chamber orchestra is a pile of crap? And besides, most of those graduates would kill to be in the chorus of a long-running, hit Broadway show. In case you don’t know it, the Actors Equity Union ensures a decent minimum salary for those members of the chorus in a Broadway show ($1,509/week).
And Rachel throwing a hissy fit because loverboy was 45 minutes late? Geez - in NYC that is considered punctual. Get with the program, girl.
I’ll defend this one, as Lauren’s absence wasn’t mysterious. Lauren quit New Directions and broke up with Puck at the beginning of season three, saying she was done with them after their embarrassing defeat at Nationals at the end of season two. She still attended McKinley, so it’s not like she just showed up at the dance out of nowhere. The glee club kids presumably had seen her around over the past year and a half, but she had no role in any of the show’s storylines and hadn’t been depicted as a close friend of anyone in the choir so there was no reason to mention her.
I was happy to see her return (she was not my favorite character by a long shot, but I found her far more interesting and entertaining than her replacement Sugar, or Marley, or Quinn 2.0), although it was disappointing that she’d lost her mojo. The Lauren we’d seen in season two didn’t seem at all the type to hesitate to ask a guy to dance.
Yeah, there were quite a few moments that I enjoyed, but it never really came together and there were plenty of weird, head-smacking, or just boring things preventing it from being a good episode even by the loose standards I apply to Glee.
On the plus side:
[ul]
[li]Tina gets a lovely solo, and actually plays a role in the plot.[/li][li]Brittany is more or less aware that she’s on a TV show.[/li][li]Kurt is moving on with his life. I’m sure he and Blaine will get back together soon, but I’m glad he has the chance to date other guys for a while.[/li][li]NYADA has expanded a bit to include more than one room, more than one storyline, and more than two speaking characters. We didn’t know this place even had student clubs or a social hierarchy until now, it was always just Rachel and her unsettling rivalry/love triangle with Kate Hudson and Shirtless Dude.[/li][li]As silly as the Warblers doping scandal is, we are actually getting continuity here with an acknowledgement of and explanation why the Warblers went from being a nice, polite, by-the-book show choir to a bunch of preppie psychopaths. [/li][li]Warbler Trent, who’s been around in the background for a long time, also got to do something significant for once.[/li][li]The dance looked nice (nicer than any of the proms, actually), and the songs were generally fine if nothing really special.[/li][/ul]
On the minus side:
[ul]
[li]Although she actually got to do something this week, Tina is basically the Lady Edith of Glee. She can’t win for losing. She also seems inexplicably unaware that Blaine is gay, even though she does know he dated Kurt for over a year.[/li][li]For some reason I didn’t buy the Blaine-crushing-on-Sam storyline at all. I can easily believe that a gay guy would find Sam attractive, but whether it was the lack of build up, the writing, or Darren Criss’s acting (not the greatest on the show), his confession to Tina seemed totally phony to me. I actually thought for a while it was going to turn out he was lying to cover up a more embarrassing crush, like his ex’s stepbrother Finn, that’s how unconvinced I was.[/li][li]Are we actually supposed to hate Rachel now? Because yeah.[/li][li]I thought it was strange and offensive the way this episode portrayed female empowerment as being all about getting a boy to like you. We even learned that Coach Beiste’s path to being one of the only women to ever be a successful football coach all began when a boy agreed to go to a dance with her. Pardon me while I hurl.[/li][/ul]
I’m also so bored with Marley, Puck Jr, Finn 2.0, and Quinn 2.0*, not to mention Rachel’s creepy romance with Shirtless Dude, that I turned around and read the SDMB whenever the show shifted to them. I didn’t even learn until the next day that Rachel invited Shirtless Dude to move in (!!!); when she got all angry about him being late I just went “Do not care” and tuned out completely. I did catch that Puck Classic and Quinn 2.0 are now an item, a plot point I guess was necessary to keep us from thinking that Quinn 2.0 was in any way an original character and not just a complete retread of Quinn. I expect she’ll get pregnant soon and try to blame it on Finn 2.0.
I also thought it was kind of odd how the episode acknowledged at least twice that Blaine had transferred to Dalton after having been beat up outside a Sadie Hawkins dance at his old school, but did absolutely nothing with this. Maybe it was just to show that the writers actually do sometimes remember things that have happened in previous episodes, but it seemed like this was going to be important somehow and it totally wasn’t. When Warbler Trent, who always seemed to admire Blaine even more than the other Warblers, mentioned that they’d joined the Warblers at the same time I thought maybe it was going to turn out that he was the other gay guy who’d gone to the dance with Blaine and been beaten up along with him. Nope.
*I actually like the dorky Japanese-American girl (one of the wallflowers in this episode, and has made a couple of minor appearances earlier this season) and the cheerleader with the neck brace (another wallflower who’s been seen in the background throughout the season) better than the new New Directions members. As little as we’ve seen of them, they at least seem like the type of characters that Glee USED to be about.
Oh yeah, and how on earth does proving the Warblers were doping mean that New Directions will retroactively win Sectionals? New Directions isn’t even eligible to win, they automatically forfeited by leaving the stage and didn’t even finish their performance. With both the Warblers and New Directions in violation of the show choir rules, the only choir left that could be declared the winner is the Mennonite choir…who I thought deserved it in the first place.
Sure, this is Glee and I haven’t forgotten the MST3K mantra, but since the show spelled out pretty clearly exactly why New Directions couldn’t win Sectionals it’s weird that everyone seems to have totally forgotten this now and was acting like they came in second. They didn’t even come in third, they were disqualified altogether.
The only fanwank I can think of now is that maybe all these problems with the rules will mean the whole Sectionals competition will be struck from the record and they’ll have to do some sort of rematch. But if ND just goes on to Regionals then those Mennonite kids were totally robbed.
I thought it would have worked if Blaine had told her “It’s not that I’m gay, it’s that you’re pudgy and Asian” and outed himself as an anti-fatty racist prior to becoming the show’s new villain.
Ten will get you twelve that Kurt’s new crush is straight.
Is anybody else kind of prudish and disturbed at hearing a Down Syndrome girl describe herself as a “hot piece of ass”? Plus, I’ve worked with the retarded including high-function Down Syndromes- they would never say something like that. (Based on his show’s dialogue for MR characters here and on The New Normal I’m wondering if Ryan Murphy has ever actually been around somebody who’s retarded.)
I thought it was more disturbing that she proudly declared she’d let her date get to third base with her.
Murphy apparently thinks it’s funny to have a girl with Down Syndrome say things that are more or less things a typical “mean girl” cheerleader character would say. I don’t agree. I mean, it might have been kind of funny if just once or twice Becky had said something unexpectedly “mean girl”-like, but some time during season three that became Becky’s entire character. I don’t need for her to be a Saintly Disabled person (like Sue’s sister), but depicting Becky as a “mean girl” who we’re apparently supposed to like anyway just because she’s handicapped seems even more patronizing.
Yeah, even assuming that the New Directions weren’t disqualified but instead were judged solely on what they did before abandoning the stage… there’s no way that “Gangnam Style” with Marley fainting at the end was better that the 3rd group’s entire set.
I despise this plot point more because it undermines the theme of “Swan Song,” my favorite episode of the season.
I thought the bits with the various crushes and relationships were fun. Yeah, Tina knows that Blaine is gay, but I think that in her mind she was asking Blaine to the dance as a friend while all the while hoping that she could turn him somehow. It’s high school logic.
One hopes that he’s been around Lauren Potter, who plays Becky and suffers from Down Syndrome in real life. I agree with you, though, that a lot of Becky’s dialogue rings false. They’re using her more as a joke than a character, which is kind of offensive.
I literally just found myself looking for the ‘Like’ button.
Of course I still don’t understand how Finn saying that Sue should be more compassionate now that she has a retarded baby was such an evil and inappropriate thing, especially considering Sue had said far worse in the argument. Retarded is not an insult, it’s a statement of fact- Sue’s baby is mentally retarded. (And don’t get me started on the word handicapable which they overuse [which is to say ‘use once or more’] on that show.)
Well, the second time she asked him yeah, but singing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” at him in front of everyone and then being surprised and hurt that he wasn’t eager to go to the dance with her was pretty weird, and in their followup conversation she acknowledged that he might have personal issues about Sadie Hawkins dances without it ever seeming to occur to her that he might have turned her down because he’s gay.
I suppose it’s plausible, by the standards of Glee, that Tina thinks Blaine is bisexual since she witnessed him making out with Rachel back in season two, but if that’s the case it would have been nice to have her say so.
I don’t know that we were meant to think it was really all that bad, and I can easily buy that Sue would be very touchy about the subject. What bothers me more is that this is at least the third time that a storyline has hinged on Finn saying something offensive in a moment of anger (see also “Theatricality” and “Mash Off”) and then is Very Sorry because he Learned A Valuable Lesson About Tolerance…that he will promptly forget so the writers can he him do the same thing again.
I’ll mention here that I think the show wouldn’t have to keep inventing reasons for Sue to flip between villain and reluctant ally if they’d make better use of Principal Figgins as an antagonist. Sue’s objection to having Unique play Rizzo seemed out of character even for a character who’s never been particularly consistent in her behavior or motives. If the writers really wanted Unique to be kicked out of the production of Grease then it would have been much neater to just have Figgins say that it had recently come to his attention that Unique wasn’t a [cisgender] girl and that having a transgender teen in a major role in the school play was too controversial for him to allow.
The depiction of the learning disabled man in the cafe on The New Normal (alongside the ludicrous African-American stereotypes) convinced me that the only minorities Murphy cares about are gay men - more specifically, rich, white, able-bodied gay men.
I’ve wondered why with all of the black actresses in Hollywood who have actually studied the craft and have some talent he insists on using the amazingly talentless Nene Leakes on both of his shows. The woman makes Shirley Hemphill look like Cicely Tyson in terms of acting ability and the character is as lazy a “sassy black woman okay? O-to-the-hell-to-the-kay!” stereotype as his MR characters.
Now she might work well on American Horror Stories as Og knows I’d scream if she moved in next door, but even then some might argue that a background in dramatic arts might work better than being one of 3,086 paint by the number shrill bitches on reality shows. (I’ve never seen whichever Real Housewives spawned her but I assume she must have yanked somebody’s hair out at a christening or something to get noticed by Murphy.)
“I know something about love” done to the chicken dance was something different.
For some reason I like Marley.
Having them get eliminated in competition was most bold/interesting thing they have done lately. Disapointed they will be back in (in all likelyhood - a reamtch seems probable)
Brian
I find her the most tolerable of the newbies, but the whole “I’m a pretty girl, and two cute boys like me! Which one should I choose?” storyline is totally uninteresting to me. It’s bad enough that the Glee writers struggle to come up with plots that aren’t love polygons, but I think this is their dullest variation on the theme yet.
Yeah, having New Directions lose Sectionals was the only thing this show hadn’t already done with a competition episode. While we have seen them lose before, that’s only happened in season finales and only after they’d been victorious at 1-2 previous competitions the same year. And if we’re supposed to keep believing this is a show about underdog/misfit teens then they can’t just win all the time.
I hope they will at least have a rematch rather than having New Directions automatically proceed to Regionals. I was pretty sure the writers would come up with some way to have New Directions compete again, like that as reigning Nationals champions they were automatically invited back regardless of how they performed at Sectionals/Regionals, but so far this cheating plot seems like just an easy way of hitting the “undo” button.
The “Marley is terrified she’s gaining weight because one (and only one) outfit (that other people have access to) keeps getting smaller (though none of her other clothes do)” established her as too stupid to invest in. With those critical thinking skills she’s just going to end up joining a UFO cult or driving a getaway car for a band of meth heads who’ve convinced her they’re Mormon missionaries or something equally :rolleyes:. On a show known for plots that don’t bear scrutiny that was particularly :rolleyes: enough to stand out.
Though probably the king of those plots is the “we’re in NYC for finals without a clue what we’re going to sing because we’re singing our own material and haven’t written it yet” episodes. McKinley would have been absolutely justified in killing the program and downgrading Will to parking attendant for that kind of misuse of school funds and time.
I do realize glee doesn’t care about plot continuity or really anything unless it leads up to musical numbers (and in some small ways maybe that’s what I like it), but The Too Young to be Bitter Club? You had Lauren, Tina, and Sugar who have all been in serious relationships not that long ago (Heck, Tina had Artie and Mike fighting over her!). If I was the other members of that club, I’d be like what in the world are y’all bitter about?
Also, since when can Sugar sing? Or do they just turn off her mike and let her pretend she’s singing?
Anyways, they had a great opportunity with the senior graduating to start anew, but decided retreads of Finn, Rachel, Puck, and Quinn was the direction they were going to head (Old Directions?).
I couldn’t agree more. That and the fact that she has “I <3 My Mom” written on her locker door. That character annoys the living bejeezus out of me.
Rachael flipping out on whats-his-name for being late pissed me off too. In this day and age of cel phones and constant communication they could have phoned each other. What the hell.
And I don’t know about you guys, but Puck (who is about 30 years old IRL) boinking the skanky teenage cheerleader totally skeeved me out.
I only watch this crap for something do to while I eat dinner. Honestly.
I do plan to watch this week because it’s the beefcake calendar shoot. While they can’t go beyond PG unfortunately, they’re pretty enough that even that will be nice. (I watched this week because I thought it was the calendar shoot, but alas.)
does it help that she is 27 years old?