Next week, Becky bites an exchange student and has to be put to sleep.
I would so watch that.
Brittany’s may have an excuse - Heather Morris is quite noticeably pregnant. Supposedly, she has said that once she has a baby, she’s leaving show business to concentrate on raising a family. This would also explain the “MIT wants Brittany to commit early” throwaway line.
The one thing that caught my attention from this episode was, the singer Will heard from one of the competing show choirs is a sophomore. This is usually an indication that she’ll be transferring to McKinley in time for her junior year. Whether that’s next season or the one after that remains to be seen; there’s talk that next season will be a continuation of the current school year, so they don’t have to worry about any of the Seniors (e.g. Tina, Artie, and Blaine) graduating.
The New York stuff was beyond awful. If I knew that one segment where the 3 kids and Sarah Jessica Horseface sing was going to take so long and end at another commercial break without going back to McKinley, I would’ve hit five minute skip on the DVR.
And Sam and Artie are jerks. I’ve never been molested, but damn, not cool how they reacted to the confession.
What’s particularly galling about this for me is that, for all the difference it made in this episode, his confession might just as well have been “I secretly love the songs of Barry Manilow.”
I don’t think Santana’s family was actually poor – IIRC she said at some point in season one or two that her father’s a doctor – I think she just pretends to come from a rough background in order to seem more badass. This week she was obviously lying when she initially claimed her family couldn’t afford ballet lessons.
I did enjoy most of the songs, with the exception of “Everybody Hurts”. I was a teenager in the '90s, so an even halfway decent version of this song might well have reduced me to tears, but Finn 2.0 was so lousy that I turned around and started playing Kingdom of Loathing on my computer. This meant I didn’t learn until reading reviews of the episode today that this number featured a slushie flashback montage. So the show apparently takes the whole child molestation thing even less seriously than it had seemed to me at the time.
I think it’s sadly plausible that a teen boy who said he’d been molested as a child by an older girl would get a “Dude, you’re the luckiest guy ever!” reaction from some other guys, but this seemed out of character for both Sam and Artie. (Too bad Puck wasn’t around.) If nothing else you’d think the former stripper would be a little more sympathetic about a boy getting unwanted sexual attention from older women.
After Sam and Artie’s unsympathetic reaction I fully expected this would be a Very Special Episode where they’d learn An Important Lesson, which still would have been uncomfortable but nowhere near as bad as their not learning An Important Lesson. It’s possible the show will somehow manage to cram an apology scene into the remaining two episodes of the season (which must also cover Rachel’s call-back for Funny Girl and Regionals, and presumably Sue’s return, something about Burt’s health, and at long last the end of the catfishing plot), but I’m not in a hurry to revisit this storyline.
Will also reached a new low by doing basically nothing to help Finn 2.0 or shut Sam and Artie up. He said something halfhearted about being a mandatory reporter, but when Finn 2.0 said his molester was already in prison Will was apparently happy to just let it go and focus on important things like…having the kids practice a cappella singing.
Child molestation is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect Glee to fuck up (witness their treatment of domestic violence last season), but I thought that they treated with an unusual amount of realism and respect. Sam and Artie’s reactions were realistic for their age, and it was sad that Ryder pretty much just had to accept it. They were never going to understand.
While it is extreme, I think that this episode did a better job of humanizing Kitty and turning her into a sympathetic character than anything else has. Even aside from the admission of molestation, her obvious sadness at being rejected by Ryder actually made her relatable. Imagine that.
I didn’t think that Santana’s subplot was done all that well, largely because it didn’t even seem like Santana was the main character. We spent so much time with Kurt, Rachel, and Isabelle. Isabelle even symbolically stole “At the Ballet,” which started out being by and about Santana and ended up being a showcase for Sarah Jessica Parker.
That’s a pretty good summation of how I feel about it.
This episode’s handling of the child abuse storyline actually strikes me as almost exactly the same as the handling of the domestic violence plot in “Choke” last season. Shortly before a big competition, there’s a C-plot featuring a totally out of left field revelation that a friendly but lonely secondary character has been the victim of abuse. Several members of the glee club react with less sympathy and tact than one might hope. But at least in that episode they got told off, and the character who instigated the joking (Santana) was already known for making cruel comments about others.
But not, IMHO, realistic for the characters as they’ve been depicted on the show in the past. Both have generally been depicted as nice, well-intentioned boys. I guess I could buy that Artie, who must have spent years wondering if he’d ever have sex at all, might lack sensitivity about this situation, but just a few episodes back Sam was portrayed as basically the world’s most tolerant and understanding teenage boy.
Well it should, this must be what, their third attempt at coming up with different, increasingly dramatic reasons for her to suddenly be sympathetic and nice to others.
The story of how she was molested was also unpleasantly similar to the “joke” in season three about how Brittany lost her virginity – some guy climbed into her bunk at cheer camp and she was dumb enough to believe he was an alien probing her and not a human raping her. So thanks, Glee, for reminding me of what was probably the single most offensive attempt at humor in your checkered history and then asking me to take it seriously this time.
To me, the main problem with “Choke” was that it came across as overly didactic, with the point of the episode being “domestic violence is bad, mmkay” and the characters merely pawns in this lesson. I’ve also always had major issues with Shannon’s characterization as both a powerful independent woman and an emotionally fragile flower. She was a prop in this episode.
On the other hand, I didn’t feel that sense of didacticism from “Lights Out.” In fact, insofar as it teaches a lesson, once could argue that it teaches the wrong one, because Ryder and Kitty both face pretty unpleasant consequences for telling others about their molestation. Their admission was less out of left field than Shannon’s in “Choke” because it feels like this fits in their lives. Ryder can’t trust women, to the point that he’d rather talk to a liar on the Internet than someone he really knows, because at least then he can’t get hurt. This explains his otherwise insane relationship with Katie, and one even wonders how spectacularly his relationship with Marley would have blown up if he’d managed to get in ahead of Jake.
The results of Kitty’s emotional damage are pretty obvious, both from the ridicule she experience from her peers and, more importantly, her parents’ distrust of her. I can buy this as a reason why Kitty sees people as playthings and why she has so much trouble letting anyone in, emotionally. And the connection she forged with Ryder over it felt real and has potential complications for the future.
In other words, the events of “Lights Out” feel rooted in the characters, while the events of “Choke” felt outside the characters.
Kids can be insensitive. All kids. Especially when it’s regarding something they can’t understand. Sam and Artie’s reaction comes across as very harsh, but I don’t have any problem buying it. They think they understand what happened to Ryder, but they simply don’t.
Well, this is the same show that did an episode about a school shooting and then made light of it in the first scene of the very next episode. I will say that the Brittany joke (and the shooting joke for that matter) was meant to be very darkly humorous, which, while more common in season one, is still something they come back to now and then.
Since when does he not trust women? I don’t remember that ever even being hinted at prior to this episode. He didn’t seem to have any trouble trusting Rachel 2.0, and his online relationship with the catfish suggests someone who’s overly trusting rather than the opposite. It seems very obvious to me that this child molestation plot is something the writers came up with quite recently in an attempt to drag the catfish plot out a little more, and not something rooted in their original concept for this character or anything that had been previously established about him.
I am struggling to even imagine any resolution to the catfishing plot that could possibly justify it being a multi-episode arc. If, at the end of “Feud”, the mysterious “Katie” had been revealed then that would have been one thing. At that point there was a long list of characters who might plausibly have been behind it (Unique being the most obvious choice, but really any of the glee club girls, possibly some of the guys, or others like Lauren Zizes, the neckbrace Cheerio, Sandy Ryerson, etc.) and there could have been a moral about not judging people by appearances or not trusting everyone you meet online or whatever. But I don’t see any good reason to keep dragging it out, and certainly not for propping it up with all-too-realistic tragedies like a school shooting and child molestation.
I really hope I’m wrong about it turning out to be Brittany – she’s toying with the emotions of a younger boy and sort of cheating on her own boyfriend because…she’s dumb? – but she’s the only character who was absent from the choir room during the lockdown but whose phone would have been in the room. I went back and checked, and Sam actually says at the beginning of the scene that he needs to go find Brittany because she doesn’t have her phone, she left it when she went to the bathroom. In “Lights Out” Finn 2.0 also says he was watching everyone’s faces to see who’d have a different reaction to his revelation that he’d been abused, but Brittany was conspicuously absent from this episode.
Yes, I remember. This sort of thing is probably the worst characteristic of Glee.
Didn’t he say that the molestation happened when he was eleven? Even if you believe that a teenage boy might welcome being molested by an older girl/woman, he was too young even for that. And after the teacher said, “You know I’m required to report this,” he said, “Don’t worry, she’s in jail for touching someone else.” So the teacher isn’t going to report the molestation? Even if she’s been jailed for another crime, the boy probably still needs to talk to a professional about this.
Although I too thought the molestation story was poorly handled, you can’t really blame Gee for some of the thoughts expressed.
If you ever listen to late night talk shows, they will joke about some FEMALE teacher being arrested for having sex with a teenage BOY. It is always something like, “Gee…I wish I had had teachers like that!!!” ha ha ha ha.
However, if that same teacher is a MALE, then all bets are off with teenage boys or girls.
Of course is it always inappropriate for an adult to be screwing any teenage kids, and illegal to boot - but there does always seem to be a wink and a nod when it is a boy with a woman. I do not want to hijack this thread on the debate of sexual molestation, but the writers of Glee did sort of hit on one of the glaring differences when it is between the supposed hot, sexy female teacher and the horny, young teenage male stud - even though that is certainly NOT always the case.
Yes, he said he was 11. I can believe that there are teenagers insensitive enough to react the way Sam and Artie did, but as I said, I didn’t buy it from these characters.
It sure looked like Will was cool with doing absolutely nothing to help his student.
I don’t blame Glee for bringing up the issue of sexual molestation of boys by women being treated less seriously than other forms of molestation, but I sure as heck blame them for bringing this up just to serve the catfishing plot and then doing nothing with it – not even having Will tell Sam and Artie to knock it off and apologize.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some sort of “Hey dude, we’re sorry we were jerks about that whole molestation thing” scene within the next two episodes, but with so much else going on the writers can’t be planning to devote much time to this. It was treated as a minor subplot even in “Lights Out”, behind the Sue storyline and the NYC storyline. Given how the aftermath of the school shooting incident was handled, it seems all too likely that the writers are just going to wind up doing a “humorous” follow-up like having Finn 2.0 speak with a goofy accent or create an Eddie Vedder hand puppet and sing “Alive” with it.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m extrapolating based mostly on what happened in this episode rather than his prior history, but isn’t much else to go on when it comes to Ryder’s relationships with women. He failed to get together with Marley, after all. I think that Katie is different because she exists only online. Thus, she can’t physically be near him (which is where his babysitter betrayed his trust), and she can have whatever attributes Ryder wants her to have. With only her words online to go by, he can fill in the blanks however he wants and pretty much build himself a woman he can trust.
Do I think they intended this development from Ryder from the very beginning, or even immediately prior to this episode? No, I think they just put it in because they thought it made sense, and I just agree. Glee has never been good at planning. It kinda just goes with the flow, and I tend to accept it as long as it makes sense to me and fits reasonably well.
On the one hand, Glee’s tonal inconsistency, regardless of the actual seriousness of the subject matter, can give the viewers whiplash, and it can give the sense that they don’t respect the subject. However, I think the point of it sometimes (especially with the “school shooting” gag) is to assure the viewer that Glee doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is an important thing to remember for a goofy show that can get very dark.
At the same time, they kinda really suck at making those disparate tones go together.
I still wouldn’t be surprised if the catfish was Unique. Remember, you don’t have to have the same ring tone for all the contacts in your phone and just because she has Raining Men for the majority, doesn’t mean that’s what she’s assigned Ryder.
I feel there are some topics a show as goofy and inconsistent as Glee should just stay away from altogether. I wouldn’t say it’s a long list, but it does include the murder of children and the sexual abuse of children…and they’ve managed to evoke both in the past three episodes.
They used to be better at this. For instance, they found a way to work some humor into the storyline about Burt’s heart attack (Brittany’s suggestion that his doctors might benefit from reading her book report) without minimizing the seriousness of the situation or making light of Kurt’s concern. Even in season three they were guilty more of just totally abandoning serious storylines like Karofsky’s suicide attempt than asking us to take them seriously one week and laugh at them the next.
Unique would make a lot more sense than Brittany, but if it’s Unique then she’d need to have two different phones because she was shown holding one during the lockdown sequence. At this point I think that making the catfish Unique would also be playing into some cruel stereotypes about transwomen being dishonest and wanting to trick men.
Time to vote:
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The Catfish is Kitty who has multiple personalities a la Sam and his ‘twin brother.’
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The Catfish is Will baby-sitter molester out of prison unbeknownst to him.
That’s my prediction.
Or, the catfish is Finn 2.0 himself in a Tyler Durden split personality plot.
Or, it’s Becky, who will molest him upon meeting.
Maybe it’s that piano guy that just shows up out of nowhere whenever he’s needed. Twist, he’s also the molester, who got a sex change paid for by the state while in prison, and that’s why Ryder didn’t recognize him/her.
The AfterEllen Glee recapper came up with an interesting theory: the catfish is Lord Voldemort, with a high tech version of his ol’ magic diary routine. Fortunately Blaine has experience dealing with this sort of thing.
My favorite quote from that recap:
I think Santana’s crack about Kurt being a singing pancake waiter on Fire Island was just a joke, but I’d have been perfectly happy to see the catfishing plot dropped in order to make room for a dance number featuring Santana dressed as Barbarella.
I definitely disagree with the idea that there are subjects that it’s simply impossible to tackle. Either they succeed or they don’t, but I’m willing to give just about any show a shot at just about any subject, as long as they try to do it well, take it seriously, and treat it with respect, and then judge it on its own merits. Even if they don’t do those things, it’s the fault of the execution, not the subject matter. I don’t like the idea of going into a viewing experience thinking “Well, it’s about [child abuse, a school shooting, domestic violence, texting while driving, suicide, whatever] so it’s automatically a failure.”