Going back to at least early season three, maybe even season two, there have been times when I thought “If next week’s Glee is as bad as this one then that’s it, I’m done with this show.” That’s how I felt after “Feud”. It’s not that the episode was 100% awful, but the more I think about it the more it seems that the scene where Finn beat Rachel’s gigolo boyfriend Brody senseless is the worst thing this show’s ever done. I don’t just mean because it made no sense (Finn just teleported to NYC?) and was weirdly out of place on this show (it seemed like a couple of pages from a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit script got mixed in with a Glee script by accident), but I felt they crossed a line morally by suggesting that it is noble and heroic for a man to violently assault his ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend. But this being Glee, I figured there was a chance either this would all be magically undone by this week or that Finn would be facing severe consequences for his psycho, criminal behavior.
For a good portion of “Guilty Pleasures” it seemed like much of what happened last week had been magically undone or forgotten. Santana was living with Rachel and Kurt again, and while Rachel still didn’t know that Brody was a prostitute for some reason Kurt now suddenly believed Santana. Back at McKinley, Finn and Mr. Schuester were nowhere to be seen. (Will’s absence was attibuted to the flu; no one seemed to care where Finn was.) There was also no reference to Finn 2.0’s mysterious online friend or Blaine’s plan to take down the Cheerios, although he is clearly still on the squad as he was in uniform most of the episode.
Really I felt this was for the best. The early part of this episode worked pretty well for me, with some fun scenes both at McKinley and in Kurt/Rachel/Santana’s apartment. Sam and Blaine kept the glee club going for a week, and did a better job than either Finn or Will have recently. Their “Guilty Pleasures” assignment was basically just season one’s “Bad Reputation” and none of the choices really made sense for characters ages 15-18 but seemed more the guilty pleasures of someone 2-3 times older, but whatever. I’ve put up with far worse this season, and the songs were reasonably fun. We also finally saw Kitty get called out for her bad behavior and Kurt and Santana’s interactions as roommates were great.
However, when the episode suddenly started making a big deal about how bad it would be to do a Chris Brown song, I became uneasy. When Glee starts getting preachy like this, it often means the show is about to do something incredibly stupid or offensive. Sometimes I’m sure the writers do this on purpose, other times it seems like they’re sincerely going for a moral but botch it horribly. For instance, there was the Michael Jackson tribute episode where we learned that if you have a taped confession from the person who attacked and nearly blinded your friend, it is wrong to go to the authorities or even your friend’s parents with this information.
This week I think the deliberately offensive thing was having Puck 2.0 sing a Bobby Brown song instead of a Chris Brown song, but this barely even registered with me. I was distracted by how, after multiple characters made a big point of saying how awful it was that Chris Brown was so crazy and violent and how Rihanna shouldn’t have gone back to him, we were shown that Rachel finds it charming and romantic that Finn – who, lest we forget, is the one who broke up with her nearly a year ago – traveled 600 miles for the sole purpose of beating up her boyfriend and demanding that said boyfriend break up with her without explanation. And while Rachel has not yet gone back to Finn, I think there’s little chance that she won’t.
Aside from being awful and disturbing, from a narrative perspective this whole violent Finn thing seems totally unnecessary. This episode would have been almost exactly the same (some parts would even have made more sense) if Santana had hidden Kurt in the bathroom last week to prove to him that Brody was a prostitute and get him on her side. Things would have been different, but better, if Santana had hidden Rachel in the bathroom so she could learn the truth directly. But best of all would have been if this show hadn’t decided to waste so much of the season on destroying Rachel’s character and sticking her with boring, pointless, horrible storylines. As much as I’ve disliked the 2.0 characters, the past couple of episodes they’ve managed to be fairly entertaining. Thinking back over the season to date, what really would have improved things would have been cutting pretty much every Rachel storyline. Instead we got three episodes about her non-existent pregnancy while Kurt has been reduced to a background character who gets a few lines per episode.