Aaron throws away his 'must do better' stamp; it just doesn't cover how awful this pre-finale episode is...

Ok, I seriously don’t know what the hell to say about this episode. It somehow managed to be more disjointed and (despite a Queen song) less entertaining than last week. I care so little about writing this week’s review that I just spent the last half-hour looking at pictures of Heather Morris (Brittany) instead, but now I think I’m back on track.

As the weeks go by, and the episodes get dumber with greater frequency, I find myself with less to write about in the actual review portion and more to say in the Random Observations section. This week, basically everything I have to say seems to belong there. In fact, I’m struggling to actually write this recap since I honestly tuned out several times during the episode. I’m tempted to copy and paste the episode synopsis from Wikipedia and just get to the randomness since that’s the feeling I got from the episode as a whole: random idiocy and inanity.

The episode opens with Rachel beckoning the Second Tier to come to the auditorium for an “emergency meeting.” Don’t they have class to get to? Don’t they ever have class to get to? The big emergency turns out to be Vocal Adrenaline is on their stage, and they want to do a number to shake Nude Erections up. Don’t THEY have class to get to? At their own school?!? I know they all look thirty, but my barely functional suspension of disbelief keeps reminding me that they’re still in high school.

Jesse’s there, too, having transferred back to Carmel since the McKinley club didn’t seem to like him or take any of his advice. Ummm... I don’t recall him ever giving them any to ignore. This is what’s called an “informed action,” a kissing cousin to the “informed ability.” When something is supposed to have happened in order for it to have an effect on the plot but we’ve never seen it, someone has to tell us it happened in order for it to make sense. Do that once, ok; do it once in a while, I can forgive you; do it several weeks in a row or multiple times in a single episode and you just have lazy writers caught in an oh-shit-the-season-finale’s-right-around-the-corner-we-gotta-raise-the-stakes-by-making-up-some-total-bullshit-type problem.

They perform “Another One Bites the Dust,” which gets the glee kids all worried since it was “fantastic,” or at least they tell us it was; honestly, it wasn’t that great (more “informing”). They mope back to the choir room to find - gasp! - the room has been bog-rolled (a past-tense appropriation of a Britishism I’m going to use since the phrase “TP’d” is silly, childish and grammatically unsound). While cleaning the room up, they mope some more about how screwed they are when Sue enters to taunt and threaten them. She intends to make the choir room into her “trophy annex” after the glee kids lose at regionals and sets about planning for this until Will (in a move that would, in any reasonable school district, get him a reprimand, if not a suspension) violently destroys the trophy she’s brought with her. They dick-swing for a few seconds until the scene is mercifully over.

"Goddamn... a lot of people hate Terri; I didn’t until right now"

Will and Terri finalize their divorce, which makes them have sadfaces L. Terri, who was Will’s high school sweetheart, tells him, “You’re still that sixteen-year-old boy to me; you always will be,” and Will doesn’t punch her in the fuckin neck. On what planet is that supposed to be a compliment or a consolation or anything other than a thinly-veiled insult? Basically, she’s telling him that as far as she’s concerned, he’s not a grown man - he’s still a gawky sophomore whose only had sex with one girl in his whole life and he always will be. Goddamn... a lot of people hate Terri; I didn’t until right now.

Will wants to get some kind of revenge on Vocal Adrenaline, so Puck and Finn take it upon themselves to slash the tires of all two dozen of the group’s members. This proves easy, since they all drive identical black 2010 Range Rovers. Wait, are you serious? Twenty-four $25,000 vehicles explained away as coming from boosters? That’s $600,000. Horseshit!

Figgins wants to expel them for having committed a felony, I assume because it happened on the grounds of a school. Look, he can’t expel them on his own, on a whim - it takes a hell of a lot of time and effort, including a committee hearing, to completely derail a student’s entire future; it’s not like firing them from a job. Jesus Christ, does anyone who writes for this show think about anything before their fingers hit the keys?

In order to avoid being expelled, Finn and Puck offer to get jobs and pay for the damages. Within a month. They destroyed $19,000 worth of tires (four tires per vehicle times twenty-four times $200 per tire), they couldn’t make that much selling their asses in a month on street corners in Cleveland, let alone in a year at the jobs they wind up with. Wait, what happened to the job Rachel threatened Vork into giving Finn in “Wheels?” Did that just evaporate along with any other aspect of the characters’ continuity that doesn’t directly effect what’s happening on screen right this second?

"I’m eight minutes into the episode and I’m already frustrated enough to stop watching"

I’m eight minutes into the episode and I’m already frustrated enough to stop watching.

Will tries to buy some weed from Sandy, who refuses to sell it to him for fear that if depressed people get high, they’ll kill themselves. He obviously doesn’t know the effects of the drug he’s peddling. Anyway, he’s really here to “inform” Will of Vocal Adrenaline’s weakness: they can’t perform funk numbers. Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

I’m gonna go ahead and skip to the end of the episode since the total and overwhelming absurdity of this is making my brain retreat towards the back of my skull and the resultant pressure on my visual cortex is making it hard to see through all the awful. After much ridiculousness, including Finn and Puck getting jobs at Sheets-N-Things under the command of Terri (who takes a shine to Finn), Will seducing Sue in order to disrupt her unceasing bullying and Quinn singing a James Brown song with a half-dozen nine-month-pregnant dancers moving much too fluidly behind her, Nude Erections sings “Give Up the Funk,” making Vocal Adrenaline shit their pants in fear.

Why would that make even the slightest bit of difference? Even if, for some inexplicable reason, a group of people that changes annually somehow had a funk deficiency yet still manages to pull in win after win at the national level, what difference could that possibly make? Why does this matter at ALL? Are funk songs Kryptonite to judges at the sectional level? Do they just hand first prize over to whatever school performs something by George Clinton? That’s the only way I could conjure that Carmel’s glee club would be at all worried about McKinley’s chances, given the 40:1 odds against them (Sue checked with a Vegas bookie - they make odds for everything, apparently). This is the resolution to the A-plot of the episode and it doesn’t make any sense!

"Did Ian Brennan think “I want to write a funk episode! Oops, now I have to try and have it make sense... Oh wait - no, I don’t!”"

What, exactly, is the point of this? Did Ian Brennan think “I want to write a funk episode! Oops, now I have to try and have it make sense... Oh wait - no, I don’t!” I just went back and read my review of “Bad Reputation,” also written by Brennan, and I’m finding the same major problems. To quote myself: “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.” Replace “string of bad songs from the bargain CD bin” with “motley collection of soul and R&B-esque covers” and it could be the same review.

I didn’t go into this review or episode knowing Brennan wrote it; I looked that up right when I started writing the previous paragraph. That he also wrote the other exceptionally shitty entry in the show’s canon marks the beginning of a trend, which, with any luck, won’t develop next season when the friction caused by the sheer amount of terrible ideas in his brain causes it to self-immolate over the summer, saving us from having to sit through another hour of this hack’s absurd nonsense.

Next week is the season finale. Maybe, with any luck, I won’t feel like an asshole for recommending this show to everyone I know based on the strength and quality of the first thirteen episodes, which was mercilessly incinerated by several of the back nine.

Grade: D

Songs

“Another One Bites the Dust” - Queen

“Loser” - Beck

“Tell Me Something Good” - Rufus

“Good Vibrations” - Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch

“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” - James Brown

“Give Up the Funk” - Parliament

Random Observations

Nationals - If sectionals happened in December, right before winter break/midseason hiatus and regionals happens in May, at the end of the school year/season finale, when are nationals? Between seasons?

“Clinically Depressed” - A phrase that gets thrown around a bit this week. None of these morons are clinically depressed, they’re just dumb. Then again, it’s being thrown around by morons, so maybe it’s overuse is understandable.

Quinn’s performance - I like Dianna Agron’s voice; it’d be nice if they could find a song it really worked with.

Money - Glee has none, but I saw a $5000 Roland V-Session electronic drum kit.

Quinn and Mercedes - Their friendship should be heartwarming, but the individual conversations are horrifyingly twee and mid-eighties after-school-special-ly.

Will is a Spanish teacher - why wasn’t the entire conversation he had with Sue’s housekeeper in Spanish?

Mike and Brittany - I want to see them dance with each other while the rest stay the hell out of the way.

Great Lines

Quinn - (her regret) Thinking “trust me” was a sensible birth control option.

Mercedes - Let’s be honest, when white people try to be funky, you end up with KC and the Sunshine Band. Artie - I love “Boogie Shoes!”

Brittany - (disheveled, pulling on blogger-Jew’s arm) Please? Please love me! Please?