Previously on Glee, Brittany name-checked the Lesbian Blogger Community in such a way that the ladies said, “Oh, there’s no way they can ever walk that back.” And Tina fell in love with Gay Blaine in such a way that the fellas said, “Oh, well, it’s not like anything amoral and totally fucking batshit crazy will come out of it.”
Spoiler alert: Wrong on both counts, gaymos.
LIMA, OHIO Now that New New Directions are on their way to Sectionals, Finn is starting to worry that they won’t be able to hold the audience’s attention without Rachel and Kurt and Santana and Mercedes, which, as any viewer of season four can tell you, is a valid concern. Although, if he’d let Kitty stand on stage and roll her eyes for like three straight minutes, that’d go a long way to softening up the judges’ hearts. Emma (hi, Emma!) suggests getting back to the theme weeks of yore, and so Finn lands on divas. He asks Emma to be a guest judge for the diva-off, a responsibility she gladly accepts due to her natural skill of making restaurant managers cry like little bitches. Also, she comes correct and is neither a trick-ass-ho nor a hater-sweater.
Unique is pretty sure she’s got the diva thing locked down, but Tina’s got a taste for talking now that she’s been allowed to speak at least once in the last three episodes. Brittany is Brittany, Bitch, so you know she’s got a shot. But also: Blaine is adamant that men can be divas too. The best part isn’t the arguing; the best part is that Sam has his fingers plugged in his ears the whole time so he can’t hear it. It is hilarious. I love that guy. The ensemble song is Beyonce’s “Diva,” and while it’s a pretty good performance musically, the real magic is the visuals.
Everyone looks ridiculous and so, so amazing, like if Project Runway had a challenge called “Power Ranger Primadona,” and all of the designers were sewing until their fingers bled while tripping balls and listening to “Entrance of the Gladiators” as performed by Alvin & the Chipmunks. Like the fever dream of a pack of Crayola Classic 10 magic markers. Like if Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Best Friends pulled a Tyra Banks in Life Size and their main dream was to open for The Spice Girls before being turned back into dolls. Most notably, Blaine’s body is dressed like Adam Lambert and Blaine’s head is dressed like Darren Criss. It’s a heady combination. The real winner of the first song sing-off, though, is Emma Pillsbury who explains in gory detail the way she bends the waiters at The Cheesecake Factory to her will.
Blaine trades his Lambert duds in for some Queen duds and goes full Freddie Mercury with some “Don’t Stop Me Now.” It takes real balls tackle a tune by by a guy whose range spanned four octaves, but Blaine crushes it. Tina, note, has now watched him channel the vocal- and accessory-stylings of two gay icons in less than five minutes. Does that quench the fire of her inexplicable lust? No. No, it does not. I have barely caught my breath when lightning strikes out in the hallway, signaling the arrival of Miss Santana Lopez and a gaggle of Louisville cheerleaders. Emma invited her back because the only other person on this show who could do justice to Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” is no one, and it’s a principal component of the one true diva canon. Tina’s face when Santana dances her way into the room is like a full Liz Lemon “OH, BROTHER.” And Brittany’s face is like, “OH, GIRL.” And Sam’s face is like, “Oh, God. I’ll be dead by sundown.” After the song, Brittany rushes up to high five her lady love and wonders aloud why Santana didn’t tell her she was teleporting into town. Santana, verbatim:
You know, I think that the better question is, why didn’t you tell me that you were dating Sam? I had just left a comment on my favorite Rizzoli & Isles lesbian subtext blog when I heard the news. Oh, and before I forget, allow me to introduce my backup, and my girlfriend: Elaine. And by “girlfriend,” I mean “out-and-proud, lipstick-loving, AfterEllen-reading girlfriend.”Last week someone in the comments called me – hang on, I’m going to look it up because I want to get it right – a “Self-righteous Lesbian. Devoted to improving Glee with her rapacious standards of heterophobia and misandry. A woman on a mission.” And while the heterophobia and misandry thing is all wrong, the other part is right. I am a self-righteous lesbian, and I am a woman on a mission. And I’m not going to apologize for either of those things. Sometimes I’m preachy and always I want what I want, because what I want is: Queer visibility. When I started writing for AfterEllen, there was barely enough lesbian pop culture news to fill a weekly column. We went an entire year without a major lesbian character on broadcast TV. I’m talking like five years ago, that was the reality. Not one single major lesbian character. And gay guys weren’t all that present on broadcast TV either.
Here’s what we know about queer representation on TV: It changes everything. It changes things for straight people who have never met a gay person in their lives. It humanizes us. It opens the door for us into the living rooms of “mainstream” America and we sit down with these people who don’t know us and we have dinner with these people who don’t know us and we make them laugh and we make them cry and they come away knowing that there’s one kind of folks.
And it changes everything for gay people too. We are, all of us, born with an ancient need to stretch ourselves across the fictional universes of other people’s stories. If they can be heroes, we can be heroes. If they can find love, we can find love. If they can crash and bleed and break and claw their way back to redemption, well, then, so can we. If a young gay boy can get thrown into a dumpster and crawl out and come out and sing his way into the most prestigious fine arts school in the country where he can banish his bullies with a song in his heart and a smile on his face, we can really believe that it gets better. And if a young gay girl can break through walls she spent a lifetime building, stare down her deepest, darkest fears, and find the courage to crack open her own heart, we can be brave enough to love out loud too. When I call Glee out on its misogyny, on its double standard of gay/straight physical affection, on its unwillingness to commit to its character development and tell us their real truths, it’s not because I’m jaded and cynical and like the sound of my own angry voice. It’s because when Glee does it right, it does it better than anyone. It heals us on a soul-balm level. I’ve written before about how constellations are nothing more than stories, the joining-up of unrelated points of light by people who wanted to make sense of the universe. When we look at the night sky, it’s not a jumble of glowing chaos. It’s Orion. It’s the Big Dipper. It’s Leo the Nemean Lion. And when we look at our own lives in the context of the stories we’ve been told, we’re not lost and alone and abandoned in a turbulent world without hope. We’re Blaine. We’re Brittany. We’re Santana. We’re Unique.
And when people who don’t know us – not really, not physically, not yet – try to work out whether or not we’re like them, the same thing is true: We are Kurt Hummel. We hurt and we love and we hope. Oh, we hope. And sometimes we do it looking fierce in one-sleeved woolen ponchos.
So, yes: I am a woman on a mission. And when Santana Lopez says “AfterEllen” out loud on Fox, five years after there were exactly zero lesbians on any major network, it only strengthens my resolve. It also makes me feel like the first time I went out on a date with another girl and she flicked her eyes up at me coyly over her beer and I was like, “Oh Jesus, she’s going to kiss me. Another girl is going to kiss me.” And she did kiss me, all gentle and firm and delicious and hops and jalapenos, and my heart ricocheted around in my chest like a pinball and my lungs forgot to do their job and all of my blood rushed to the surface of my skin, and I think what happened next was that I blacked out.
It’s like, Naya Rivera is saying “AfterEllen.” I see her lips going, “AfterEllen.” But it sounds to me very much like, “I love you.” Someone who isn’t hearing “I love you,” however, is Brittany. What she is hearing is “I came here to hurt you,” and her face is so sad and now my heart is sad too.
Santana retires to the auditorium to wait for Sam to show up for a lover’s duel. And here’s where my mind actually gets blown. I never in a hundred thousand badrillion years thought we’d get to see any emotional substance on the Bram vs. Brittana front. After all, Glee‘s writers aren’t exactly famous for knowing anything about what happened in any episode besides the one that’s airing. Also, no one gets shape-shifted like bisexual characters on TV. They’re practically play dough. But here come Santana and Sam – a confident, gorgeous, fan-favorite gal and a confident, gorgeous fan-favorite guy – stepping up to the line to fight for love in a war where gender isn’t even a factor. They duet on “Make No Mistake (She’s Mine),” and it is heart-wrenching and flawless and the ultimate irony is that their voices sound like they were made to harmonize with each other. Sam asks Santana to let Brittany go, to let her be happy with him, because all of the reasons she broke up with Brittany are still in play and he’ll never be able to compete with the depth and width of their affection for each other if she won’t set Brittany free. Santana says “Never.” Because even though she knows what Sam is saying is true, Brittany is her one true thing. The only truth she’s ever known. Also, he asked her to eat cereal off the floor. And now for something that is the opposite of true: Tina is full steam ahead in her delusional pursuit of Blaine, an obsession that is made all the more manic by the fact that Santana’s performance pushed Tina back into the shadows of New Directions. She skips up to Blaine’s locker and tells him she noticed he was getting a cold. How? Well, he sniffled seven times yesterday, five more than his average. Twice at glee club practice; twice in Calc II; once at lunch, right after her finished his sandwich and before he opened his pudding snack; once in the locker room when he was watching Jake and Ryder wrestle, and once right after he turned out his bedside lamp. She has crafted him a care package – chicken soup, Vitamin C, Vap-o Rub, roofies – and he says she’s just swell.
My favorite thing about this clusterfuck is how Blaine literally has no idea that Tina wants to blow his whistle. He’s that guy who lives in a bubble of his own handsome affability, just chasing an old lady down the road to tell her she dropped a hundred-dollar bill and having the old lady go, “Aw, just keep it.” And the pad thai driver showing up with his favorite meal even though he didn’t order it and telling him, what the heck, it’s on the house. And H&M always having just one more sold out shirt in his size back in the store room. And, “We don’t usually let people into the habitats to cuddle with the baby panda bears, Mr. Warbler, but I guess for you we can make an exception.” So when Tina gives him a handmade care package because she just senses that he’s sick, that’s the kind of serendipity Blaine calls “Tuesday.” He does invite Tina over to practice being a diva, though. Because his heart has to work double-time to make up for the fact that his eyeballs are broken.
In Blaine’s bedroom, which is decorated with more Kurt Hummel paraphernalia than even AfterElton HQ, Tina just randomly asks if Blaine has ever had sex with girls. He has not. He is a gold star gay. Kurt and Eli C. (boooooo!) and one exceptionally awkward kiss with Rachel Berry. Tina starts bitching about Rachel, something Blaine has had to listen to Kurt do so many times in this very bed that his body has apparently developed some kind of autoimmune narcoleptic reflex to it. He just passes right the hell out. Tina makes a heartbreaking love confession before she realizes he’s asleep, and let’s assess her next move on a scale from normal to axe-murderer, shall we? Normal: Quietly leave. Normal with a side of heartache: Cover him up and turn off his lamp and glance at him wistfully from the doorway. Moderately creepy: Take off his shoes and brush his hair off his forehead and give him a kiss. Creepy: Spoon him. Crazytown Bananapants: Unbutton his shirt and massage his chest with Vap-o Rub.
Glee, good lord. You can get away with a lot of shit by doing that high camp hand-wavey magic trick thing, but you cannot get away with non-consensual semi-sexual touching. And like, the piano in this scene is trying to tell us to feel sorry for Tina, when all any of us want to do is slap her hand away and wash our brains out with bleach. Not OK, show. Not OK a lot or a little bit or anything in between.
You think she can’t get any more cracked than she already is, but the next step up the cuckoo ladder is: rabid, and that’s exactly where Tina goes when she sees Blaine at school the next day. The audacity of not having her molestation of his sleeping body praised (or even acknowledged!) is just the absolute limit. She marches over and tells him about how she’s done with letting him take advantage of her – which: uhhh…? – and from now on she’s the Madonna in this situation. A pink leotard is involved in “Hung Up” along with a whole lot of background dancers that were cryogenically frozen in MTV’s vault back the days when they used to play music. Glee club is into it. The McKinley courtyard lunchtime crowd, all of whom are always up for a gay ol’ time, is into it. But Blaine and me are mostly just bamboozled. Him because the roofies are still in his bloodstream. Me because my eyes won’t unsee what they just saw. While all of this is going on, Finn is Schuestering around Emma’s office wearing sweater vests and brainstorming Ways to Make a Difference and helping her pick out centerpieces. As soon as he said, “You’re the only girl at McKinley that always makes me feel better,” it was obvious he was going to make a play for her, but Emma Pillsbury lives in a whole other kind of bubble where TV doesn’t exist, so she didn’t see it coming. In a perfectly acted scene, Emma is freaking out about the wedding planning, halfway to a full-blown panic attack, when Finn gets right in there and plants one on her. He has the good grace to zoom out of her office like a gazelle instead of sticking around to tell her how she feels about the situation. Is Finn Hudson … growing up? No, it can’t be. I’m drunk on Naya Rivera saying “Rizzoli & Isles Subtext Blog.” My brain is addled.
Tina wins the diva-off, which is worth it just to hear Brittany in the background going lke, “Tina won a thing! Maybe the world really is ending!”
Sanatana, it turns out, has dropped out of school in Louisville, something Sue already knows because Sue knows everything because Sue is God. Based on her ability to draw actual blood with her verbal barbs, Sue offers to take on Santana as her apprentice, something that seems to be working out quite well with Finn, who is 86 percent Will already. Santana mulls it over in the auditorium because that’s where Brittany goes to do her thinking too. Santana starts firing off trouty mouth insults as soon as she spots Brittany, but Brit has always known that stuff is just the white noise Santana uses to mask the lonley melody inside of her. Santana tries again, tossing bombs about her new girlfriend, but Brit swats that nonsense away with one swoosh of her hand. (Santana bought a date for the day with scratchers tickets and an Ani DiFranco t-shirt.) And so then it’s the truth: Santana is going to learn the Cheerios ropes from Sue, poison her protein shakes, and stay at McKinley forever. But, as always, Brittany is like Santana’s own personal Mirror of Erised, reflecting the deep and secret desires Santana has hidden even from herself. Just like she nudged her to embrace the truth of her sexuality, Brittany nudges her again to embrace the truth of her musical ambitions. They hug. They kiss. They let go, for now.
BUSHWICK, NEW YORK
The theme of Brooklyn life this week is DIVA! also, and the way you knew this episode was going to be good is that it opened with a Kurt Hummel monologue. I feel like we’ve been deprived of his voice for so long! It’s like cool spring water after weeks of drinking sand! Well, but Kurt has had it with Rachel 2.0. She’s as egomaniacal as Lima Rachel, but with 100 percent more bangs and sycophantic entourages and weirdly naked boyfriends. Kurt tells her exactly that when she starts ringing a bell for her morning tea and bossing him around with flash cards so as not to injure her voice. It goes about as well as you’d expect.
Kurt: Hey, remember all the worst things about you from Ohio? They still exist, only Santana and Quinn aren’t here to keep me from killing you. Rachel: I knew I could only treat you like shit for a matter of time before you told me to stop acting like a bitch. Kurt: Obviously the only way to slay the dragon of your id is for me to destroy you with my voice, so I challenge you to that thing like they did in Pitch Perfect, but more like one-on-one. Rachel: Didn’t we do something like this several hundred times in previous seasons? And didn’t I beat you every time? Kurt: Well, for one thing, my voice, like my supernatural good looks, are growing exponentially awesomer every day. And for another thing, I let you win because it weirded out my dad back then that I could sing like an angel. Rachel: All of my confidence was built on that one moment of beating you! Kurt: That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Your confidence has always been built on whatever guy is boffing you. Rachel: Fine, let’s do this.
Brody explains the Midnight Madness like it’s some kind of vocal deathmatch, which would actually be a good way to lose some of these new characters no one seems to care about. The song the NYADA fight club chooses is Jean Valjean’s “Bring Him Home,” and I don’t mind telling you that just the three notes from Chris Colfer moved me in a way that Tom Hooper’s entire film did not. Adam of Adam’s Apples is in attendance and has strategically placed himself at the very edge of the stage so he can experience the maximum impact of Kurt’s voice and also so he can sit by him and maybe hold his hand or at the very least smile self-deprecatingly at him in that special adorable way British people do. (Snicks at AfterElton.com says Adam looks like homeless Neil Patrick Harris. It’s the most correct description I have ever heard.) The song is gorgeous. They both sound incredible. Kurt wins by half a note.
All of Rachel’s hopes – well, the Funny Girl revival ones, at least – are dashed. Kurt lets her fall down about seven notches before he gently prods her back up four notches, just enough that she’s still Rachel Berry, but without the flash cards and the sycophants.
Speaking of whom: Kurt tests out Adam’s boyfriend potential by measuring his ability to listen to him talk about Rachel’s need and feelings for hours and hours. Adam, however, is more interested in talking about how Kurt deserved to win the sing-off and also about how he should stop hiding his light under a bushel. Rachel’s minions, the same ones who were clowning on Kurt and his Apples ten minutes ago, run up to him and talk real fast about how he’s the bee’s knees and how he just has to do whatever Broadway kid thing with them. Kurt, verbatim:
I don’t think so. I think you both are shallow and obnoxious. And I think the only reason run around kissing everyone’s as is because you know you’ll never make it on your own. And another thing: If you say one more nasty thing about Adam’s Apples, I will challenge you to the next Midnight Madness. And we all know how that ends.Kurt, dude. You are better than a diva. You are a goddamn caped crusader and I love you with all of my whole heart. Also in love, or at least in the verrrry smitten range of emotion is Adam. The way he look at Kurt, it’s – I think loving Kurt Hummel gives boys an immediate and incurable case of heart eyes, like, “Just watching you tie your shoelace blows me the fuck away.” He tells Kurt that he’s impressive, but Kurt doesn’t hear the implied and let’s make out right now because he’s the best best friend and he has to go stitch Rachel back together.
Back in their loft, Kurt and Rachel are enjoying a quiet night in when someone knocks at the door. Santana has made one last loop around McKinley High: the lockers, the classrooms, the theater, the foyer. “Girl on Fire” is the song of her new life, and she owns it. She has walked out the front doors of her high school, for real this time, and walked up the steps of the New York City subway. And now here she is. Rachel and Kurt are both like, “Santana?” And she goes, “Let it burn, baby. Let it burn. Snix is home.”
Next week: Blaine takes Tina to Will and Emma’s wedding, where she flips the cake in a moment of incandescent rage when Blaine forgets to thank her for brushing his teeth after she clubbed him over the head and knocked him out last night. Rachel hooks up with Finn, Blaine hooks up with Kurt, Quinn hooks up with Santana, and gay Twitter blows up the entire internet.
Mega thank yous to my screencapping partner, Lindsay (@scenicpenguin)! She’s a caped crusader too!
