Glee - "Extraordinary Merry Christmas"

Season 3, Episode 9

“Best. Christmas. Ever.”

Early on in tonight’s episode, some of the students began to talk about how last Christmas was a terrible time for the club, and that they should do everything in their power to make this Christmas a happy on. Regular readers of this blog and/or people with great taste in television will have undoubtedly noticed that this plot almost exactly mirrors a similar plot point in last week’s Community. I’m not usually one to compare shows against each other, as I prefer to judge shows based on their own merits. However, Glee kept comparing itself to other shows so much that I couldn’t ignore this fact, especially when Glee started comparing itself to well, itself.

I’m going to start with the obvious centerpiece of tonight’s episode, the in-show Christmas special made by the glee club, not only because it’s the part of the episode that will define it in the public consciousness, it’s also the most problematic aspect of the entire episode. Now, the idea of having the show do a spot-on homage to the television specials of the 1950s is a good one, and given that other shows have used the same idea to great effect (and as part of a holiday episode, no less), I applaud Glee for doing something that seems so bold by their standards. Glee is usually about the big and flashy, and while this was certainly attention grabbing, it was also about restrained showmanship, which is very antithetical to this show’s ideology. (I’m also surprised that the show stuck with one idea through two whole acts, given it usually suffers from the television equivalent of ADHD.)

But I’m not really sure if the show stuck the landing enough to make it work. While the core of the idea was good, like just about everything that this show touches, it got bogged down by a mass of competing ideas. For starters, the fact that a special that was meant to evoke the 1950s included a gay couple living together and a black girl feels a little off. Now, this is the 21^st century, and we are a more evolved society that no longer ostracizes minorities (or so I like to believe), so it’s not that I think Artie was wrong for planning the special as he did, and I in fact applaud his progressive mindedness. But the dichotomy between what the special was meant to evoke and what was one screen was stark but received so little comment that I can’t be sure how much of that was intentional on Artie’s part, and what was the writers not realizing how strange this all looked.

Of course, I realize that there was a laugh track to the thing, and that a laugh was set by Artie right after Blaine’s joke that (within the special anyways) he and Kurt were meant to be seen as roommates, but I don’t think that that joke matched with the soundtrack went far enough in clearing up whether Artie was trying to upend the sexual politics of 1950s. And even if wasn’t, are we really supposed to believe that whichever Lima residents that tuned in wouldn’t have figured out that these were two gay kids at the center of the program? And that they wouldn’t have protested the special when they found out? (Remember, Kurt’s sexuality is well-known enough that somebody was able to call up Burt’s body shop and insult him back in season one.)

And speaking of the laugh track, god was that annoying. Again, I get that that’s part of the special’s throwback nature, but I think it was turned up to much that it felt more forced than anything. (For a good example of this is done, see Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special from a few years back. Of course there, it probably helped that the jokes were actually funny.) And then there’s the fact that this was supposedly being broadcasted live, which means that a good portion of those camera angles/jumps wouldn’t have been possible, and neither would the canned laughter. And then there’s the fact that we’re supposed to believe that Artie actually liked the Star Wars Christmas Special, which is hated by anyone who’s ever seen it. And How did that fancy set only cost $800? Shit, I pretty sure it cost more than that to process black-and-white film these days. And lastly, why would a program on PUBLIC TELEVISION need to cut to a commercial?

(Sorry. That was just a little list-y right then. And while all of those are little complaints individually, added together they create a giant, illogical mess of a segment.)

The special also marked the return of Glee’s song-heavy approach to episodes, where it just throws a bunch of musical numbers at us and hopes that we don’t notice that the cost is a loss of a coherent plot. Now, I realize that this takes place within the in-show Christmas special, so that could just be Artie again aping those plotless specials of the past, but this episode made it really hard to differentiate between which creative decisions were Artie’s, and which were those of the writers and director. It’s quite possible that Artie was their stand in for this episode (and the more I write about this, the more convinced I am that that is indeed the case), and if that’s the case, then that means that the show has just given up on that whole promise to cut back on songs this season, and that just pisses me off. (I mean, I think we all remember how the back half of season one over-relied on songs, and that its quality suffered for it, right?)

And then there’s the way that the special ended, but in order to talk about that, we’re going to have to back up and talked about the rest of the episode. Now, it’s normal for shows like this to use their large, aesthetic-breaking set pieces to comment on and/or forward the ongoing storylines, but this is Glee, and we’re used to scenes not being connected together by silly things like plot or theme. And so, after a great deal of plotless, shallow posturing, the special (and the episode along with it) takes a sharp left turn as Rory pulls a Linus and teaches the glee club about the True Meaning of Christmas (read: the Biblical story of Christ’s birth).

Now, this scene was not without its context (insofar as Glee is actually able to provide context). Rory, because Damian McGinty is contractually obligated to have another song/plotline, misses his family back home and sings “Blue Christmas”. This, for whatever reason, causes Sam to reach out and offer to let Rory accompany him as he spreads cheer through volunteer work, and they strike up a rapport. This of course means that they have to have a falling out and reconcile within the same episode, because this is Glee, after all.

I get that Glee is a world in which emotional changes are frequent and rapid, so I don’t particularly begrudge the show for following through on that formula here, even if it felt like they were creating drama for nothing. But given the fact that said drama had to factor into the Christmas special, which up until that point had been relatively (and probably purposely) plotless, it felt like the show was trying to overreach the original goal of the segment, which was to merely ape the TV specials of the past. I know I said above that the show appeared to be using the segment to further the ongoing plots, and I believe that’s true as well. I guess what I’m really saying is that the special tried to be both of these things. It spent so much time with so many characters doing things that had no bearing on the rest of the episode that when it suddenly tries to pretend as if it was connected the plot this whole time, it’s jarring. Much like Artie smashing 50s era- and Star Wars-themed Christmas specials together, it’s a juxtaposition that makes no sense.

And that’s a shame because there was a kernel of a good idea here when Sam stood up to Artie and proclaimed that Christmas wasn’t just about the happy endings, but also the sadness that some people feel around the holidays, which makes sense in a number of ways. First off, it’s a true observation for the show to make, even if it’s not a universal experience. Second, it fits it with that theory that Glee is actually a show about sadness hidden beneath layers of manufactured happiness. And third, making Sam the character who stands up for the idea gives the plot development a semi-legitimate starting point (given that Sam was, ya know, poor like five months ago), even if the idea is never really developed. It becomes mostly a way to create friction between Sam and Rory (who only met last week, mind you) and that friction was quickly resolved by episode’s end. So just so we’re clear, Glee took a rich aspect of human experience and used it to create so false drama. That’s just great.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only stretched connection that the show tried to make, and as things got even trickier, that whole “Glee being self-referential” thing comes into play. Early on in the episode we see Sue cajoling Artie, Kurt, and Blaine into assisting at the local homeless shelter, and before the audience could even respond that that makes no sense, the characters are there to do it for us, as suddenly the show decides to remember that these character have lives that exists beyond a single episode. And it didn’t stop there. Suddenly Tina became an exposition machine, as she recounted all the things from the last Christmas episode that we would rather just forget, like Artie getting robotic legs and Sue dressing up as the Grinch.

But you know what? None of that mattered. It’s one of those rare times that the show remembers its continuity, and it in no way had any effect on the episode that we saw. Artie suddenly didn’t decide that he wanted to walk again. Sue didn’t come up with another plan to ruin the glee club’s Christmas. And it’s not like the group needed to talk about last Christmas being all sorts of terrible in order to want this Christmas to be a happy one – that’s just the default setting of most people when it comes to the holidays.

Frankly, the show probably could have just decided that Sue was interested in helping the homeless now, because that’s the kind of show that this is, and the show using her sister’s death to rationalize her actions YET AGAIN has just become a matter of diminishing returns. Regardless, the end result still would have been just as a muddled, because the episode failed to properly build whatever tension there was supposed to be between Sue and the glee club. Now really, this plot should have been about how terrible the kids were acting that they would place filming a TV special over helping the homeless, but the show wasn’t really willing to play that angle, mostly because it needed us buying the fact that this special they were making was so awesome, and the knowledge that they had to be selfish dicks in order for it to get made would have taken away from that fantasy. So instead we had to settle for Sue being upset with the club, which also didn’t work, because why should the fact that the woman who’s been nothing but mean to them for two and a half seasons make anybody feel bad about the club’s choice?

So the show was left with one other recourse in Rachel, and it’s here that the show’s sudden remembrance of continuity becomes a liability. Look, Rachel’s Jewish. This has been a part of her characterization since the beginning. It’s why she and Puck dated. It’s also why she looks up to Barbara Streisand. So for the show to forget that, when it’s in the middle of remembering everything else, is pretty egregious. I mean, it’s not like this was a problem that couldn’t have been fixed by some simple rewriting. Change those 5 gifts to 8, make it because Rachel’s celebrating Hanukkah, and boom, problem solved. Instead we got some last minute ADR that did nothing to fix the problem.

But that’s not even the worse part. No, the worse part of Rachel’s plot was that she had to continue Glee’s line of not-so-casual misogyny playing out the “selfish bitch” type, and it was just incredibly annoying, to the point that I couldn’t see why Finn would jump through all those hoops to find her the perfect gift, let alone still be dating her by the episode’s end. I get that this was supposed to run parallel to the glee club’s refusal to feed the homeless, but the connection wasn’t made strongly enough until the end when Rachel’s new found sense of charity came after the glee club assisted in feeding the homeless, and by that point we had forgotten all about it because, you know, the TV special. (Damn, that TV special just fucked up the whole episode, didn’t it?)

But none of the above, as awful as some of it was, was as bad as the worse thing in the episode: The glee club singing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to a bunch of homeless people. Look, it’s a pretty cheesy song to start off with, but to have the kids sing it at the homeless shelter was just the highest level of offensive/oblivious, especially when you factor in the fact that they only showed up because the last ten minutes of their program got cut. (Well, minus Sam and Quinn who were already there. When did Quinn decide to stop acting so shitty? Cause I would have liked to see that.) Exactly what were those last ten minutes of the special going to look like Artie/Glee? Because last time I checked, an Irish man dressed as an elf reading Bible stories is a pretty logical stopping point.

Oh fuck it. You don’t know, because this was an episode without any sort of fucking plan. And that was its ultimate downfall. The episode just skipped around from plot to plot without any real sense of how it was all supposed to play together, and as all the plots became entangled with one another in an attempt to make some sort of semblance of an episode, well that just made everything worse.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

For once, I am not the one to have the most negative reaction to an episode. It feels kind of nice, really. I mean, the episodes was still pretty awful, but I don’t think I was incensed by it as Todd VanDerWerff was, or as much as I was “I Kissed a Girl”. And that one really pissed me off.

So Matthew Morrison directed this episodes. I have no idea how much of this episode’s poor quality we can blame on him, but frankly I’m just relieved he didn’t use the opportunity to squeeze in another instance of Will rapping.

Oh, and Marti Noxon wrote this episode. I know we can blame her in part for the episode’s quality.

That song that Blaine and Rachel sung was called “Extraordinary Merry Christmas” (hey, that’s the title of this episode!), and it was an original song made just for this episode. Though I doubt any of you noticed, since the show didn’t even mention this fact. (I also doubt any of you cared.)

And speaking of randomly made up shit, what was with all those global warming/end times jokes as part of the in-show special???

I wasn’t able to fit this in above, but man alive was that a depressing song selection the show used for the first half o f the episode. I’d say that this was the show playing up the “sadness of Christmas” theme, but I don’t think the writers are sophisticated enough to come up with that parallel.

Oh, and just for comparison, this episode opened with the Glee club singing as they decorated the show choir room. The show did that last year too, albeit that time it happened after the title card was displayed.

“Holy crap, I’m dating Kim Kardashian.”

“Wheels, Porcelain, Other Gay…”