And we’re back for a third round on the grand carousel of glee – be ready for flailing over klaine and hummelberry goodness, overwhelmingly sickeningly sweet fawnings over Kurt/Chris Colfer and the general insanity that comes with this show which can only be described as the best crack!fic ever written and put on the screen.
The episode was actually pretty damn good and drew attention to what we should expect to see this season: more fighting between Sue and Will which will become irrelevant; cutesy adorable coupley-ness between Kurt and Blaine, Rachel and Finn and hopefully Mike and Tina will hold on to their crown of most stable relationship.
We begin with another one of Jacob’s video montages to let us know what’s happening, only this time he’s asking everyone what their plans are for senior year. And we learn that Tina and Artie are the only juniors. Yep, out of the…13 of them, 2 are juniors and the rest are seniors (which begs the question: how did Artie get into the junior prom last year?!?) so there is going to be a massive gaping hole next season unless a lot of them fail (and honestly we can only count Finn and Brittany amongst that group). But I digress because let’s face it, once Kurt leaves the show, so will this Kurtsie.
Poor Finn….he starts the voice over and that’s pretty much the last we hear of him, as he panics with the realisation he has no idea what it is he wants to do. I’m excitedly curious over this, as hopefully we shall see Finn grow and develop this season by going through those horrible moments of attempting to decide exactly what to do with the rest of your life before your even allowed to drink legally or vote.
The team is now down 3 members as Sam’s family moved away – and oh how I want to cry! I loved Sam, he was a proper geek and a hot one to boot, plus I actually was truly excited about Samcedes, Quinn is MIA and Lauren has decided losing Nationals has lost her important street cred. And she dumps Puck. I hope we get to see more of Ashley Fink later this season, her character is awesome (and way too reminiscent of a lot of my friends).
And how will they find new members? Well, by having random purple pianos around the school (and I believe this whole scene was placed here solely for the image of Kurt climbing on top of said piano and sprawling….oh boy, what are you doing to me?!?), so whenever a Gleek sees one they should sing and dance in order to entice other school kids to join the club.
Because that idea has worked sooooo well in the past.
Mike and Tina are fooling around..with a PIANO, people, when Sue comes in and starts trashing it and being all-out offensive. Sue is running for Congress but can’t seem to find a platform to stand on…until she gets the idea to run on an anti-arts program, cutting arts from schools so that a) she can hopefully garner more points and b) finally succeed in destroying glee. And oh my heart weeps at this idea coming from a school where we in the performing arts department where woefully ignored and neglected by the entire school in favour of the sports kids. and I went to an all-girls school. Sheesh. Sue initiates Santana and Becky as co-captains and tells them they need to destroy all the pianos. Which they set out to do….
Back to basics – Hummelberry is on course to get their NY spin-off errr make it into Julliard, until they discover Julliard doesn’t have a musical theatre program so instead they decide to try out for the never-before-heard-of-and-entirely-made-up NYADA – New York Academy of Dramatic Arts, or something along those lines. We have an adorably cute version of Ding Dong with all the inane melodramatic over-performing we have come to expect from these two, but it’s so adorable that I can forgive them anything. They then go along to a mixer for potential applicants and run into possibly the most self-centered and overly-confident I have ever seen, and are basically caricatures of Rachel and Kurt – the expressions on their faces at this point is laugh-out-loud hysterical- and they perform an adequately overly -dramatic and widely-toothed mashup of Anything You Can Do and Anything Goes….sung by apparently one of the Glee Project people. I will not be able to pass judgement here, nor pick up these factors as I did not watch that show and am eternally grateful now because I go into their episodes without any idea of who these people. Said entrant seems to be pretty good, actually, but nowhere near as good as our beloved Rachel.
But Hummelberry flips out and have a little cry in the car as they realise that outside of their little bubble, they have stiff competition. and thank you! show! Although I was expecting to see that once they hit New York, its nice to see them finally acknowledge there are other people with talent in this world and they will have to work for it. This scene, btw? Is adorably wonderful and I am flailing over here at the promise of all the Hummelberry this season.
Meanwhile, Quinn ahs joined the Skanks. By which I mean, she is rebelling against…something, and has dyed her hair pink, is wearing bad 80′s trash clothes (and seriously, some of the combos are horrific), ahs an “ironic” tattoo of Ryan Seacrest and is now smoking while not bathing.
So basically she’s become a uni student a year early.
Our Quinnie is rebelling against god knows what, because who cares? She looks hot with pink hair, her new friends remind me of my high school group (god, that thought scares me) and it’s terrific to see the show acknowledge that this does happen. Tina never really rebelled – she’s an emo kid, which is pretty common. So this is a nice change, even if I don’t think it’s going to last, considering all the longing looks Quinn keeps giving the gleeks in their performances. Although I loved the conversation she had with Santana and Brittany about re-joining the Cheerios and finishing high school with a bang…coining the term the “unholy Trinity”. Heh. I love these three.
Mercedes, bless her, ahs no real storyline except that she’s picked up a massive football player over summer and they’re being overly sickeningly sweet together. No seriously – his one line at the very beginning about how after she wins a grammy they’re going to make cocoa babies together? That was a little off-putting for me, particularly at their age. Even now, a few years down the line, if a guy I was dating starting whispering in my ear about making sweet little babies I think I’d knee him the groin. Or maybe it just sounds strange to hear that from a guy? I don’t know. I think we need to spend some more time with these two in order to get a sense of their relationship.
Artie…has no storyline. Tina and Mike….basically snuggle together. There’s no mention of Brittana, but I’m sure that’ll pop up later on..hopefully with Santana getting a new girlfriend who appreciates her. Puck, sadly, also has nothing to do besides mope about Lauren dumping him.
And as our Gleeks….gleek out in the cafeteria, they inevitably are caught up in a food fight. It looks like so much fun. But the piano is ruined by all that flung spaghetti. It was succesful in that someone does try out with the worst rendition of Big Spender ever. It made me want to cry. Seriously. I was crying in sheer agony over here. WIll has to let her down and basically makes himself sick to the stomach at the thought of turning someone down, even though he turned down Becky last year. That and this is the daughter of the guy who donated all those pianos, so methinks we haven’t seen the last of her just yet.
And we have Blaine. Blaine who first appears in his Warbler outfit, drinking coffee with Kurt in the Lima Bean as Kurt attempts to yet again persuade him to transfer just so they can be together. And lo and behold – oh you have to love this show for its inanity the next time we see Blaine he’s in an interesting outfit and the newest member of McKinley High! Because transferring from private school to public school nearly 2 hours away is apparently easy to do within the first week of school, and doing it for love seems to be a reasonable decision. Whatever, Blaine performs with the Cheerios, and Quinn sets the piano on fire.
Seriously. I can’t explain it any more succinctly than that.
So we close our first hour of frivolity back in the choir room, as Blaine joins the New Directions and WIll ensures them they will work hard – and kicks Santana off for not being loyal to them. Ouch. Me unhappy now.
Rachel decides they’ll do West Side Story to ensure she can add some credits to her name, while Kurt decides to run for Senior Class President…yes, what?But it seems like such a brilliant idea – Kurt campaigning to be rpesident of classmates who voted him for prom queen. I have no diea where this is going but I’m in it for the ride.
We finish off with a numebr of Hairspray – I’ve been waiting 2 years for some Hairspray on the show! – and the promise of a good year ahead of us. Yes there’s more story to do with Emma and Will but who cares? Rachel and Mercedes both want to be Maria! Blaine, Finn and Kurt are surely going to come to battle over who is the biggest male diva in the group! Kurt will be running for class president, Quinn will continue making bad choices, Santana will hopefully grow a pair and just remain awesome, and hopefully Tina and Artie will get storylines at some stage. Yes it’s only been one episode…but it was a good one.
Best line -
“There’s a bar of soap and a bottle of peroxide in my locker whenever you’re ready” – Santana to Quinn on bringing the unhoy trinity back together.
Songs -
We’ve got the Beat (The Go-Gos) – New Directions
Big Spender (from Sweet Charity)- Sugar Motta
Ding Dong The Witch is Dead (from Wizard of Oz sung by Harold Arlen and Barbra Streisand)- Kurt and Rachel
Anything Goes/Anything You Can Do (from Anything Goes/Annie Get Your Gun)- Harmony and the ragtag NYADA applicants
It’s Not Unusual (Tom Jones)- Blaine
You Can’t Stop the Beat (from Hairspray)- New Directions
