Glee: "Born This Way"

Season 2, Episode 18

Were those last 30 minutes really that freakin’ Gleekin’?

I feel like I should explain my “process” for my reviews, as it were. I have class Tuesday nights, which means I miss the first run of Glee, and I am forced to watch the episode through other means and because I choose to write about other Tuesday night shows as well, I have to put off my Glee reviews till the next morning. However, this Tuesday was different; though I was mad about having to go back to class – we had the past two weeks off to work on a paper, and we were meeting just to go over our rough drafts, so it felt like a waste to me – I figured I could probably still get home at a decent enough time that I would be able to procure an copy of the episode and watch and write a review before I had to go to bed. Except that this episode was 50% longer, which means everything got knocked back, and I would have to watch the episode next morning as usual – but I would have to get up even earlier to do so. Except that I had to go in early for TA business, and that meant putting off watching and reviewing until early this afternoon. Long story short, those extra minutes better be worth the trouble they caused me.

I know that such thinking may seem unfair – how dare I let my feelings about other things spill over onto the show? – but I would have felt something along these lines even if I had been able to watch the episode live. I get this feeling just about every time there’s and “extended” episode of a show, and apart from saw the extended pilots on USA or FX, I usually feel like this extra time are just unnecessary. (The most recent example that I can think of were those two 90 minutes Sons of Anarchy episodes that aired last fall, which were good, but probably could have been done in the standard hour length.)

All of this is to say that I have no fucking idea – apart from maybe competing with other networks – why anyone thought expanding an episode of Glee was a smart move. Given the show’s structure – at its worst, it’s really just a loosely connected bunch of random plot points that are meant to shuffle us along to the next profit-turning cover of a hit song – there are many times when a large part of a regular-length episode feels like a waste. In short, Glee, unlike say Sons of Anarchy, hasn’t proven itself worthy of the extra airtime.

Yet while I think the extra air time here was used as well as it could have been, it was certainly better than I was expecting. But before we get to that, and in order to talk about why the extra time wasn’t used well, we have to talk about the things that did work – and worked well.

“I’m very ashamed of who I am…and what I’ve done.”

-Karafski

The idea of accepting oneself for who you are isn’t exactly the most original plot, but it’s one that’s fitting for the show, or at least my favorite version of it, which sees the characters covering up their mostly sad lives with the uplifting nature of music. (And it certainly makes more sense than last week’s theme of rejection. I may not buy that these kids aren’t rejects anymore, but I do buy that they’ve been kept down enough in their lives to make them feel insecure about themselves.) I’m actually surprised the show hasn’t done this plot before. But even if they did – my memory of the show is a little hazy, most likely due to the large amount of random plot points that we’ve seen throughout the years – they’vr never done it as well as they did it here.

Sure, there was a lot of plot machinations in the beginning to get to where the show went – suddenly all the kids aren’t that great at dancing, which leads to Rachel breaking her nose (which she is suddenly ashamed of); suddenly Santana straight-up admits that she’s a lesbian; suddenly Lauran and Santanna want to run for prom queen against Quinn – but I tend to forgive Glee for these convoluted send-ups when the result works, as it (mostly) did here.

I think the most powerful storyline, and the one that I’m sure all the kids are talkin’ ‘bout, is the return of Kurt. Though his return seemed to threaten to take over the whole episode (and made for some weird act breaks), I, like the glee club am I happy that he’s back, and we got to see that powerful scene in Figgin’s office both between the parents and then just Kurt and Karafski. More important than anything else – thanks mostly to Santana’s Lady Macbethian ways – is the fact that none of this felt like a cheat, and even though the turnaround was perhaps a bit too quick, I actually do feel like Karafski has changed, or is likely to in the near future.

As for Santana herself, I don’t think we’re quite done with this plot yet, so I’ll hold my tongue till it’s a little more played out, but I found tonight’s scenes to be fairly good, even if I think her sudden admittance to being completely gay erases what could have been a more nuances take for this arc, one where she has to discover whether is gay or bisexual. Or maybe I’m just mad because I think this move simplifies gender/sexual politics too much. That’s probably it.

Rachel’s storyline was a bit more problematic, mostly because a) it hinged on a heretofore unknown insecurity and b) there was never any real doubt that she wouldn’t go through with the nose job. So most of her actions tonight felt a bit perfunctory – even if the “Barbara Streisand” number was kinda fun to watch (as was Finn’s number, now that I think about it) – and the love triangle aspect felt a bit forced here, especially considering that nothing came of it by the end of the hour. But as a impetus, as a way to start the theme off tonight, it worked well enough (at least as well as such things can on this show) and luckily it was light enough that the better stories could take over the hour.

“This is who I am. This is who I’m supposed to be.”

-Emma

For once, I didn’t totally hate the adult’s subplot, though I have to admit, it was mostly because Will got to act like a total dick. The scene where Will confronts Emma about her unwillingness to do something about her illness was a dark one, the kind of scene that the show does best, and with two other such scenes tonight, the reason this episode worked well for most of its running time. Though I doubt that this will suddenly make the rebudding romance between the two actually interesting, it was interesting to see Emma and Will as the flawed characters that they are, and not just serve as enablers for the kids.

But I do have a problem with the ending of her story. My mental health professionals will tell you that people who are on medication for a medical disorder are still “themselves,” that’s there is not lying or trickery involved with being on meds. I agree with this statement. Yet within the context of this episode, which deal with Santana and Karafski hiding who they are, and Quinn running from her past, it almost makes it seem as if Emma taking those meds is an equivalent move, as if she is hiding her true self, even this means that she is also accepting that she has a problem. I’m sure the show didn’t mean for such a message to come across, but the debate over what taking these kind of drugs means is still a sticky one, and I think it would have been better if the show had sidestepped this issue altogether, perhaps saving the pills for another episode.

“I have a warped sense of the world.”

-Quinn

Since I saves this for last, I’m sure you can deduce that this was the really sticking point of the episode for me. At first, when Quinn was singing the duet with Rachel, I thought that her apparent sadness was over how she was “perfect” on the outside, yet unhappy on the inside, was going to serve as her episode arc, kind of like how Santana and Karafski’s fake relationship might get them through the school day, but it leaves them feeling empty on the inside. Because the idea of accepting who you are in order to be truly happy is another trite sentiment that gels well with this show.

But then they have to go and fuck it up, didn’t they? Why, in a episode about accepting who you are, did the show suddenly have to have Quinn feel bad about being ugly in the past, and more importantly, why did the show seem to laugh at her for it? (It doesn’t help that all of this was revealed by Lauren, the meanest – or at least most cartoonish - of all the glee kids). I get that this was supposed to be about accepting who you are, a la Lauren, but it just felt weird, and the “Lucy Caboosy” twist was out of nowhere. The show had something that it could have worked with, and then threw it away for a joke that made far less sense.

Yet despite the missteps in Quinn’s storyline, and the lengthy, unnecessary padding out of Rachel’s nose job and Kurt’s return, this episode worked, far more than any episode since “Silly Little Love Songs.” I can’t say for sure that this hour would have been better at only an hour long – because knowing this show, they might have cut out the good parts or something equally offensive – but it certainly felt like it at times. Yet the extra half hour (really only fifteen minutes after commercials) can’t be called a total waste, and for a show as problematic as this one, that seems like a big enough victory as is.

Quotes, Etc.:

One of the few good things about writing my post later than most other critics is I can peruse their opinions ahead of time, and get a general sense of what they thought, though I never read whole reviews ahead of time in order to remain spoiler free. This week, I got to see some pretty funny opening sentences, including Myles McNutt’s self-defeated “Why?” and Ryan Murphy’s spot on assessment, “Admit it: when you saw that this week’s “Glee” was supersized, you either jumped for joy or jumped off the nearest ledge.”

“It’s like a rite of passage for Jewish girls.”

“Self-hatin’ Asian.”

“Warts and all…especially warts.”

“I really prefer ‘neat freak’ or ‘cleaning bug.’”

“I love this lesson.”

“I am both repulsed and impressed by her Lady Macbethian ways.”

 “Legend has it when I came out of my mom I told the nurse she was fat.”