Glee: "Rumours"

Season 2, Episode 19

On the risk of over-indulging in themes

“Looks like your group has got a case of the Mac”

-April Rhoads

Glee often causes us to ask the metaphysical question “What similarities exist between music and television?” Television, much like music can be turned when we want a change of mood. They can be either personal or processed by the hit-making machine. Both can move people. Both, in their greatest iterations are art. But one of the greatest similarities between the two is the idea of theme. Some of the best albums ever made – The Wall, Sandinista!, Pinkerton – all have a umbrella theme that connects all of the songs, and turns the album into a more cohesive, moving whole. The same goes for the best episodes of television – when the character go through similar situations within the same hour, it can add another layer of resonance to all the stories.

Yet adding an umbrella theme on top of all the other elements doesn’t make things better if all of the individual parts aren’t that great to start off with. Enter both “Rumours” and Rumours. Rumours is a great album, and a great example of how you don’t need a theme to make good art. “Rumours” is a middling episode of television, and yet another example of how trying to shoehorn in a theme can sometimes wreck an episode.

For this reason alone, the two never should have been paired up. I appreciate what the show is trying to do, both in exposing its younger audience in music that is both outside their knowledge and actually good, and in trying to center an episode by having it stay focused on one specific body of music, but Rumours isn’t the album to do that . No non-theme album is really, because once you take those songs out of their original setting, separate them with minutes of people talking - and in Glee’s case, rearrange the order and only use some of the track list – the songs lose that context and whatever meaning you had assigned to the album.

Now, sometime televisions could probably makes this work still be assigning a new theme based on the storyline and the song juxtaposition within that episode, but no surprise here Glee isn’t one of those kind of shows. What the show tried to here tonight was take an album from one of Fleetwood Mac’s tumultuous period and apply to a tumultuous time for the glee club. Yet despite the circumstances under which Rumours was made, that doesn’t really shine through on the record itself, so the pairing comes as quite a stretch.

Yet the show stuck to this theme, much to its detriment. The biggest hurdle once again seems to be buying into this new theme that the show had pulled out of thin air. I get that as teenagers, these characters would be susceptible to petty jealousy and easily swayed by the mere suggestions of rumors. Yet the glee club is also a group of outcast, banded together not just by their love of performance, but also out of mutual ostracism of the school body, so I can’t seem to swallow that they would turn on each other this much, that they would suddenly become so distrustful of these people that (as the show has told us many, many times by now) they actually love.

The second biggest problem with this episode was that it’s all predicated on a big, cartoony joke-premise hybrid. Sue (who is now such a cartoon herself that she can do a complete costume change in three seconds), all of a sudden wants to revive the school’s old tabloid, The Muckraker, in order to destroy the glee club, because apparently at this point, she is such a cartoony villain that now her master plans have to be convoluted as well. Terry decides to help because she wants the apartment back from Will. (Seriously?)

All that follows is meant, I think, to show the fragility of the group, to illustrate just how easily the group could fall apart. In another show, this could have been a good idea, but here is was just a mash-up of some of the plotlines that I couldn’t be bothered to care about. This show has bandied around so many relationships over the past few months, that I have just about given up caring about any of them, so filling this episode full of talk about current and past relationships for me was a bit of a non-starter.

Another non-starter for me was the idea that Will might leave McKinley, mostly because, well, I knew he wasn’t going to. Will is too good of a guy, so I never had any doubt that he would stay with the glee club. I like the idea that Will is unsatisfied with his current position, and I could see if this has been developed further, tapping into this dissatisfaction could have made for some good television. Yet this beat played background to the far less subtle question of whether not Will would stay, which means that the whole point became moot.

And try as I might, I also couldn’t care about Sam’s sudden poverty. I am happy that the show has finally given Sam an actual storyline, and much like Will’s plot, I can see how this could have been a good plotline, but it is held back by the fact that Sam isn’t really a character. He was introduced as a new romantic partner for Quinn, which was nice enough role, but then he quickly devolved into a stereotypical douche, and was never anything else until tonight.

Not only that, but there existed a disconnect between this and everything else that happened tonight. Not only is Sam’s poverty a much deeper, more serious issue than all of the petty jealousy the rest of the group was going through, but it also kind of goes against the show’s general aesthetic. Let me put it this way: If Dalton Academy is “Tolerance Narnia,” then McKinnely is “White-People Hogwarts,” a magical land where all of the kids (even the black girl and the Jew) only have to face White People Problems like relationships or winning a competition. Poverty isn’t a White Person Problem, and thus this development feels as if it belongs to an entirely different show.

The only plotline that I did like was the one that didn’t originate in this episode. We didn’t learn much about the Santana-Brittany relationship, there was a well-done scene her and Artie, one that confronted the ridiculous circumstance of their relationship while not under-selling the real feelings that they had for another. Yet that scene apparently also meant that the two are broken up, and now I’m just afraid that the show is going to completely undermine what was perhaps the show’s purest relationship in order to further the next plotline. But hey, that’s Glee for ya.

Next Week: Prom. I’ve got a bad feeling about this…

Quotes, Etc.:

Despite the quality of the episode, Fox did use the bold decision to air the Google Chrome/It’s Gets Better advertisement, which means a lot of eyeballs must have seen it.

“Lord Tubbington is allowed to eat cheese because he’s on Atkin’s.”

“It’s like an episode of Hart to Hart.” “No, it’s not fun or cool.”

“Oh how I miss you insanity.”

“You know, just because we’re doing this interview doesn’t mean I’m not mad at you. Because I know you started smoking again.”