Be prepared for harsh language from Aaron, but this episode of 'Glee' might deserve it...

Well, I have something to get off my chest before this week’s episode starts.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, I have some things to say about Kurt. To write a flamboyantly gay character who is not annoyingly so appears to be a tricky proposition for TV writers, who seem to delight in swishy, snarky stereotypes. Kurt has been handled with care and allowed to develop naturally into one of the best-received characters on the show, given opportunity to show his wonderful voice and a range of newcomer Chris Colfer’s acting abilities.

Such a character could have been a cliché farm, tended to in a half-assed manner so 'queer' kids would have a token of representation on an actual scripted show, rather than the flamey Bravo “reality” shows. Instead the producers seemed to give a shit about showing a faceted person whose trials and difficulties, while occasionally silly or farcical, rang true in many viewers’ experiences, gay, straight or otherwise.

Well, congratulations on fucking that up, writer Brad Falchuk. For reasons I cannot fathom, you have traded away the credibility of Kurt’s character for cheap... well, I can’t say “laughs” because what he did last week wasn’t the least bit funny. His deceitful, shameful and above all else, ridiculous behavior rubbed a bit too hard against the lay of my fur. His crush on Finn is kind of cute, or at least it was until he threw their parents together. He twisted those two sad, needy people into each other on the ballhair’s-width of a chance that living together in whatever well-designed configuration Kurt’s basement apartment might wind up in would lead to Finn topping him in some kind of Kirk/Spock pon farr slashfic. It’s idiotic and sad almost to the point of being offensive.

Of course, it backfired in Burt finding the son he may have always wanted, and Kurt’s wounded ego limping off to cry its biscuit-arsed tears. If I’m expected to feel sympathy for him, I don’t think I ever can. I’m sorry that he can’t find one of the other gay kids in the school to flirt with and fall for (maybe they’re not that attractive), but involving their parents, and by proxy, Finn himself, in his cock-eyed (all puns intended) half-cocked (again), dumb-assed (I could do this all day) scheme to get mounted by the straight boy of his dreams is absurd to the point of being out of character. Kurt is many things, but suddenly making him conniving, creepy, petulant and viciously selfish all at once has almost ruined what could be one of the most helpful characters on television. As marginalized as gay youth still are, wouldn’t it have been nice to show one on a prime-time network program who didn’t have to be a goddamn douchebag? Anyway, on with this week’s episode...

"As marginalized as gay youth still are, wouldn’t it have been nice to show one on a prime-time network program who didn’t have to be a goddamn douchebag?"

What the fuck just happened?

Was it “take pity on a one-hit-wonder” week? Were they over on their licensing budget for the month? Did somebody lose a bet? I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how the hell this episode came to be - a string of bad songs from the bargain CD bin loosely and poorly tied together by a fractious “plot” and a weak-sauce theme.

So another week comes where Nude Erections faces eradication. Seriously? This is like every other week, sometimes several episodes in a row. How often can this tired bullshit be retrodden and the audience expected to care? “Oh, look, the club is facing disbandment, whatever will they do? I’m at the edge of my seat in anticipation” of something that never comes to pass.

This week, the unbelievable bullshit facing glee club is that someone has posted a list (called the “Glist”) of the club’s members ranked by promiscuity, which (thanks to the magic of freeze frame) reads:

Glist: “Who’s hot - Who’s not!”

1) Quinn +45

2) Santana +43

3) Puck +38

4) Brittany +35

5) Jesse +29

6) Finn +19

7) Mike +11

8) Matt +5

9) Rachel -5

“I cannot have an environment that sexualizes children and damages their self-esteem,” Figgins whines. Well, where’s he when the Cheerios are being berated and abused by Sue or when the glee club was performing “Push It” by Salt and Pepa? Cause I seem to remember him placidly tapping his foot and weaving to the beat when Rachel, Tina and Mercedes were getting dry-humped on stage. So that’s asinine, but is nothing compared to Figgins’ stated intention to expel the maker of the list (based on the groundless assumption that the list will be a weekly event) or ALL of the glee club if the perpetrator isn’t found. The title card hasn’t even come up yet and I’m considering not watching the episode.

Sue’s real beef with the glee kids is over a video of her dancing around to “Physical” which mysteriously made its way to YouTube. Well, it’s a mystery to Sue since we got to see Finn post it on the site after Kurt admitted having stolen it. The usually unflappable Sue is completely taken aback at being the object of ridicule, but just to drive that home, someone decided to throw Molly Shannon a check by having her cameo for a few seconds as a new teacher we’ll never see again whose sole purpose in the plot is to hurl insults at Sue.

Because the glee kids are supposedly getting a bad reputation, Will decides their limp-dick assignment that chafingly scrapes up against the episode’s theme this week will be to “redeem” a shitty song. To shoehorn in an example, he hamfistedly segues into a performance of “Ice Ice Baby,” which all the kids seem to know the steps for, despite the song having come out three years before any of them were born and its status as a pop cultural artifact a baker’s dozen of today’s teenagers would know being obscenely negligible. But, we get to see Mike dance, so all was not lost. Sigh... Dance, Other Asian, dance!

On an actually interesting note, while the club is bopping merrily to this abysmal tune, Artie is left out and looking like he feels it. They cut to him a couple times to shore this up, but then nothing comes of it. It’s like a miniature version of one of the program’s overarching problems: it doesn’t finish anything it starts if it can’t be tied off by the end of the episode; or in this case, scene. They drop subplots that they spend entire episodes setting up - there is very little actual continuity between them. I think (and other critics have made note of this elsewhere on the interwebs) this is due to the show’s three writers working independently on single episodes and not consulting with each other on what’s actually happening in the stories. It’s becoming very frustrating.

"The flash mob of “U Can’t Touch This” in the library is now one of the stupidest things I’ve ever repeatedly watched"

Anyway, the Second Tier are whining because they weren’t included on the Glist, which 1) doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to get upset about and 2) ineptly sets up this rung of characters to have their own absurd routine. They surmise they weren’t on the list because they’re boring and set to shaking things up a bit. According to Kurt, the worst thing a student can do in their school is to cause a disturbance in the library. Really? That’s the worst thing a student in their school can do? They decide, for this inane reason (maybe the costumes were already available - the only logical reason they could have come up with the idea and executed it the next day), to do a flash mob of “U Can’t Touch This” in the library, which winds up causing no notable commotion. This is now one of the stupidest things I’ve ever repeatedly watched. At least Artie got a lead, which I believe is his first since “Dancin with Myself,” which broadcast back in November.

Wedged into all this ridiculousness is Sue filling in for Emma’s dead therapist, who convinces her to confront Will about fooling around with Shelby and April while he’s supposed to be figuring himself out so they can be together. Emma is convinced to call Will out in front of all the other teachers in the staff lounge, embarrassing him as revenge for his students doing the same to Sue.

Rachel has decided to enlist Puck’s help to make a music video of “Run Joey Run,” the first song in the show’s run that I’ve never heard of and whose original artist is just as unknown to me. Somehow, she thinks that what she’s putting together will make her seem naughty or nasty or... some fuckin thing, I don’t know, this is just getting even more stupid with every passing scene.

Turns out Sue’s “Physical” video has gone viral and Olivia Neuter John herself has called Ms Sylvester to shoot a remake music video for a rerecorded version of the song. This happens for no other reason than to soak up time in a completely absurd episode that I guess the writer (Ian Brennan) didn’t feel was disjointed and silly enough. When the Second Tier decides to tell Sue they leaked the tape to bolster their cred, she, of course, doesn’t even give a shit, much like me.

When time comes for Rachel to screen her video, Jesse and Finn look confused. So was I when they showed up in the video, too. Rachel triple-cast the part of the boyfriend in the clip and used footage from all three boys in the same role, making little sense both within the clip itself and the scene on a whole. Finn loses his shit and fronts Rachel off in front of the whole club, accusing her of using them to create an image of her as a girl with three guys fighting over her, which is not alluded to in the video at all. I get that she didn’t tell any of the guys she was using all of them for the shoot but for some reason, they all take it very very badly, as if it were an estimation of them as people. Finn and Jesse storm out of the room, all huffy.

In an effort to tie off this week’s “plot” as lazily as possible, Will (who has been half-ass interrogating the kids about the Glist), determines it had to be Quinn when he sees her being ignored and walked into in the hallway. And hey! He was right! Lil Quinnie (much more visibly pregnant) was feeling put upon and sad, so she wrote up the list to... oh, who cares? Nothing happens, no one gets expelled and Will gets to have an after-school-special chat with her.

"This episode was a total mess but what annoyed me the most was the complete disregard it had for the show’s continuity"

The episode wraps up with Jesse breaking up with Rachel and the latter singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” accompanied by Finn, Jesse and for a second there, Puck. This number was well performed, vocally, and was the only thing that really made sense within the episode’s illogical and silly narrative. That caveat, of course, is rendered meaningless by not only Finn walking out on Rachel before the song is over, but everyone in the club doing so. Ummm... why? To the rest of them, she was just doing her usual dumbass-Rachel shenanigans. Ugh. I give up.

This episode was a total mess but what annoyed me the most was the complete disregard it had for the show’s continuity (don’t treat us like we don’t fuckin' remember what happened two weeks ago - this isn’t Heroes) and for the relationships the first part of the season spent building, just to piss them away, negating the investiture of time and energy on the audience’s part to care about them, basically telling us “Thanks for the ratings, suckers! Now that we’ve already been greenlit for a second season, we can do whatever the fuck we want now!” and that’s rude.

Grade: D+

Songs

“Physical” - Olivia Newton John

“Ice Ice Baby” - Vanilla Ice

“U Can’t Touch This” - MC Hammer

“Run Joey Run” - David Geddes

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” - Bonnie Tyler

Random Observations

Quinn’s living arrangement - According to the Word of God, she’s now staying with Puck’s family. This hasn’t been addressed on the show, even though it was important enough to base an episode around in the first half of the season.

Cheerios uniforms - Ok, I know I harp on this, but it’s one of the show’s inconsistencies that I’m particularly annoyed by. So Brittana (as well as the other Cheerios) wear their uniforms constantly unless they’re directly involved in a costumed performance of a song, five days a week, without fail. Since their joining of the squad, Kurt and Mercedes followed this apparent edict as well, until halfway through this episode, where they’re wearing clothes their characters would actually have on, but Brittana are still in uniform. That shit just irks me.

Mike and Matt - Matt got totally shafted (no pun intended) this week, but Mike got to be in a couple two-shots early in the episode and dance during the absurd “Ice Ice Baby” number.

“Bad Reputation” - is a bitchin Joan Jett song.

Regionals - This is supposedly the big showdown with Vocal Adrenaline that will determine the club’s existence (until next season). They haven’t started rehearsing anything and the event itself is mentioned maybe once an episode. This happens in five episodes, time to get to work, guys.

Rachel’s music video - Sandy Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) makes a cameo as the girl’s shotgun-wielding father.

Great Lines

Brittany - I’ve been here since first period. I had a cold and I took all my antibiotics at the same time and now... I can’t remember how to leave.

Artie - You had me at “sex tape.”

Jesse - You know, before I transferred here to make you my girlfriend, I asked around about you - found out your rep, what kind of girl you were... Most of them had no idea who you were. The ones that did said you were kind of sneaky-hot but that that quality was cancelled out by a compulsive need to be right and a strange affinity for sweaters with animals on them.