IIRC the unnamed Troubletones were on the bus to Nationals last season – I remember thinking it was a pretty full bus.
There’s also the unnamed backing band, some of whom were drafted into service at a competition last year. I noticed in “Wonder-ful” that Mercedes addressed one of the musicians as “bobble head bass player” or something like that, and wondered if it’s not merely the audience but the New Directions members themselves who have no idea what the musicians who back them every week are even named.
I feel fairly certain that we were told they were disqualified for leaving the stage early. Either way though, the Mennonite choir was named #2 in the competition.
I do remember it, and I remember we had complaints about it then too. Regardless of what the Warblers did, New Directions came in dead last at Sectionals. The Mennonite choir beat them fair and square and by rights should be going on to Regionals in place of the Warblers. It would have taken one line to handwave this away (“In other news, the local Mennonite community was tragically wiped out by a deadly flu epidemic”), but the writers didn’t even bother.
My guess: Kurt is going to accompany Rachel to the callback for moral support and he will be cast as the lead instead. She will initially not speak to him, but they will hug it out and make up. Then in life imitating art imitating life, Finn will break out of rehab and come beat the hell out of Kurt, which allows Rachel to go on as understudy after an apologetic three way with Finn and Kurt, but she chokes and Santana goes on instead, bringing some much needed Sapphic Latina heat to the role of Fanny Bryce. Meanwhile, Sam and Brittany decide to conceive an emu, Blaine has flashbacks he can’t explain to a prehistoric Ugaritic harvest rite, and in a comic sideplot Becky sets fire to Artie.
Should’ve had an in episode excuse for at least the burt stuff. Had him on the phone with his mom saying sorry but he has a final (2 weeks after starting college, but still) he can’t miss or something (only showing her end of the call if the actor’s out)
As a filler episode, tonight’s episode was okay. My favorite part was probably [del]Santana changing clothes[/del] Sam casually remarking that he knows Blaine wants to do him.
As a season finale, or even a competition episode, it sucked. I don’t think the stakes have ever felt lower or the rival teams have ever seemed less fierce than at this year’s Regionals. There weren’t even any songs that I liked; it was mostly just recent pop hits that I don’t care about. And while I expected a cliffhanger ending, this wasn’t even a cliffhanger – it was Glee running out of time after screwing around all episode, and really all season. Case in point: the goddamn catfishing storyline, which lasted for two months/seven episodes, finally ended with the astonishing revelation that the catfish was the person it seemed most likely to be way back in “Feud”. But instead of wrapping it up then, we’ve been treated to scene after thrilling scene of Finn 2.0 typing. Because that’s what got me hooked on Glee in the first place, the hot typing action.
On another note, did anyone else think it was weird how many close-ups and reaction shots Sugar and Dreadlocks got in this episode? It seemed like a lot of screen time for two characters who rarely speak and have been entirely absent a good chunk of the season. During Brittany’s big speech when she included Sugar as being like a sister and Sugar hugged her I was thinking “Would Brittany even remember who Sugar is? Do many of the viewers remember who Sugar is?”
And not to be Lord Tubbington catty, but, Styx formed in 1970 and didn’t become big until years later. Baxter & Duke’s characters were 18 at the time, which would make them at the most 60 and probably a little younger. Both actresses are in their mid 60s and look every day of it (especially Duke, who in addition to being 66 and bipolar is a heavy smoker); they should have backed it up and made the band The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or The Who or the Grateful Dead to make them a few years older.
I’m not sure why their roles even existed in the first place. Since the only other lesbian character this show has ever had is Santana I do think it’s nice that there’s now a pleasant and seemingly sane couple on for balance, but is the season finale the right time to introduce new characters? We got an awful lot of backstory on people who’d been introduced just minutes before, and while it seemed like they were going to be important they actually did not advance the plot in any way. Last week Blaine expressed his intention to propose to Kurt but hadn’t yet done so. At the beginning of this episode Blaine expressed his intention to propose to Kurt but hadn’t yet done so. And as the episode ended, Blaine still intended to propose to Kurt but hadn’t yet done so.
It seems to me that if they want to do a Blaine proposes plot, or even a Blaine is still trying to win Kurt back plot, this time would have been better spent on Kurt, whose current relationship status and feelings about Blaine remain mostly mysterious. This week Sam made a brief reference to Kurt’s New York boyfriend and said that just a few weeks ago Blaine had said he didn’t know if they were still dating. Well, are they still dating? Beats me. We haven’t seen the NYC boyfriend or IIRC even heard anything about him since way back in the movie episode. I fear that Finn may have mistaken him for one of Rachel’s suitors and beaten him to death.
More than that, it was “Yay! Same-sex marriage for Patty Duke and Meredith Baxter (who came out a few years ago)!” It was just awesomely random and fun casting, like the ultimate Lifetime movie.
We’ll have plenty of time next season to delve into the relationship between Kurt and Blaine and what is really going on there. This was just a teaser, with a nod to the significance of same-sex marriage.
A better backstory/lesson for the Sapphic Elders would have been that they fell in love at 18 but because of the times couldn’t build a life together so they married, had kids, got divorced, and then found each other again, the lesson being “if you’re soulmates [I hate that term] it will wait” and “today you don’t even have to worry about what society says”. Perhaps with Santana and Brittany portraying the younger versions of them in flashback sessions.
Right after Marley fainted and they were backstage, Will said something like, “Leaving the stage in the middle of the competition is grounds for disqualification,” not that it was automatic disqualification. If the Mennonite choir was announced by anybody as coming in second, I missed that part. All I remember was Sue saying that the Warblers had won.
And no graduation or prom, either. Next season will be a continuation of this season - that way, Artie, Tina, and Blaine don’t have to leave McKinley yet.
I think they will be making occasional appearances next season - possibly as some sort of “voice of reason” for Blaine and/or Kurt.
I’m beginning to think that the writers, directors and producers of Glee are all locked up in rehab somewhere with Cory Monteith, so the show is just being created by a bunch of unpaid interns.
We had plenty of time this season, it’s just that the writers chose to squander it on storylines like Rachel’s non-pregnancy and the goddamn catfishing plot. By shaving mere seconds off one of those interminable scenes of Finn 2.0 typing/texting, they could at least have given us a single line to address the question of whether Kurt is even still dating the guy in NYC.
I suspect interns would at least have done a better job of trying to stick to the school year/competition season timeline used by all previous seasons of the show.
I wouldn’t object to deviating from this timeline for some good reason, but I don’t see that they had a good reason to abandon the only reliable structure this show has. If they’d split the 2011-2012 school year across seasons three and four then that at least would have allowed them to stick with the original cast for one more year, but why do it now? It doesn’t seem like this could have been planned more than a couple of months in advance (the non-wedding episode was set on and aired on Valentine’s Day), and I don’t see any reason for it other than the writers realizing they’d thrown too many balls into the air at once and couldn’t manage to deal with them all by the end of the season.
To completely undo Burt’s good advice for Blaine in the previous ep. Oh, Kurt’s dad told me it’s not a good idea and gave me reasonable reasons, but some crusty old lesbians I just met 5 minutes ago think I should go for it so screw that.
I believe Rachel’s only scene was the audition itself.
They didn’t come back to Rachel after her audition scene near the beginning of the episode. I don’t think it was even mentioned again. When I wrote my first post about this episode, only about an hour after it aired, I’d actually forgotten there even was a Rachel scene in the episode and only later remembered that we hadn’t found out if she got the role or not. So for me at least that didn’t even work as a cliffhanger, because a cliffhanger should leave one wondering “What will happen next?” and not be totally forgotten before the episode is even over.
