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'Glee' Recap: "Michael"

Now I’m never one to wholeheartedly argue that Glee has to exist in the real world, because all the rules that don’t apply to Glee are what occasionally make it very fun, like when Brittany’s rousing “Run The World” can take place in three places at once, or Sue Sylvester can seemingly take on any job position ever so long as it puts her perfectly in Will’s path, or Rachel can celebrate Christmas even though she’s Jewish (actually, that last one isn’t fun, it’s just… stupid). If Glee wants to do that as a sort-of fantasy take on the real world, I’ve never had a problem with it. If it wants to run itself in a way that calls every week to be THE BIGGEST WEEK EVER FOR ONE SINGLE THING—in this case, Michael Jackson—then I’m perfectly willing to see what happens.

But there are times when the Glee world gets unbearably unreal, and completely breaks the ability to suspend disbelief and just enjoy what’s happening. “Michael” has a lot of real dumb moments that supersede comprehension, my most frustrating of which involve the gang actively in the mindstate of WE’RE GOING TO GO INTO A WELL-LIT PARKING LOT IN BLACK HOODIES AND HAVE A MICHAEL JACKSON DANCE-OFF WITH FULL ON CHOREOGRAPHY WE MIRACULOUSLY FOUND HOURS OF TIME TO PRACTICE, AND WE’RE GOING TO BEAT THE WARBLERS WHO OF COURSE DOING BETTER THAN US (AND APPARENTLY TAKE THE CARTOON METHOD OF NEVER CHANGING CLOTHES) SIMPLY BECAUSE WE LIKE MICHAEL JACKSON MORE THAN THEY DO. It’s hard for me to believe in those moments (the other BIG one is Santana and Sebastian’s rendition of “Smooth Criminal”, which I had to let go because it sounded really good) that the show places this much value on song and dance when A) most of their cast is really bad at it, and B) time could be better spent actually creating relative story first and relative song to match. This episode is clearly created for Michael Jackson songs to fit into the show, and that inorganic quality makes most of this hour a bad trip.

“Michael” is perfectly all that Glee is: a loathingly basic exploration of all that is wrong in the world and how it’s either inexplicably fixed by music immediately after the song is over or solved by doing the right thing and not fighting back against your oppressors, despite the fact that yeah, they got you really good and you might really want to. It’s an ambitious showcase of choreography with some of the most uncoordinated actors in the industry. It’s an auto-tune concert of lip-sync eye candy. It’s not very different than anything else we’ve gotten this season, except there seems to be a lot more big light bulbs involved.

And it’s a really funny thing that these very qualities that created the show’s charm have become the show’s biggest problems, because it just hasn’t found a way to transform and build on the solid ideas of life in loserdom and redemption and finding happiness despite adversity that it started with, and one of the worst things a series can do (in my opinion) is not grow. Glee hasn’t in a single ounce and has aimlessly cycled through these ideas with no real goal anymore, other than manipulating them to target big music numbers and make a bigger spectacle of itself. I can’t help but feel like I’d have fought a lot harder for an equally-awful Artie and Mike version of “Scream” two years ago, back when the show wasn’t starting to spiral out, but by this point, where the show is insistent upon out-doing the last time it tried to out-do itself, it’s lost its own credibility.

But the reasons to like “Michael” are the reasons that I’ve liked the few other episodes of Glee I’ve liked this year, and that’s whenever it’s dealing with these downtrodden kids and their hazy futures. While I’m actually wanting to claw my eyes out during “Scream”, Rachel turns to Quinn for help with The Finn Proposal and Quinn heartily announces that she’s gotten into Yale, and it’s a brilliant moment for both character and actress. Yale is wholeheartedly her ticket out of Ohio and the clutches of being a Lima Loser, and there’s great undertones in her voice that speak to that. Moreso, I like that her proudest moment came with doses of realism for Rachel, a character who always works best when unbalanced between that huge self-confidence of hers and melodramatic insecurity. It's a little too blatant in scripting, as if Rachel and Finn being together have to directly correlate to Rachel's success in life in order to drive the point that she should break up with Finn, but if you take the pieces apart and just look at the good ones... yeah, in order for Rachel to focus on her future properly, there could be a point in life where Finn isn't conducive to that plan.

Rachel also has a moment where she believes that she hasn’t gotten into NYADA, and it’s another superb one, because I’m not too sure I believed that she was actually going to get in, and I was looking forward to a show that would navigate just where a broken-hearted girl goes from here. It ostensibly—but maybe not actually—leads her right into Finn’s arms and a ‘yes’ response to his marriage. But it’s shocking to me that The Finn Proposal and the pair’s future managed to contradict itself and make itself work at the same time, when it toys with ideas of love both lasting forever and existing in the moment.

When Finn is asking Rachel to marry him is weird some faulty moments slip through the cracks that point to a fleeting love, not a long lasting one, and I hope the show is going somewhere with this and it’s not just lazy scripting. The most notable moment is when Finn says this marriage is symbolic of “how we feel right now”. Right now, he says, not how he’ll feel about her next week, or in a year, or ten. If someone says that they want to get married because of how they feel right now, is that not a bad sign? That feels like an awful sign to me, and one whose purpose I can’t even figure out, which makes me think it was just awful, terrible writing.

Speaking of awful, terrible writing, of course Ryan has to nearly ruin Quinn’s no-bad-very-good hour by making her announce her Yale acceptance again, and of course it’s doused in regret and shame and how she came out of it thanks to New Directions, which I was fenced about: it read more like she was proud of the club for pulling her out of her rut and she didn’t do much, but I’d have liked it if she’d said something a bit more real: she went absolutely apeshit for half her senior year—let’s say because of pent-up anger, and not because the writers had a season-long memory lapse—and she’s had to work out a lot of problems with herself, and she’s not immediately fixed because she got one acceptance letter to college, but she’s hoping to move towards getting there. I just hate that she believes she’s okay now and all is better because of things like Chord Overstreet’s Justin Bieber Experience.

But Glee always has the strangest injections of extremely bitter truth in itself, despite the fact that the road to get there is always rougher than any other show on TV. My favorite quote from Quinn ever is to Rachel dallying in her love for Finn, when she says “I’ve dated Finn, Puck, Sam. Even thought I loved some of them. But by the time the snow falls in New Haven next winter… I won’t know why.” It’s a sad little thing, but it’s a perfect little thing: as much as high school (and even college, to some degree) just seems like The Rest Of Our Lives, the truth of the matter is that love fleets and things change, and it shouldn’t be a surprise in the slightest if far off the world where Glee storylines go on, Rachel is single on Broadway and Finn is still in Lima, Ohio married to a dancer (stripper) named Tina and the old high school loves tried to talk on the phone, you know, once, but Rachel was in rehearsals and Finn’s baby just wouldn’t shut up. Because that’s an honest truth and possibility, and despite the fact that Glee is often sunshine and rainbows, it’s still not afraid to tease that the world is indeed a real place before doing 20 more things to confirm that Lima, Ohio is not.

SumOlogy: I had no idea how to grade this, so I decided to take off a point for every performance I wholeheartedly didn’t like, which pretty much amounts to the number of moments and scenes I did.

Grade: 6/10

 

The Songs

“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” – 6.5 Darren Criss is in no way, shape or form Michael Jackson, despite their feeble attempts. But this is cute.

“Bad” – 6.5 The Warblers made New Directions look like such trash. It’s really sad. It was so weak.

“Scream” – 4 Visually stunning, verbally PAINFUL.

“Never Can Say Goodbye” – 7 How weird is it that THIS is a performance I hated a lot less than I should have?

“Human Nature” – 9 For the second time, and I might be the only one who thinks this, but I love Chord and Amber singing together, even if it requires her to step down from all the big vocals.

“Ben” – 4 This is just weird.

“Smooth Criminal” – 8 When it got to the chorus, it really hit its stride.

“I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” – 6.5 Lukewarm to the last degree.

“Black Or White” – 7.5 Except for Kurt, I found it cool. And wait, where is the choir coming from? Do they just live in the auditorium?

 

Leftovers

Ryan Murphy legitimately sat Darren Chris down and told him to be more gay, and then showed him how to use his tongue to make more feminine 'S' sounds. I’d bet all the money in the world that happened.

There was a really rare mention of Vocal Adrenaline tonight. Where have they been?

Things I didn’t hate: Sebastian as the new villain. I really enjoy that. Grant Gustin is one convincing jerk.

Things I didn’t hate: Mike O’Malley and Chris Colfer, because it’s literally impossible not to.

Sue Sylvester wasn’t in this episode an ounce, and I usually like those episodes. Not the case here.

I miss Brittany jokes.

YOU SAW THAT ONE SHOT OF DAMIAN MCGINTY AND EITHER YOU HAD NO IDEA WHO IT WAS OR YOU GOT SO MUCH LIFE THAT YOUR INNARDS HIT THE FLOOR.

“Oh my God, hey Kurt, I didn’t recognize you. You’re wearing boy clothes for once.”

“Lock the door.” “I don’t know how to do that.”

“This is not violent, it’s clever. I put it in my underboob.”

“This is what we call taking the high road. Which I was shocked to find out had nothing to do with marijuana.” 

“You know what, Prancy Smurf, I respect that.”

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