Glee Season 3 Round-Up/Awards

I stopped reviewing Glee weeks ago. Because, I mean, how many sarcastic put-downs can one person think up? How many hilarious screengrabs can one person make? You know every time I make one of those I have to mess around resizing the image on Microsoft Paint? It was bumming me out. I still watched Glee every Wednesday morning, but without much enthusiasm. I wasn’t surprised when it was bad, just when it was really bad. Or good.

My main problem with this series has been its focus on Issues, which are barely integrated into the wider plot and come and go alarmingly quickly. At first it was OK- in Season 2, the episode ‘Blame it on the Alcohol’ taught us all a lesson about the perils of binge drinking, but it also included some really awesome scenes of the glee club getting drunk together, and it had great songs. The show’s approach to homophobic bullying has also usually been very good, it’s consistent and doesn’t feel gratuitous because, as far as I know, this strand of the show’s plot is based on Chris Colfer (Kurt)’s own experiences of being bullied at high school, and it’s something that ought to be dealt with in high school shows.

But now…the Issues are heavier and sadder, but they are also forgotten much faster. What really riles me about this is that I can see the show’s writers (all dudes) sitting around a big table, saying things like “What about violence against women? We haven’t covered that yet.” Episode 18 of this season, ‘Choke’, revealed that Coach Bieste, who had all but disappeared from the show, had been hit by her husband. But don’t worry- the whole thing was resolved through song, including an awful and totally inappropriate rendition of the cell block tango from Chicago. A later episode creates a parallel between Puck, who was taunted for being a loser, and Bieste, who was hit by her husband. Quinn was disabled, but only for a couple of weeks. And Dave Karovsky’s suicide attempt got 20 minutes of screen time and really just gave everyone else the chance to reflect on how much they had to live for. I started to wonder, is it OK that Glee screens this awful human misery as entertainment? Should I really be watching it?

I did watch it, though. And I’m gonna pick out some highlights and lowlights. If this were a real award ceremony, the statuettes would be unwieldy wax models of Will Schuester’s head on a pike.

award 4 achievement in glee

Let’s begin.
Best Song

The best song was, obviously, this one.

This is a really excellent performance by Naya Rivera and Amber Riley, and a smart combination of songs with amazing dancing. It was also immediately preceded by Santana discovering that she had been public outed and would have to tell her parents she was gay, and immediately followed by her slapping Finn Hudson in the face. Yesssssssss. No seriously though, these few minutes were shocking rather than sentimental and had more emotional weight than anything Glee has ever done.

Runner-up: This a capella version of the best Whitney Houston song ever.

Worst Song

‘Do They Know it’s Christmas’. Performed in a homeless shelter full of delighted children. Nuff said. I’m not gonna embed a video of this because I don’t hate you.

Best episode

This is hard, because every good episode is marred by at least one terrible plotline. But ‘Dance With Somebody’, a tribute episode to Whitney Houston, had great music and costumes, and actually made me feel quite cheery. I didn’t even mind the totally absurd premise that the kids would still be actively mourning Whitney Houston, with candles and everything, two months after her death.

I also liked ‘Nationals’. But I can’t remember why.

Worst episode

The Christmas episode was a sanctimonious piece of iPod-pushing crap, and I hated it from start to finish.

Best Character

The best character is Santana Lopez. She’s a gay badass with razor blades in her hair, and for some reason her mum is Gloria Estefan.

Most Neglected Character

What is Rory Flanagan? I mean, aside from Irish, what is he? Tina Cohen-Chang was so underused that she eventually got her own body-swap episode, but Rory Flanagan was absent from the show for months at a time and no-one cared. Because he is boring.

Most Unnecessary Plot

I’m torn between Quinn’s unexpected crusade to get back the baby she gave up for adoption at the end of Season 1, and Quinn’s unexpected car accident, which put her in a wheelchair for a couple of episodes. But the Will Schuester head on pike goes to the former, which genuinely ruined my enjoyment of the show for many weeks. Why would a 17/18 year old want to burden herself with a stolen baby?

Best Cameo 

That total throwback Ricky Martin was charming as Dave Martinez, a nightschool teacher equally passionate about Spanish and dental hygiene.

Best Young Upstart from The Glee Project

Alex Newell as Wade Adams/Unique. The Glee Project was mostly just a dispiriting talent contest for overconfident teens, but Newell was frickin’ incredible: here he is, singing ‘I am Changing’ in drag.

Wowza.  The problem- and this is not a problem with Newell- is that Glee hasn’t decided whether to be trans-friendly or to keep taking the piss for cheap laughs. It is not clear whether Newell is a trans woman or a man who likes to perform in drag, and the show’s sort of taking advantage of that ambiguity: there have been a lot of ‘Issues’ scenes where the writers congratulate themselves for being aware that trans people exist, and also a lot of nasty jokes. But I think the character has a lot of potential, and Newell is an excellent performer, so if the writers maybe get some good advice over the summer this can be a good thing.

Most Tragic Tragedy

This season’s most tragic tragedy was Puck. What is sadder than a 30 year old man flunking Geography and getting thrown into a bin?

I know next to nothing about Season 4, although Ryan Murphy has said that many of the graduating seniors will be returning, which makes sense as they are definitely the show’s best-loved characters but in terms of narrative plausibility is totally insane. Also, Sue will have a baby. One thing I liked a lot about the season finale is that it sort of brought things back to the beginning, when Rachel was the show’s lead character, a Tracy Flick-esque teen sociopath who no-one really liked because she was creepily desperate to be famous. She is much more compelling that way. In my head now she is being nerdy, pushy and abrasive all over New York. If she had married Finn and stayed in Lima I would have thrown my computer out of the window.

I usually end with a promo for the next episode, but there aren’t any! So…let’s watch them throw up all over each other?

It has come to my attention that I love Don’t Tell the Bride

Men, eh? Grr. What’s worse than men? Men are a bunch of clowns, can’t trust them with anything. They make terrible decisions, and they’re always thinking about themselves. If there’s one thing that’s worse than men, though, it’s women. Women! So shrill! So demanding! They’ll cry at anything, and the stuff they care about doesn’t make any sense. Like, what is a bolero? Still, though, if there’s one thing that’s worse than women, it’s men. Men!

I learned these things about women and men from watching BBC3′s Don’t Tell The Bride. In my defence…nope, can’t think of anything. In every episode, a couple is given £12,000 to pay for their wedding, on the condition that the groom plan everything, from the venue to the cake to the…bolero? In the meantime, we see the bride choosing the venue, cake and bolero she would most like, as a stick to beat the groom with. Same-sex couples have also been contestants on Don’t Tell the Bride, on the condition that they can be separated into the manly, stupid one who doesn’t know anything about weddings and the womanly one with too many demands. Climb aboard the SS Unflattering Gender Stereotypes, lesbians! There’s room for all of us! Now, which one of you is the man?

Almost all of the show’s drama comes from the groom making counter-intuitive decisions and the bride weeping and refusing to come to the wedding: the show does a huge amount of cross-cutting between the bride describing or finding what she wants, and the groom describing or choosing the wrong thing. Here is some sample dialogue from Don’t Tell The Bride USA:

Woman: I just want it to be nice and elegant.

Man: I think a theme wedding would be awesome.

Woman: I would like a four tier cake, a signature drink…

Man: I’m pretty much winging it.

A lot of the time, the groom will steam ahead and plan a hideous theme wedding of his own choosing. But if the men aren’t making sufficiently bad decisions, the narrator steps in to stir things up. This is where the constant cross-cutting really pays off: while we see the woman choosing her dream dress, and the man choosing a slightly different dress, the narrator drawls “Jenny has chosen this oyster-coloured vintage-style gown with a long train, but John- the idiot- is buying this cream-coloured gown with a medium-sized train and a bolero”. Hey, John? John? Why are you such a dick? She didn’t even want a bolero. Because the show is about weddings, and women obviously dream of their perfect wedding day from conception, any deviation from the bride’s dream is treated as a grave, wedding-cancelling mistake. Other things done to build up tension and suspense when the groom is being too sensible include pretending that the bride has lost something, and concerned vox pops from mothers and friends.

I’m a bit confused as to what level of reality Don’t Tell The Bride sits at. It’s clearly more “real” than, say, Made in Chelsea, which warns its viewers before each episode that the whole hideous affair was fabricated for their amusement; and it’s clearly less “real” than something like Big Brother, where the only mediating factor is that the fame-hungry little monkeys know they’re being watched. But the level of miscommunication and short sightedness on this show beggars belief. If I have learned anything from watching Don’t Tell the Bride, it is that women want to get married in stately homes or castles- not science museums, theme parks, bowling alleys or conference centres. But why haven’t men learned this? Why have they never said to their partners, “Hey honey, do you want a pirate-themed wedding, or do you want like a normal one in a church?” What about…when they found out they were going to be on Don’t Tell the Bride? Didn’t they have a quick chat about Dos and Don’ts?

I’ve worked out how I think Don’t Tell the Bride works. I would imagine that the hapless grooms are pushed towards silly decisions like robot waiters and theme park receptions by the show’s producers. They are also being egged on by their best men, who are often framed as relics from their past lives as lads. Down it! Down it! Down it! Now go choose floral arrangements! It’s clear that a lot of the conversations in the show have been suggested to the participants- why not talk about how he’s under the thumb and he’s not the mate he used to be? Why not ask your daughter why she is marrying this goon? And I think in a lot of cases the bride is in on it, or at least was aware that she was signing up for a silly wedding. Maybe before signing the contract the couple are told that their wedding will be vulgar and strange, but it will also be free.

There is a lot not to like about Don’t Tell the Bride. It makes both men and women look awful, and also weirdly uniform- I mean, I know for a fact that women aren’t all harpies, because I am not a harpy. I don’t find weddings all that compelling. But I think that the show, in a strange way, ends up making light of weddings. The very formulaic nature of Don’t Tell the Bride means that with repetition the various elements of the wedding become a bit silly, until you can’t remember why they matter and they’re just something that people do. The groom always fumbles a bit, the bride usually cries, there’s a white dress and invitations and a venue and entertainment, and the boundaries of taste are stretched, but everyone’s usually all really happy in the end. The wedding tropes become baggy and strange with overuse, everything happens the same way in each episode, even the crying. How much can this stuff really matter? Or maybe I like watching this show because I like it when things go wrong and people cry. I hear there was one episode where the bride just didn’t show- that’s the one I want to see.

If I were ever a participant on Don’t Tell the Bride, I would organise it as an elaborate heist. The groom would skimp on every aspect of the wedding, spending a maximum of £100; on the wedding day I would wail that all I wanted was a nice bolero, and skip town before the ceremony; my stingy partner in crime would then come and join me in Mexico to start a new life on the BBC’s dime. It’d make dynamite TV, and when the money ran out we could come back home and go on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! Keep your eyes peeled, TV lovers, I’m coming.

Glee Season 3 Episode 15: ‘Big Brother’

My favourite part of this whole episode of Glee - and I am not exaggerating- is when Sue Sylvester writes “Lazy idiots” on the board in the choir room, where Mr Schuester usually writes things like “Acceptance”, “Inspiration”, “Funky” and “Prom”. I kept spying it during Blaine and Cooper’s totally uncalled for Duran Duran mash-up, undermining them from the back of the room. I liked it so much, I took a bunch of stills of it, and here they are.

Lazy idiot

Lazy idiots

One more time

Other small moments I enjoyed were the appearance of this stuffed dog that looks just like Margaret Thatcher:

and this outfit, surely put together by Rachel Berry circa 2009:

Am I right?

I didn’t write about the last episode, ‘On My Way’ because I really hated it. The first half was taken up with reverberations from Karovsky’s suicide attempt, which I saw coming a mile off- the writers have been shoehorning in references to LGBT teen suicides for a while, and Karovsky returned in ‘Heart’ to reveal that he was miserably in love with Kurt and being bullied at school. The suicide was mostly used as a chance to disseminate more ‘It Gets Better’-style wisdom- it turns out Karovsky will be happy when he has a lot of money and is married with children. This was all swept under the carpet for the second half of the episode, which was a classic competition segment, followed by a near-wedding and a car crash. And also, I think, the first use of non-diegetic music in the history of Glee, apart from those acapella bits between scenes. It sounded super weird.

It was all pretty high octane stuff, but it seems to have had next to no impact on the kids’ lives. In a typical piece of telling-not-showing, Quinn announces to the group that it’s bad to text and drive, she’s still going to be able to have children and she should be up and dancing again by Nationals. She’s more cheerful than ever! I love a bit of Elton John as much as the next sane person, but two kids with serious spinal damage performing ‘I’m Still Standing’ in their wheelchairs was more weirdness than I was ready for. Quinn also seems to be pretty convinced that she can’t go to Yale and be in a wheelchair- that’s a pretty strange way of raising the stakes.

Blaine’s minorly famous older brother, played by kinda successful TV actor Matt Bomer, is a total buffoon- part Derek Zoolander, part Johnny Drama, all handsome. His terrible acting lessons were fun to watch, although I would love to know when the whole glee club became so gullible. Blaine and Cooper’s rendition of ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ worked really well- looks like Blaine has been taking lessons in facial intensity from the Lima School of Acting While Singing.

Good work, Blaine!

The rest of the episode mostly dealt with old bits of plot that don’t interest me a whole lot- whether or not Finn and Rachel will get married- please god no- and Sue’s pregnancy. The fact that her daughter may have Down’s Syndrome is mostly galling because she will be the third character with Down’s introduced mostly to make Sue look like a saint, after Sue’s sister Jean and her young friend Becky Jackson. This is the worst thing that Glee does.

I recently read this little piece, ‘Was Glee ever good?’. I guess I have been asking myself the same thing. I think it must have been- I used to find most episodes charming, witty and fun, I thought it had decent politics and I even enjoyed about half of the musical numbers- not like, “I’m gonna buy this on iTunes”, but like, “This version of ‘Ride Wit’ Me’ is no more annoying than the original”. The problem, says Willa Paskin, is that Glee “eats plot faster than Ebola eats flesh”. This is clear from poor Karovsky, who doesn’t merit a mention one episode after his suicide attempt. And as always, with characters changing wildly according to what the plot requires, someone who was a joke three episodes ago- Mr Schuester- is an upstanding citizen and a good friend this week, and someone who was literally trying to steal a baby a few months back- that’s Quinn!- is now a model of courage and moral rectitude. It makes your head spin, and it also makes you totally shut off while watching the show- why should I care about these characters when the writers clearly don’t? And of course as they run out of sensible places for the show to go, the writers become transparently desperate- this is the only explanation for the baby-stealing, car crashes and Ricky Martin that we’ve been treated to this season. In the Ebola analogy, that’s like running out of flesh to eat and going for hair, ear wax and toenails instead. Gross.

If there is any good news, it’s that there is an amazing pun in the title of next week’s episode.

See you next week for more toenails. Yum!

Glee Season 3 Episode 13: ‘Heart’

I’d like to introduce my review with a tenuously linked clip from a vastly superior show. 

The first time I watched ‘Heart’, I thought Jeff Goldblum and Brian Stokes Mitchell were both super awkward as Rachel’s dads; the second time I realised that they were supposed to be pretending to support Rachel’s marriage to Finn while actually trying to sabotage it. Which is quite awkward, I guess. The strangest part of the show for me was when, half way through the Hudson-Hummel-Berry dinner, the parents started encouraging Rachel and Finn to enjoy what they called “teenage lovemaking”. At the time I didn’t understand that they were employing reverse psychology and thought it might have been a horrible dream sequence.

What impressed me about ‘Heart’ is that it was in large part very unromantic. I particularly enjoyed the feeling of intense discomfort that pervaded the section of the show set in the Berry household- the uncomfortable class disparity between Finn’s parents and Rachel’s, the embarrassing sex talk, and the part in Rachel’s bedroom which revealed how little the young couple had thought through the awkward practicalities of cohabitation and marriage. And yes I am basically talking about poo.

Using my awesome insider knowledge (that I got while watching The Glee Project), I can tell you that the new character, Joe, played by joint contest winner Samuel Larsen, is a composite of two characters: what Larsen looks like- something vaguely wholesome, raised by hippies- and the real character of a contestant that dropped out of The Glee Project, an earnest young Christian called Cameron. Ryan Murphy, who hung around the set throughout mining the kids for new storylines, said on camera that he would like a Christian character who was just like Cameron. And here he is! Except, well, way more handsome and charismatic. The camera loves this guy- he’s introduced with a long, languid close-up on his weirdly angular face.

 

I think as a character Joe possibly has more potential than Rory Puddingface Flannigan, whose only distinguishing feature, after all this time, is, still, Irish. Evidence:

That fuzzy green thing is a four-leafed clover

So Irish.

‘Heart’ was very much on-message today with its deliberations about sexuality and the church. The four-way discussion that Mercedes, Sam, Quinn and Joe had about the ethics of performing a singing valentine to a woman from her girlfriend could’ve been lifted from a school textbook: the camera even swung from person to person around the four sides of the table, allowing each to deliver their nugget of liberal Christian wisdom in turn without interruption. I think it’s totally fine that Glee sometimes operates like this: maybe it comes off as a shade patronising, but it’s explicitly trying to find room for homosexuality within Christianity, in terms that a child could understand. I don’t really mind.

I liked the story about Brittany and Santana not being allowed to kiss at school- it was an obvious joke about the moralistic double-standards of the network, if that’s who is to blame for the total erasure of their sexuality on the show. I suspect that slightly chauvinistic writers may also have something to do with it. Anyway, I’m sure millions of people were delighted to see their first on-screen kiss. I was obvs one of those people so here it is again.

I did feel a bit icky about the return of Karovsky, though. Setting aside the myriad ways in which it makes no sense for him to be haunting McKinley in a gorilla suit, I hate the idea of him being in love with Kurt. It’s really tragic, unnecessarily so- the last time we saw him, at Lima’s only gay bar, he was happy.

The music was oddly enjoyable this week. One number, the unbearably cheesy ‘Stereo Hearts’, was spectacularly expensive and silly- it involved a gospel choir and like a hundred extras, and was clearly aimed directly at Youtube and iTunes. I was quite touched by the coincidence of Whitney Houston’s death and Glee‘s use of ‘I Will Always Love You’- and I do believe that it is a coincidence and not some sort of ugly opportunism. It’s a nice performance in that it is appropriately hammy and overwrought, and Amber Riley’s voice suits it well. Also, and more importantly, I am almost embarrassed about how much I enjoyed ‘Love Shack’. If I’m not all the way at embarrassed it’s because it was a big, exuberant, fun performance, kind of raucous and not over-choreographed or overproduced but with amazing dancing and singing. And enjoying these things is normal. Quick, watch it, before Fox’s lawyers snatch it away!

Next week, it’s regionals! And lots of exploding plotlines, by the looks of things. You should now watch this promo, and then put on ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody‘ and groove around your room.

Glee Season 3 Episode 12: ‘The Spanish Teacher’

Mr Schuester loves all things latin!

He loves latin food!

latin art!

and latin people!

Words mean different things in different places LOL. Anyway, ‘The Spanish Teacher’ is a classic case of Glee totally rewriting the past, in that we’ve always previously been given the impression that Mr Schue is a good Spanish teacher. In this episode we learn that he is a phoney who can barely string a sentence together and whose lessons are based on offensive stereotypes involving ponchos. I think this may have been inspired by a very similar plotline in Community- at the end of Season 1, it was revealed that Señor “El Tigre” Chang speaks no Spanish, and was teaching words he had learned off the telly.

Ricky Martin stars in ‘The Spanish Teacher’ as a super handsome, overly earnest night school teacher. Ricky Martin hasn’t really been on my radar since 1999, and he’s actually quite charming here. Where he could have been written as a villain angling for Mr Schuester’s job, he is instead a sort of unwitting foil to him, showing him up without even trying by being cool, sexy and, y’know, genuinely hispanic. The Mr Schue of this episode is the one we saw in ‘The Substitute’ and ‘Britney/Brittany’- he’s floundering, square and old-fashioned- and Ricky Martin’s role here is actually very similar to the one given to Gwyneth Paltrow in her cameo episodes. This version of Mr Schue’s character is obviously my favourite, because it gives us all a break from the other versions which include Parental-Style Authority Mr Schue and Bursting With Passion and Creativity Mr Schue. Watching him literally translate the lyrics of ‘A Little Less Conversation’ into nonsensical Spanish and then perform it, dressed as a matador, was on the border between painful and hilarious. Let’s say it was an 8 on the Julia Davis scale.

One Schue-version which always returns is Wearing The Trousers In His Relationship Mr Schue. A few weeks ago in ‘Yes/No’, a storyline about Emma’s OCD was dominated by Will and his deliberations as to whether he could marry a damaged woman. This time, Emma was (implausibly, given her lack of experience in the field) taken on as a history teacher at the high school, but the news of her achievement was filtered through Will, with a focus on him being an amazing boyfriend and good taking care of her. Here he is, promising to eat chicken with her until the end of time.

This is the smile of a man who knows that it's really actually all about him, forever

Three other things were poking around the sidelines in this episode: Sue Sylvester wants to have a baby, but she’s too old; Rachel and Finn want to get married, but they’re too young; Sam and Mercedes want to get it on but she’s going out with someone who is only ever on screen as an obstacle to their love. I’m guessing this is being dragged out so it can come to a head in next week’s Valentine’s Day episode.

I’m finding the idea of Sue having a baby quite confusing: it is clearly being played for laughs, with all the jokes about sperm banks and sandy breast milk and “with whose vagina?”, but we are also told intermittently that she would be a good mother, so I’m not sure if the audience is supposed to laugh at the idea of a woman over 50 having a baby or root for her. Glee has in the past made jokes about Sue not being a woman- the supposed lols come from the fact that her hair is short, she’s a sports teacher, she wears masculine clothes, she is not soft or pleasant or polite, and Jane Lynch is a lesbian, and so naturally she is not a real woman but some sort of half-man half-hyper-aggressive fembot. Now I’m not sure whether the scandal about her having a baby is indeed because she is supposedly too old, or because everyone has been laughing for ages about her being insufficiently womanly. And I can’t imagine how this will be resolved.

The most successful scene for me was the one between Kurt and Finn. Finn feels like a failure, and wants to cut his losses and get married to someone who is destined to be more successful. Something that Glee does quite well, I think, is failure and disappointment. I can’t imagine many other mainstream shows in which the star football player doesn’t get a college scholarship- although perhaps this is just because I have watched too much of pie-in-the-sky football-based dream factory Friday Night Lights. Like many of the best bits of Glee, this scene pits the kids’ big showbiz dreams against the reality of living in a small town and being poised to fail. Chris Colfer and Corey Monteith often put in really good performances as mismatched brothers- Kurt is tough but encouraging and believes that good things can happen, Finn is red and shaky like a frustrated baby and has been prepared all his life for staying where he is and letting everyone else move on. I’d like to see more small town big dreams plucky kids stuff like this, please.

Next week, it’s Valentine’s Day in Lima!

Looks like one of Rachel’s dads is Jeff Goldblum, and the other one is white- that joke about her not knowing which of her dads is her biological dad from the Pilot is hereby retrospectively cancelled. I’m a curmudgeon, but I loved ‘Silly Love Songs’, the V-Day episode from last season, so I know it is theoretically possible for my curmudgeonly heart to be melted even on February 14th, the worst day of the year. Crossing my fingers!

PS: How amazing is Nene Leakes?

Glee Season 3 Episode 11: ‘Michael’

I’ve got a theory. My theory is that Glee was at it its peak, in terms of music, plot consistency, quality of script and toe-tappin’ good times, for the ten episodes of Season 2 in which Brittany, Santana and Quinn were not cheerleaders and wore real clothes.  Think about it! We saw them all get crunk and dance and vomit all over each other, Santana and Brittany realised they were totally in love, Gwyneth Paltrow came back to tell us that her sex tape with JD Salinger was a disaster, the Fleetwood Mac tribute episode was incredibly weird, Lauren Zizes was there, all the boys formed that Justin Bieber tribute act… I feel like the show was adventurous and odd in a lot of ways then, and a lot of character development happened in a very short time. Now that Brittany and Santana are back in their uniforms, their relationship doesn’t seem to matter anymore, Brittany has receded into the background – she had one line in today’s episode- and the episodes are just worse. Get them back in their civvies! I’m convinced it’s the only way to save the show.

Thanks for listening to my theory. I didn’t enjoy ‘Michael’ very much.  Ratings for this season of Glee have been hovering around the 7 million mark, whereas last season the average was more like 11 million.  I think this episode was intended to bring in a big crowd- it was heavily advertised, with a lot of previews on Youtube, and it looked pretty expensive. There was some cool, flashy visual stuff and neat choreography, which I certainly won’t complain about, but the whole affair seemed a shade desperate. The feud between New Directions and The Warblers came from nowhere and felt forced, plus I hate that kid Sebastian- what teenager is that evil? What does he want? When will he leave?

I felt like the dialogue was often conspicuously tailored to accommodating the song choices, particularly Artie’s out-of-the-blue angry diatribe about the glee club being mistreated, and of course Blaine, Mercedes and Santana’s clunky opening gambit about how everyone loves Michael Jackson. Of course I might have swallowed this if I myself loved Michael Jackson.

The parts that I enjoyed were those which had nothing to do with the king of pop- the more low-key interactions between Rachel, Quinn and Kurt. I also liked hearing the word “underboob” three times. But instead of reviewing ‘Michael’ in detail, I have made some images about it. Enjoy.

Who's doing Michael? Are we doing Michael? You could never do Michael!

It's father of the year Burt Hummel!

Snore

Not OK

Maybe this part was a bit cool

Next week…Ricky Martin. Yeah. We’ll see.

Glee Season 3 Episode 10 – ‘Yes/No’

This week was the week we found out that Mr Schuester, a divorced teacher in his mid-30s, has no closer or better friend than Finn Hudson, a high school student. We also saw a man in a wheelchair hurl himself into a pool as part of a musical number.

That’s just weird. So there were two main stories going on in ‘Yes/No’- a marriage proposal, and a potential romance between two people with disabilities. One of them ended well and one of them didn’t- can you guess which was which?

Helen Mirren guest starred in ‘Yes/No’, as the voice of Becky Jackson! This is pretty cool, I guess. Except, well, what’s wrong with Becky Jackson’s voice? We’ve seen dozens of opening scenes in which characters walk in slowmo down corridors while we hear their thoughts in voiceover, but in previous episodes the voiceover was done by the actor who plays that character, not by an Oscar winner doing their celebrated impersonation of the Queen of England. I’ve been trying really hard to articulate what made me uncomfortable with this storyline, and I just don’t think I’m up to it. It must be hard for the writers of Glee, who do not have Down’s Syndrome, to write for a character who has Down’s Syndrome, and I think it’s great that her point of view is being foregrounded for the first time – she has always previously been Sue Sylvester’s stooge, a fairly boring role. It’s good that it’s about her more than it is about Artie- after he rejects her, the camera follows her away from the encounter, and Helen Mirren tells us how upset she is. And then there is a very sweet scene between her and Sue. This is a positive change, since, as I wrote a little while ago, Glee often introduces characters with disabilities to make other characters look good and then ditches them. But it was never going to work out between Artie and Becky.

The way I see it, it’s a bit like what happened with Lauren Zizes.

Lauren Zizes was an incidental character at first, and she was brought onto the main cast as a love interest for Puck. She was fierce, her size was talked about but rarely fun of and her relationship with Puck was one of the more interesting, challenging ones that the show has featured (although competition is pretty darn scarce). But during the dance numbers, she would be totally invisible- they just kept her out of shot- and she left without fanfare. Glee is desperate to be inclusive until being inclusive starts to trespass on its very conventional pop video aesthetic.

Here’s my linking sentence: Lauren Zizes was in the show because she was fat, but being fat stopped her from becoming a permanent fixture; Becky Jackson is, I think, in the show because she has Down’s, but having Down’s will most likely stop her from becoming a permanent fixture.  It’s awesome that she is taken seriously in ‘Yes/No’, but I’m not sure how much we’ll be seeing of her from now on.

Emma’s OCD is also mobilised in weird ways in Glee, and this brings us onto the other big storyline of ‘Yes/No’, Will’s proposal to Emma. There are actually three proposals in ‘Yes/No’. First, Emma proposes to Will by accident, but he doesn’t answer the question because it only counts if a man says it. Duh! Then comes much singing, and much agonising over whether a woman with OCD would make a good wife and mother. She has to plead with him and apologise for being “incomplete”, reassure him that she is normal enough to perform wifely duties and promise to get better. I wish I was joking. This out of the way, having bafflingly asked Finn to be his best man, Will proposes to Emma through the medium of synchronised swimming, dressed up as Fred Astaire channelling the spirit of a tampon. 

Am I right?

For more on how bad Mr Schue sucks, see The AV Club’s review of ‘Yes/No’. I felt more peeved by this storyline than the one with Becky and Artie, because it was not about Emma, but about how Emma’s disorder impacts negatively on her boyfriend, and whether he could bring himself to commit himself to someone like her. And that’s not nice.

Then Finn proposes to Rachel. Why? I honestly can’t remember. The reasons were really boring. I predict that she will say no, but that they will stay together.

What I did enjoy, strangely, was every part of this episode involving synchronised swimming. Maybe this is because synchronised swimming is inherently funny? I don’t know. I liked the bit at the beginning with Sam naively joining the synchronised swimming team because he imagined it would impress girls. As if! I enjoy Sam’s goofy but well-meaning shtick as much as I enjoy the fact that the actor who plays him is called Chord Overstreet, and that is a lot. And I loved the new swimming teacher- the episode being broadcast on Martin Luther King Day, she gave a MLK-style inspiring speech about how she overcame prejudice against black swimmers to win an Olympic medal for individual synchronised swimming. And the Rihanna number the glee club (and what were clearly a professional synchronised swimming team) performed in the pool was a treat for the eyes if perhaps not for the ears.

The next episode, which will air in two weeks, is a Michael Jackson tribute episode! I guess your level of enthusiasm about this will depend on your enthusiasm for Michael Jackson.

I am only moderately enthusiastic about Michael Jackson. See you next week!

PS: If you were worried about Artie in the swimming pool, it’s ok, he made his way onto this lilo using Kevin McHale’s fully functional legs.

"I'm Kevin McHale, and I'm only disabled some of the time"