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“Glee” recap (4.18): Forever Crying

Previously on Glee, the space-time continuum was rent in twain when Past Will Schuester kissed Future Will Schuester’s fiance right on the mouth. Ryder got himself an online girlfriend who refused to confirm in person that she was a girl and/or a friend. Tina Vapo-rubbed down Blaine, Blaine lusted after Sam, Sam fell in love with Brittany, Brittany aced the SAT. And the Warblers were disqualified from Sectionals because of harmony doping and so New Directions got an automatic berth into Regionals.

Mr. Schue has assembled New New Directions in the auditorium to announce this year’s Regionals competition. He only gets through the Hoosier Daddies and the Nun-touchables before Brittany interrupts the meeting to announce the end of the world. She says there’s a deadly asteroid headed toward earth and that she’s named the comet Tubbingtonbop and that NASA can do nothing to help because they let a meteor just like this smash into Russia a couple of weeks ago. Blaine can’t believe they’re re-having the conversation that had at Christmas, while Artie can’t believe Brittany’s is confusing space debris with solar system bodies.

Brittany says she’s going to spend her remaining days reconciling with someone she loves very much, and the camera whirls all up into Sam’s business because he thinks, like we think, that she’s talking about Our Lady of Perpetual Hotness, Santana Lopez. But actually, she is talking about Our Lady of Perpetual Arby’s, Lord Tubbington. Sam is relieved. And confused. And relieved.

Back in the choir room, Brittany expresses dismay that Jesus Christ Superstar would end the world with an asteroid. Didn’t he already prove his vindictiveness when he wiped out the dinosaurs with a global yeast infection? And when allowed both Firefly AND Freaks and Geeks to be cancelled? Unique’s main thing is that she wants to be a girl angel once she gets to heaven. And Sam’s main thing is that he wants to have angel sex. They’re all pretty chill about the Apocalypse, to be honest, which makes sense, I guess. Now that the Harry Potter books are all finished, all of humanity’s most important questions have been answered.

Mr. Schue says they’re going to either die in a fiery planetary collision or live until Fox can stop making money off their iTunes singles, but either way they need to make some music. This week’s theme will be last chances. He wants them to channel their fear of death into singing the things they need to say to one another.

If you thought like I thought that this assignment was going to lead Blaine and Brittany to charter a plane to fly to New York to confess their feelings to Kurt and Santana, you are wrong. I know that’s the main shipper problem with this episode, that Santana and Blaine are never even mentioned. But you know what? I’ve been thinking about this pretty nonstop since I first saw the episode, and I know Glee has never really allowed Blaine and Kurt, or Santana and Brittany to fully explore their relationships the way, say, Rachel and Finn have done. But we’ve seen enough to know that none of them would ever doubt that they were loved by the other one. Santana trusted in Brittany’s love when she didn’t even trust in herself. And Blaine has never played games with his feelings about Kurt. This season, more than ever, he has made it clear that he loves Kurt, will always loves Kurt, wants to spend the rest of his life inventing ways to love Kurt.

And for this episode to land the emotional punch it was aiming for, everything needed to feel as claustrophobic as possible. It was obviously a conscious choice not to even invoke the names of the New York-based characters. Although, it is pretty preposterous to think that Blaine and Brittany wouldn’t be high-tailing it to NYC to spend their last moments on earth making out with two of the most perfect people on earth.

Ryder pounces Jake after glee practice and asks him to have sexual intercourse confesses his online relationship situation. It got a lot more complicated in English class this morning because when Ryder looked up from his essay the was writing on Nineteen Eighty-Four, he saw Katie walking slow-mo up the hallway and staring right into his eyes. He tried to get up and run after her, but he ran into the brick wall called Shannon Beiste. She was like, “Sit down and finish your ten-page, grad student-caliber essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s themes of psychological manipulation through the control of history and information.” And he was all, “What is this, Pretty Little Liars?” And she was like, “Prescient that you should mention a show built on the premise of teenage death and dismemberment.”

Jake thinks the Ryder is off his nut, but he’s a good friend, so he tells Ryder if he’s going to make an ass of himself at least he should do it with a backup band.

Brittany’s Bedroom. Sam watches Brittany coo and coddle Lord Tubbington, trying to get right with him even though he’s an active member of the Ku Klux Klan for Kats and also one time reported her for being a mouse serial killer. She’s pretty sure LTubs is still mad at her so Sam suggests that glee club could sing his favorite song to him, because in the world of Lima, OH, there’s no higher form of affection than expressing your deepest, most vulnerable thoughts to another person through song while in the company of one dozen teenagers and a full jazz ensemble.

To wit: Ryder stalks down Katie and drags her to the choir room where he serenades her with a very lovely rendition of Elton John‘s “Your Song.” The most important thing about this scene, though, is that Brad the Piano Man is back. Hey, Brad! Hey, buddy! Also, I never get tired of the gag where a non-New Directions person is getting sung at intimately for the first time and is always like, “Who are these other 20 people in the room?” And whatever glee club kid is all, “The band, duh.” After the song, Katie says she’s really flattered to have been fawned over by local celebrity Ryder Lynn, but also she is not Katie. She says Ryder is getting catfished and then hilariously exposits the meaning of the phrase, even invoking Manti Te’o‘s name right out loud.

Ryder takes it about as well as you’d imagine, rushing out into the hallway to holler at and cry all over Marley and Jake. He thinks they’ve been messing with him as punishment for falling for Marley, but they assure him that the only punishment they are interested in is some 50 Shades of Teenage Threesomes.

Going into “Shooting Star,” everybody knew this was a school shooting episode, and so everything leading up to the actual shooting is filmed in an eerie, dissonant way that makes you question whether or not every student has a gun. Brittany gets two twirly-dolly, camera-staring monologues. Ryder is unhinged. In just a second, Bieste and Will’s dinner is introduced like voyeurism. Plus the music is basically just this one piano going, “Are you freaked out yet? Are you? Are you?” (Answer: Yes! The first time I watched this thing I didn’t breathe for like 43 straight minutes!)

New New Directions gather to perform a moving rendition of “More than Words” to Lord Tubbington. If you don’t live with a cat, this probably seems like some real bullshit to you. But if you do live with a cat, you understand the necessity of making offerings on the regular. My cat, Nala Jane, she would spit right in my face if I tried to placate her with a song like this, though. She likes her offerings Old Testament-style. Dead doves and baked goods for worship, poultry for peace, goats and/or lambs for my weekly sin offering, and one whole ram as penance for my most grevious tresspasses. Sam continues to be a little put out by Brittany’s myopic adoration of her beloved pet. Probably because he knows LTubs is a hardcore Brittana shipper.

McKinley High School Locker Room of Latent Homoeroticism. Coach Beiste has prepared a very Lady and the Tramp dinner for her and Will. She heard Will is making the glee kids sing their swan songs to one another, so she decides to make a confession as well: She wants Will to be the man in her life because he’s the first dude who was ever “willing to kiss her.” Blech. I’d forgotten that storyline happened, probably because I abandoned it in the middle of the episode and didn’t watch Glee for months afterward. Anyway, to Will’s great credit, he neither freaks out nor patronizes her. He says he’s back together with Emma and that he cares a lot about Shannon, and to prove it he eats the pasta she boiled in the locker room hot tub. (I don’t love anyone on earth enough to eat hot tub noodles.)

The next day at Astronomy Club, Brittany announces that she was wrong about the end of the world again. Turns out Tubbingtonbop was just a dead ladybug on her telescope lens, and that her telescope is actually just a bedazzled Pringles can. After the meeting, Becky asks Brittany if she wants to make a pact never to graduate. She wants them to stay at McKinley and rule the world together forever. Beautiful, intuitive unicorn Brit tells Becky not to be scared of the world outside of McKinley. She says if Becky prepares herself, she’s going to be awesome for always.

Will invites Beiste to glee practice. She’s feeling a little hurt and a little bit like a fool, so Will reminds her that sometimes he raps and she’s like, “Ha! I’d forgotten how weird you can be!”

The next half hour is either the most moving thing Glee has ever done, or the most offensive. I fall in the “moved beyond measure” category, but some of my best friends were ready to throw their TVs into their yards they were so angry about it.

Will claps his hands to get practice started and as he does, a gunshot echoes through the hallway. Will flinches, everyone freezes, and a second gunshot goes off. Chaos erupts as someone turns off the lights and the kids duck and run for cover. Will and Beiste lock the door and try to barricade it with the piano. Students run screaming through the hallways. Blaine helps Artie out of his chair. Brittany is missing, and so is Tina. New Directions cower and cry and wait. Brittany stands alone on top of a toilet seat, locked in a stall in the girls’ bathroom. It’s one of the most traumatizing images I’ve ever seen.

There aren’t enough crying GIFs in the world to express my emotions properly!

Probably the four biggest complaints I heard about Glee last night were: 1) This is a comedy; how dare they do something so dramatic? 2) It’s way too soon after Newtown to show something like this on TV. 3) I can’t believe how emotionally manipulative that was. 4) It was pointless.

Look, I’m no champion of Glee. I’ve written way more harsh stuff about the show than I have nice stuff about the show, but all of those arguments are a little confusing to me. I didn’t see a single gay person complaining about Glee doing drama when Kurt and Santana were grappling with their sexuality and trying to summon the courage to come out. Or when Karofsky’s self-loathing homophobia nearly killed him. Or when Unique was trying to embrace her gender identity. Pretty much all of us applauded that drama, right? We said it was important. That’s why we get so angry at this show so much. Because when it tells important stories well, it tells them better than anybody.

And it’s always going to be too soon after a school shooting if we don’t do something to stop school shootings. Sandy Hook wasn’t the first. And it won’t be the last. If you wait three months to tell this story, or six months, or a year, who’s to say how many more school shootings will happen between now and then? No, the time to open a dialogue about a horrific thing is when there’s momentum to change the horrific thing. That time is right now.

As for emotional manipulation, I think one of the greatest things a story can strive to do is make you feel a thing you’ve never felt before, and would never feel otherwise. Again, we applaud this show when it does that for gay folks. We count on this show to do that for gay folks. We want it to show the world what it’s like to be gay, to be in a same-sex relationship. Is it emotionally manipulative to make straight people feel that? To feel what it’s like to be gay, to be a friend to someone who’s gay, to root for someone who’s gay? No, man. That’s just the power of story. And this episode put us right in the middle of a school shooting. The directing, the acting, the whole thing, it made us feel like we were trapped in that choir room with New Directions, or trapped in that bathroom stall with Brittany, or crying on the floor of the school kitchen like Marley’s mother. It was scary as hell, it was traumatic, and it was gut-stompingly sad. We were there with them, not breathing with them, crying with them. We were transported inside of a story and made to feel things we’d never felt before. That’s what story does.

And yeah, in the moment when Sue confesses to being the one with the gun, it does feel pointless. But that’s not the end of the story, is it? It was Becky who had the gun, Becky who was just trying to take Brittany’s advice and prepare herself for the outside world. The point is that anyone can get his or her hands on a gun and most teenagers can just walk right into their high schools with guns in their backpacks. No, not everyone who has a gun wants to kill someone, but every gun has the potential to kill someone. Guns are everywhere in America and if someone wanted to walk into a school today in suburban Ohio and murder a whole classroom full of kindergarteners, they could do it. Gun violence in this country is out of fucking control. That’s the point. “Shooting Star” put us right in the middle of that point: “You feel how fucking terrible this is? Yeah, it’s a real thing. A real thing we need to address. Like now.”

And, frankly, the fact that it came right in the middle of an otherwise ludicrous episode of Glee, that’s also kind of the point. No one’s ever sitting around waiting for their school to get shot up. They’re planning what they’re going to wear to prom and strategizing about their basketball games in the afternoon and worrying about their term papers and living and laughing and loving and singing, and then their innocence is shattered with a single shot.

Anyway, Artie gets out his camera to record messages from the glee kids, in case they don’t make it out of the room. Of course it’s Artie because Artie is a director in his heart. The kids tell their parents they love them, tell them they’re sorry for not showing it all the time, tell them where to find the secret things they were scared to share with the rest of the world. Kitty crawls into Unique’s lap and cries. Sam has to be physically restrained by Beiste and Shue when he tries to bust out of the room to find Brittany. It is Mr. Schue who finds her locked in her bathroom stall. Heather Morris is transcendent. Tina is trapped outside the whole time, no idea if her family is OK, no idea how to get back inside and help them.

When it’s all over they all hug. And I drink a whole bottle of whiskey.

I’m unsure about the timeline of what happens next. Maybe it’s the next day, that’s what Blaine and Sam say when they’re talking to Tina and Brittany, but when Sue goes to Principal Figgins’ office to confess, she says it took her a couple of days to stop panicking about what she did. Right, because Sue confesses to the whole thing, says she kept a gun locked in a safe in her office because of all the school shootings that have been happening lately, says she’s sorry, says she understands this is the end of her career and that it’s the only thing she’ll ever be remembered for, despite everything else she’s accomplished. Jane Lynch is flawless in this scene. More flawless than all the flawless diamonds in all the land. She’s her own precious gemstone.

But she is, of course, covering for Becky. Will stops by to ask Sue to help him help her, but she is unwavering. The editing is really great here. She flashes back to Becky revealing the gun she brought to school, the two shots she accidentally fired, and her promise to take care of Becky, to take care of the whole thing. She tells Will to keep an eye on Becky, because she gets scared sometimes too. (And also because she is going to be so riddled with guilt that she’s not going to be able to function.)

Post-shooting, Brittany and Sam cement their relationship by co-adopting another chubby cat: Lady Tubbington. Tina and Blaine have a heart-to-heart about how they are each other’s family.

Oh, and Ryder tried to call Katie during the lockdown and her phone rang inside the choir room because Katie is Unique, obviously, but Ryder doesn’t know that yet. He waits for her after school, but she never shows up, so he rushes off to the theater where glee club is blowing off the most important assembly in school history to sing a little John Mayer.

The episode ends with Artie’s video: “I just want to say I’ve had the best experiences of my life in this room and I love these people more than anything.”

I know it’s the most polarizing episode in Glee history, but it sure did make me want to hug my television.

Next week: Finn and Puck become frat boys together, Idina Menzel returns to coach Rachel to her Broadway debut, and according to Tumblr: Klaine, Klaine, gettin’ Klaine over here.

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