Cory Monteith turns 29 today. You heard me. That means that there are now two glee club members who are pushing thirty.
Apologies to not publishing “live” reviews of the past two episodes, Born this Way and Rumours. My very brief thoughts on both follow.
Born This Way: A Brad Falchuk episode that made me lose some faith in Brad Falchuk. Returns like the one they gave Kurt usually are saved for astronauts returning from the Moon, not characters who have been featured throughout the entire season. Santana’s becoming a more interesting character, which I can get behind. Saying that the only reason Quinn is stupidly ambitious concerning her popularity is because she used to be unattractive and unpopular is the laziest kind of character development possible, and I can’t say that with enough bile. I guess that’s what you get when you’re ignorant enough to think that “Born This Way” is an anthem of complete tolerance.
Rumours: A Ryan Murphy episode, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that it was a themed episode. But I think we’ve finally found a way to structure theme episodes: by album. Trying to take on an artist’s entire oeuvre (The Power of Madonna, Britney/Brittany) or saying that all the song have to have a specific word in them (Hell-O, Home) generates some stupidity. But when all of the songs are performance based and come from a very set location, like a single album, then it can work. And it worked for Rumours. Poverty was handled relatively well, with little condescension (though Glee remains a firmly classist show: look at Kurt’s dialogue in any given episode or the lyrics to “Loser Like Me”). Ryan Murphy has done more to feature Chord Overstreet, between Comeback and Rumours, than any other writer. And to me, the biggest story of the second half of the season has been Murphy’s renaissance. He started off the season with two of Glee’s worst episodes, Britney/Brittany and The Rocky Horror Glee Show, but in the second half, he did one of Glee’s best episodes ever, Silly Love Songs, and Rumours, which definitely ranks as one of the best episodes of the second season.
All right, with that out of the way, Prom Queen.
0:00–This episode was written by that so-and-so, Ian Brennan.
0:35–The Jacob ben Israel reporting is a Brennan hallmark. Fellow addictive Glee watchers will remember that it showed up for the first time in Audition, another Brennan episode, where he reported on “Glee’s big gay summer.” I like Jacob’s character. He’s spread thin sometimes (as a heckler in A Night of Neglect, for example, I didn’t care for him: in Showmance and Preggers, where he’s a creepy Rachel Berry-obsessed blogger, he’s fantastic), but on the whole, he’s useful, which is more than you can say for some other characters.
1:21–Yeah, Puck’s not been the same since he originally lost his mohawk. I dunno. I don’t really mind. If you’re going to take a severe anti-bullying stance the way they did from Never Been Kissed on, you can’t really make one of your go-to characters a bully and expect us to like him. Glee desperately wants you to like pretty much every character on the show for one reason or another, and they had to think of a reason for us to like Puck without noting the bully contradiction…so they neutered him.
1:31–Anyone else been horny with grief recently?
1:43–I go to school about 700 miles away from home, so I don’t often get to watch Glee with my family. But I did get to watch with my father and my two brothers (Michael recently posted here about twelve covers he likes better than the original, go check that out). At the mention of Air Supply, we had a two minute debate about whether or not Air Supply was behind “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” or “Making Love Out of Nothing At All.” Turns out it’s the latter. The former is by Cutting Crew.
You’re welcome.
2:30–Somewhere, Iqbal Theba and Sofia Vergara are comparing notes.
2:48–”Run Joey Run” is a bad song, but I confess that I’ve never quite understood Glee’s obsession with how bad it is.
2:55–I took careful notes on this little segment. I’m planning a list of my favorite songs from Glee, and “Hair/Crazy in Love” will probably not be in contention because it was supposed to be bad. Spoiler alert, my least favorite is “The Boy Is Mine.” It was just godawful.
3:04–As we remember, Will put “BUTT CHIN” on his Born This Way shirt. Putting “BUTT CHIN” on your Born This Way shirt and saying that’s the number one thing you don’t like about yourself is like putting “GINGER” on your Born This Way shirt. If I were in charge of his shirt, I probably would have given him Puck’s.
Yep! That's the one!
3:13–Sam walks by. Lauren says that she might need to make her own prom dress. The response from Brittany: “Don’t, you’ll seem poor.” Yeah, last week’s episode taught us a whole heap.
3:35–Sam reflected a popular sentiment just now…
3:40–That might be first joke I’ve ever seen on Glee that took close to a minute of gestation time. As we know from my impeccable time keeping skills (I more or less make up about half of these times, actually, keep that under your hat), they couldn’t quite wait a minute. But it was good. Well done Glee.
4:01–Mercedes has apparently forgotten that handy lesson she learned in A Night of Neglect that not being a diva every moment of the day has some perks. Both episodes, brought to you from the fecund mind of Ian Brennan.
Ha, I kill me.
4:13–”All your dates are belong to us.”
4:50–The last black Cinderella was Brandi. Trust me, Mercedes, no matter how bad it gets, you don’t want to be her. I’ve never seen anyone before or since who sang only using her nose.
5:07–Well, in Ian Brennan’s world, yes. In our world, prom is about one-upping one’s peers through important lenses such as “makeup,” “coiffures,” and “clothes.”
5:22–Is his surname not Anderson anymore?
6:33–
Of all the Breadstix in all the towns in all of Western Ohio, he's crazy about that asshole.
6:59–That little chuckle of Sam’s was absolutely the funniest part of the episode.
7:32–I’m not really sure when this happened, but Sam turned into a genuinely decent human being. He’s a long way removed from trying to seduce Quinn into becoming the most popular guy in school.
7:48–Heather Morris looks like Tinker Bell, except not a straight up slut. Seriously, on the list of things that Daddy doesn’t want his little girl to turn into, Tink is between “Vivica A. Fox in Independence Day” and “common prostitute.”
Unless, of course, "Daddy" is what you call Walt Disney.
8:41–”We’re all so surprised that you’re going with Blaine, because the two of you are going out and because both of you are out of the closet and proud of it!”
9:01–Second Altamont reference in Glee’s history. Maybe they’d feel more original to me if I just watched these episodes once or twice like everybody else.
9:37–”Lovable but dangerous miscreant” provoked a good reaction from the family. That was my older brother’s favorite part of the episode. My dad’s reaction: “Does he know those words?”
10:20–The Puck/Artie relationship is definitely one of the odder ones that we see on Glee, but I like it a lot. There’s a fun contrast between the two of them, and Mark Salling and Kevin McHale seem to enjoy playing it up.
10:26–A few months back, my older brother sent me a video of Adele singing “Rolling in the Deep” and bet me that Mercedes would sing it before the end of the season. Turns out it wasn’t her, but props.
12:45–I admit, I’ve never really been a big Jesse fan. His presence always indicated something stupid was going on plotwise. Either he was helping Rachel figure out that Shelby was her mother (which to this day I maintain was the dumbest thing going on in the first season) or he was in some weird menage a troi concerning Rachel. I loved having him around for his vocals (“Hello” was fantastic), but they’ve never been able to fold him in adequately.
13:51–Like that scene. Killer song, no conception of how to make the character fit in.
14:16–Right, he broke up with you when you cheated on him for the sole purpose of trying to make him jealous. Are we all supposed to forget about that?
14:17–Well, Finn appears to have forgotten that little detail.
14:29–This “Finchel” thing has been screwed up immensely. Let’s have a brief refresher, because Glee is a wildly ahistorical show and I fear we may have forgotten some details. In the first season, Finn and Rachel had an under-the-table attraction while Finn and Quinn were dating. Finn was attracted to Rachel because of her talent and her compassion, and Rachel admired Finn’s straightforward quest to become a better human being. When Finn learned that Quinn was pregnant by Puck and not him, he dumped her and found Rachel eagerly waiting for him. However, she was rather too eager (read: clingy) and he broke up with her almost immediately. Rachel quickly fell into Jesse’s arms, but their relationship was tempestuous and short-lived due to mutual failings. Finn and Rachel get back together prior to losing at Regionals, and they move along with relatively few hitches until Rachel finds out that Finn and Santana had mated while Rachel and Jesse were together. Rachel immediately cheats on Finn with Puck, Finn reacts in an understandably unhappy fashion and dumps Rachel. Rachel spends the rest of the second season trying to get Finn away from Quinn, who had previously been perfectly happy with Sam.
This is a stupidly convoluted trail, and that’s because the writers at Glee like to play with the different sexual relationships of their characters the way that mad scientists play with explosive chemicals and Tesla coils. Attempts to get Finn and Rachel back together have been stale for a while now, and that’s saying something. It always comes back to The Office when we talk about drawn-out relationships. Here’s a brief refresher of Jim and Pam until they get hitched.
Jim likes Pam, but Pam is engaged to warehouse worker Roy. Jim spends most of the first and second seasons crazy about Pam. Pam seems to like Jim a lot, but she’s scared of change and can’t reject Roy outright until she admits to him that she and Jim kissed once. Roy flips the hell out, and Jim and Pam seem golden. But then Jim gets caught up with a new office worker, Karen, but they fight a lot and Jim understands that it’s because he still likes Pam. The two of them get together (quietly) and stay together without too much drama before getting married.
See how simple that was? Jim has an unrequited thing for Pam for two season, Pam has one for Jim for one, they’re together and stay together after that. The many people who have written for The Office seem to understand that when you have a special toy, you don’t want to love it so much that you break it. Glee’s writers have no such restraint or conception of patience.
16:00–One of my favorite moments from middle school involved the naming of pronouns. One kid, for God only knows what reason, suggested “egg.” We made fun of him until we graduated from high school. That’s what this reminds me of.
16:24–I miss that Kurt.
16:50–It was about a baby, Mercedes, but as Roland Barthes tells us, the Author is dead!
16:57–Learn how to play guitar, guys. You never know when you’ll have to back up a brother for his prom proposal.
17:10–Every person in that classroom who is nameless is an attractive young woman. Yay for future hausfraus!
17:28–Chord Overstreet was just on fire this entire episode.
18:16–Is it sad that Brittany is the most liberated woman on this show? That’s an honest question, I haven’t decided yet.
18:31–And that’s Ian Brennan for you. A fun sequence that had something for everybody: Brittany being incapable of figuring out eggs, Kurt being a blissful gay stereotype, a good song. And then it’s ruined with this overwrought emotional bullshit. What purpose does that serve?
19:20–The evolution of Finn as truly accepting is complete. At least until the writers decide “whatever, this is boring, let’s make him out-of-character intolerant again.”
19:42–No one’s worn tails and a top hat since Marlene Dietrich did it in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film, Morocco.
20:33–As usual, Burt Hummel is the sole voice of practicality on this show. Of course Kurt should be allowed to wear anything he wants to prom, whether it’s his gay Braveheart outfit or one of Sue’s track suits. But when you leave your school for a couple months because a kid wants to kill you for your homosexuality, doesn’t it seem practical to wear a tux? I mean, for your own personal safety, doesn’t that make some kind of sense?
21:19–”I could’ve just hated you when you were bullying me, but I’m the second coming of Jesus, and I’m better than all of you.”
22:46–
23:35–Sam’s such a dork. I love it.
No five dollar milkshakes at Breadstix, apparently.
24:22–Well, judging from the preview, we know there’s at least one…
24:45–That’s who I’ve been meaning to compare her to all this time.
26:10–Why they decided to do the majority of this song is beyond me. It was catchy for the first twenty seconds, but there was no earthly reason to make that last two and a half minutes…
27:29–I like you guys, and I’m going to admit this because we’re all friends here. Ever since I switched over to iTunes in early March, “Jar of Hearts” is my fourteenth most played song. Feels good to get that off my chest.
28:51–When you make it that sledgehammer clear that Rachel’s singing this song to Finn, it’s fair for us to go back in time and remember what their first kiss was. Oh, that’s right, it started with Rachel saying, “You can kiss me if you want to.”
29:20–”Prom! Where all your wildest dreams come true!”
29:45–I love that shot.
30:06–Puck knows all sorts of things in this episode.
33:07–That was a very special fight. Really, how many times do you have to shove the other guy before you can work yourself up for a punch?
33:50–…Shane Oman!
34:32–No self-respecting principal lets that one happen…but Glee occurs in an alternate universe, so we’ll let that one slide.
35:17–Nice of you to include Blaine in your ignorance, Kurt.
35:26–Well, that’s not an allusion…
35:54–I tried to find a better quality version of this clip, and since I’m not going to type this whole thing out, y’all are stuck with this. Just know that the gay fellow who got voted prom king at my own junior prom gave this speech verbatim.
36:53–Kurt, that would be a much more stirring sentiment if you hadn’t already made it very clear in front of everyone that they could, indeed, touch you.
37:32–Rachel, when you start by defining Quinn via her appearance, you prove her point. She’s got plenty to be terrified of.
38:23–Brittany is not also the most liberated woman on this show, she’s also the best person on this show. Go figure.
40:14–I like that they brought Brad to prom, too. He’s become almost omnipresent as the Old Testament God.
42:39–Oof. It was a decent episode overall. Ian Brennan has as much subtlety as the Exxon Valdez and his dialogue is similarly messy, but the episode itself was okay.
“Daddy flight, save your auxiliary tanks.”
