Previously on Glee, Santana, Kurt, Rachel, and Adam’s British apples got snowed into the Hummelberry Bushwick loft, and it was just as magical as it sounds. Kurt used the downtime to daydream himself onto a wildly romantic rooftop duet with Blaine, while Santana confessed to rifling through everyone’s actual shit while rifling through their emotional shit. Also: Drug pantomime. At McKinley, Finn confessed to laying a pre-wedding snog on Emma after helping Will re-woo her, and Ryder and Jake took an erotic turn at a pottery wheel.
New Directions has decided to stage an intervention with Will and Finn. Is it because neither of them have any sense of personal or professional boundaries? Is it because their great straight white male heroism is insufferable on their best days and downright offensive on their worst? Is it because they are grown men who need to have their egos propped up by teenagers on the regular? Oooh, is it some kind of self-folding wormhole intervention calling them out for needing an intervention … from their students? Sadly, none of those things. New Directions wants to get back to Nationals and they can’t concentrate on the competition because Will keeps throwing hot lattes in Finn’s face and ridiculing his commitment to proper sweater vest care.
The assignment this week is: FEUDS! Everyone who is mad at anyone will mash-up some songs by real-life feuding musicians.
Finn, who has, I confess, been growing on me this season – in large part because the writers have stopped tying their female leads to train tracks and having Finn swoop in and save the day – wonders if maybe they should just talk this thing out the way he’s heard adults do sometimes. But no! Will says the actual words: “You broke the code of a brother, Finn!” along with a whole lot of other petulant and awful stuff about how he gave Finn the glee club because he felt sorry for him for shooting himself in the face at Army. Which: Not how I remember it, Schuester. I seem to recall you blowing off your responsibility to New Directions because you were bored and uninspired. Will says they’re going to do the damn thing right, and so Finn chooses an *N Sync/Backstreet Boys mash-up because Mr. Schue trying to channel JT is the most humiliating thing he can think of.
And he is correct! For starters, he gets Mr. Schue to say, “In the 1990s, the media pitted two of America’s hottest music groups against each other in an epic clash for pop-culture supremacy!” And for seconders, well:
After the “Bye, Bye, Bye”/”I Want it that Way” mash-up, Finn suggests they hug it out, but Will just can’t forgive his 19-year-old best friend for acting like a 19-year-old. HE BROKE THE CODE OF A BROTHER.
McKinley’s second Feud of the week is some manufactured hostility between Ryder and Unique. It starts when Unique accosts Ryder in the hallway to tell him to stay away from her girl Marley, and Jake takes it to 11 with the most transphobic bullshit he can think of. He calls Unique a dude, refuses to use the correct pronoun when referring to her, mocks her for dressing like a boy one day and a girl the next, and has a real hearty laugh about, “Which bathroom do you even use?” My initial hope for Unique’s story was that the writers were going to drive home a message of inclusiveness and acceptance by simply having Unique be included and accepted, exactly as she is. Partly because it would have been refreshing and revolutionary to see a young transgender woman who is allowed to embrace the woman inside of her without any peer stigma. Sometimes making a non-issue out of things in stories is the best way to comment on the stupidity of bigotry outside of stories. Mostly, though, I didn’t trust the writers to handle a transgender PSa with any kind of grace. But they actually surprised me here.
For one thing, Ryder is clearly portrayed as the jackass in this situation. None of his friends laugh at his little jokes or offer him any kind of sympathy or back-patting. They align themselves with Unique, just as the audience is meant to align themselves with Unique. And for another thing, Ryder’s transphobia doesn’t cause Unique to have an identity crisis, it doesn’t cause her to quit glee club or capitulate to gender norms, and it doesn’t require Finn or Will swooping in to save the day and teach everyone a Very Important Lesson. Glee lets Unique stand on her own two feet, and she does it beautifully. Her mashup with Ryder is Elton John‘s “The Bitch Is Back” and Madonna‘s “Dress You Up,” and it’s really good. The arrangement is kick-ass and so is the harmony and energy.
While he’s being a wanker about Unique, Ryder is also getting himself into some kind of Catfish-ed situation with a girl online named “Katie.” They tell each other their deepest, darkest secrets, and Ryder sends her a couple of shirtless pictures of himself because she’s definitely who she says she is. Just a blonde-haird, brown-eyed, perfectly proportioned cisgendered straight girl who likes to sing and toss around a football and dry hump you while you play video games. Would it be giving Glee too much credit to say they’re exploring a “real” girl parallel here between Unique and Catfish Katie? Yes? In the end, this is going to be Unique posing as Katie and stalking Ryder? OK, then.
The very, very best McKinley feud is between Sue Sylvester and Blaine Devon Warbler Anderson. Sue calls Blaine into her office and presents him with a 500-page contract that he signed when he became a Cheerio for a day back when New Directions had disbanded. She needs a strong, rhythmic, handsome young man to hoist girls into the air without trying to look up their skirts, and she thinks Blaine is just the guy for the job. And anyway, the contract does, in fact, obligate him to perform at all cheerleading competitions, pep rallies, GOP National Conventions, etc. Blaine tries to refuse, but it only results in Becky doing black ops. Sue hires a plane to skywrite a message about how Blaine is a bottom, which: I’m not sure why that’s an insult, but also which: I’m sure Klaine fanific writers are glad to have the confirmation. Becky also replaces Blaine’s hair gel with rubber cement, resulting in the second best visual gag of the night: Blaine knocking on his hair helmet like a coconut. The first best visual gag is the camera panning back after Blaine’s long, intense meeting with Sue to reveal Tina in the chair beside him, agreeing to re-join the Cheerios. Sue tells her to go hag-out over Lance Bass.
The Sylvester/Warbler feud is a Mariah/Minaj “I Still Believe”/”Superbass” mash-up, and if you ever wondered what the fever dream of a lesbigay TV recapper looks like, this is it. Jane Lynch and Darren Criss and fog machines and black lights and circus-colored everything and beautiful harmony and ass-shaking and Lynch just mugging at the camera for like three full minutes with her beautiful, perfect face. The winner is: Every gay everywhere. Glee is so queer sometimes I still can’t believe it is on Fox. Anyway, nice try, gay Clark Kent from season one of Smallville.
The feuds shake down like so:
Finn decides to leave McKinley, and after a pep talk from Marley, he realizes he should get a degree in education so he can start his own glee club and get his own best friend who is half his age.
“Katie” convinces Ryder that he’s acting like a real dillhole, because everyone has a truth to live, and who is he to tell Unique what hers is? So he apologizes to Unique and talks to Jake for ten minutes about how he has good hands for Jake’s balls. Kitty also stops by to hop on the cuddle pile. She’s decided to stop being so judge-y due to the fact that she is dating Puck and therefore has exactly zero inches of ground to stand on when it comes to ridicule. They pretend that anyone would watch a show dedicated to the five of them, after Sam and Blaine and Brittany and Artie and Tina graduate. It’s cute. Inaccurate, but cute.
And Blaine finally agrees to join the Cheerios. Once he’s back in his uniform, the camera grabs his ass – for the third time this season. But, wait! It turns out Blaine is double-crossing Sue! He sneaked his way back onto the Cheerios to take her down from inside her own house! Blaine, you beautiful dummy! This is going to end in you getting brutally axe-murdered!
New New Directions close it out with Tegan and Sara‘s “Closer,” answering that age-old question, “Can this show get any gayer?” with a resounding “You betcha!”
There’s this one hotel downtown where all the off-Broadway gigolos go to meet up with lonely rich cougars. Every night, the same mating ritual: They sing, they tango, they bid the other patrons of the hotel adieu for like 20 minutes on the stairs like a bunch of horny Von Trapps. This is where Brody does his hooking. This is where his pager leads him.
Santana takes Rachel to the doctor to get a proper pregnancy test, and Rachel is ecstatic when she rushes out into Santana’s arms and tells her it was just a Sweeps weeks false-positive. She’s like, “Well, anyway, I’m off to school and also to have more unprotected sex with a prostitute!” Santana admonishes her to sort out her priorities, starting with dumping Brody, and then maybe evaluating how it is that she went from being a driven, talented thespian to being the co-dependent girlfriend of a hooker.
When Rachel refuses to take Santana’s advice, Santana decides to snoop through more of Brody’s stuff, lifting his pager out of his pants pocket and marching herself right up into NYADA to smack him down with some Paula Abdul jams. He’s like, “How did you even get in here?” And she’s like, “Have you seen me?” She explains to Brody how family works. The unconditional love. The support. The way that sometimes you have to cut off a hooker’s nuts and feed them to a squirrell if they keep coming around with a pager. I think they make a deal that if she performs “Cold Hearted” perfectly, he has to move out? Lopez Logic, I think she calls it? I can’t be sure about any of that because there’s a giddy lustful fog filling my brain, extending five minutes before and five minutes after Santana’s performance. Probably this is what dropping ecstasy feels like.
When Santana arrives home, after securing for herself a job at the Coyote Ugly Bar(!), Kurt and Rachel are waiting in the half-dark for a family meeting. Kurt, hilariously, goes, “We just got off the phone with Brody. Did you confront him at NYADA with a Paula Abdul song?!” Santana confirms that yes, that awesome thing did happen, and also she explains that because she loves them, she is using her psychic Mexican third eye on their behalves, and trust her on this one, Brody is a shadester.
They tell her she has to get along with Brody or move out, so she steals Kurt’s pillow and Rachel’s comforter and hops on over to Lena Dunham‘s to crash on the couch.
– Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) March 15, 2013Actually, that is only a bluff. Santana really shimmies on over to some Kubrickian hotel and waits in the dark for Brody to come try to hook for her. He opens the door, all, “Honey, I’m ho-fuck. Is this the part where you kill me?” Santana smiles sweetly and tells him it’s not her he needs to worry about tonight. The bathroom door opens, and out walks Rachel.
Oh, thank God. You know, I kind of thought Glee had soiled itself in my esteem in an irredeemable way last season when Finn had to dupe Rachel into getting on a train and move to New York. This is a show that built itself on the back of Rachel Berry’s ambition. It’s the thread that has always woven everything together, from the very beginning. It brought Glee (and glee club) together and held Glee (and glee club) together and despite all of the other stuff that found its way into the main narrative, Rachel’s talent and Rachel’s aspirations were the themes all the other themes were built on. So to have her lose herself in a boy so completely that she wouldn’t even follow her lifelong dream of moving to New York unless he coerced her into it? What a gross message. What an awful character assassination. And then to bring her to the city and trap her in another storyline where her whole self is built on the validation of another boy? It makes my breats ache with rage.
So it is such a relief to see her finally confronting Brody, both the character who is doing her dirty and the symbolism of the thing that is holding her down. To look that thing right in the eye and say, “I am better than this. I see it now. I am Rachel Motherfucking Berry” is such a relief. Finally, her character can grow into the woman we were introduced to in the pilot.
Just kidding, you guys. It’s Finn in the bathroom. “Stay away from my future wife,” is what he shouts while beating the shit out of Brody.
Not even Liz Lemon could roll her eyes hard enough to convey the correct emotion about that turn of events.
Next week: Wham! Blam? Thank you, ma’am.
Thank you, as always, to my screencapping partner Lindsay (@ScenicPenguin) for shirking sleep to bring the beauty.
