This wasn’t the worst episode, but it was pretty weak. The musical numbers were lame and autotuned to hell; I actually rolled my eyes when Blaine started singing “Stronger”. Given that we didn’t know Blaine had a brother before this episode, it’s really hard for me to care about their conflict. The stuff with Will and Sue was pretty stupid as well. Wow, Sue was mean to the Glee club and criticized their dancing? Well, gee, who would have predicted that someone who’s done countless heinous things to students would be cruel and unfair?
It also bugs me that Artie is going for out of his way to make Quinn feel good about her situation, and she’s bragging about how she’ll be out of the chair in no time and implying that her life will be ruined if she’s stuck in one forever. Because clearly you can’t attend Yale in a wheelchair. :rolleyes:
Honestly, the only reason I’m still watching this trainwreck is that I want to know what happens to Finn, Rachel, and Kurt in the long-term. I don’t give a feather about any of the other characters, but I’d like to see Rachel and Kurt becoming hugely successful in theater, and Finn…being happy with Rachel.
I think I’ve said this on here before, but in a sense the Glee shark came pre-jumped. I know the term is broadly used to refer to the moment when something really started to suck, but the original meaning was more the moment when a TV show abandoned realism/its original premise in favor of ridiculous storylines and attention-getting gimmicks. But with Glee the original premise pretty much was ridiculous storylines and attention-getting gimmicks.
I mention this largely because I wanted to link to the recent Salon article “Was Glee ever good?” I don’t agree with everything in this piece, and the author makes a few factual errors about the show, but I do agree with the general point. While Glee was once better than it is now, many of the show’s problematic elements have been present from the beginning.
This was a pretty weak episode for back from cliffhanger/hiatus. Most of the storylines were good, but lacked a little punch in execution, and the one with Blaine’s brother fell flat. Bomer and his character were great, and his scenes with everyone other than Blaine were fine, but the story about Blaine being upset with him didn’t really work.
I like new nicer Sue, and that story works now that she has a foil in the swim coach. I don’t feel like they needed to give her a downs baby though.
The songs were mostly meh. I get annoyed when they stray too far from mis en scene. Up Up Up was fun and scene appropriate. Somebody I Used to Know was great as a single, but wasn’t scene appropriate and musically works better as a duet between a male and female as counterpart (or at least two singers with distinctively different voices).
Yeah, his brother was kind of a jerk, but that doesn’t really merit TWO dramatic musical numbers. And while there’s only so much I can care about a relationship that was never hinted at before this episode, it seems like it would have been easy to either tone down the drama or give the conflict some actual weight. Prior to this episode all we really knew about Blaine’s backstory was that his father was disappointed in him for being gay, and he was bullied at his pre-Dalton school. A line or two from Blaine about how he’d wished his cool older brother had stuck around to protect him would have at least done something to justify all those scrunchy faces.
In the real world? The Chicago area, a six hour drive from Lima. In the Gleeverse there may well be one closer, as at the end of season two Blaine was planning to work at a Six Flags over the summer. Perhaps the show exists in an alternate timeline where there’s still a Six Flags in Aurora, OH, although that’s still a good three hours from Lima. This show has never been very good about local color or even geography, though.
One exception is that IIRC Blaine was practicing “Baby It’s Cold Outside” for the Christmas show at Kings Island (within two hours of Westerville) back in the season two Christmas episode, but since then whenever they’ve mentioned an amusement park it’s been Six Flags instead. Maybe Six Flags worked out some kind of product placement deal.
For so many things I can ignore reality. Their clothes, how the school is run, how they act, but then some minor thing like Six Flags comes along and I sit up and say, “Wait a minute!”
Three hours away doesn’t sound that bad. When I was in high school we took a trip to Cedar Point, and that’s quite a few hours away from where I am in Michigan. You just leave really early and get back really late. That wasn’t senior skip day, though, the seniors were off in Florida on their senior trip. We didn’t do any organized activities for skip day, it was just “hey, stay home, don’t have to go to school, YAY”
Actually that one’s much shorter than a trip for Church group a couple of years earlier. For that one we went to King’s Island. We left so early for that one we had the spend the night before at the Church.
Anyway, enough about that, I thought the episode itself was one of the best they’ve had in a long time. Maybe the best since season 1. I did snigger at “Rio by Duran Duran” but that’s just because of this board. And I totally got WOOOSHED by the Cooper Anderson joke until shortly after watching I was flipping through the channel guide and saw a listing for Anderson Cooper 360.
I would much prefer a spinoff about Puck and Finn in CA cleaning pools by day trying to be rockstars by night than one with Rachel and Kurt at NYATA.
My feelings as well, although I have heard that the next TWO episodes are going to be all-one-artist. That will make three this season, despite Ryan Murphy promising over the summer that there would be at most one.
In theory I think it would be possible to do a decent episode built around Elton John’s music – he certainly has more good songs than does Britney Spears – but in practice Glee tribute episodes are almost always tedious and awful.
I wonder if Sue is going to have a miscarriage. I’m pretty sure they don’t have guts for her to abort, but Sue having a full pregnancy and labor and then a special needs child would be a major plot-time commitment.
I hope that Damian McGinty and Samuel Larsen are getting well compensated for their time. They must feel a tad jerked around that they won a reality show to be on GLEE and they’re slightly more than extras.
