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“Glee” recap (5.13): I dare you to love me

Previously on Glee, the Old New Directions returned to send the New New Directions off into the abyss while the Old New New Directions prepared to finally graduate from high school. April Rhodes and Holly Holiday also returned, to get soused up in the rafters of the theater and concoct shenanigans for saving the glee club one more time.

April and Holly are palling around the faculty lounge at McKinley, trying to figure out how to make the most out of a game of Kill, Marry, or Bone that prominently features Mr. Schue as the most bone-able contestant. Apparently Sue only hears the words “Will” and “Kill” because she scoots in there with a fire in her eyes and a crossbow strapped to her back. She’s happy to find her friend Holly hanging out; they’ve grown so close these last few days that they bought matching track suits and submitted a video application to The Amazing Race. For Holly, it’s all about the costumes (first) and saving New Directions (second); she uses her buddy leverage with Sue to convince her to introduce music into the non-glee extra curriculars because of test scores science.

In the choir room, Kurt announces that Blaine got into NYADA, which surprises no one. And Tina gets smacked in the face with a giant trophy, which, again, surprises no one. In her unconsciousness she imagines a multi-camera Friends-style New York life that involves all the Old New Directions living and working together while Sam walks around all day in his underwear. The best parts of her dream are: 1) Kurt and Blaine finally making out like a couple of 19-year-old dudes. 2) Rachel with The Rachel. 3) The credits of Chums feature Tina as the only lead, with Santana and Rachel getting a second-billing co-star credit. 4) Mike Chang. (“MIKE CHAAANG!”) When Tina wakes up, she’s more determined than ever to get into Jewish community college in NYC.

Since the choir room is being disassembled, Old New Directions stage one last intervention, but in the theater. Kurt and Mercedes stand on stage and talk about a tater tot feud they had in the cafeteria earlier today. See, since day one, tater tots have been Mercedes’ thing, OK, and so it really got her goat when when Kurt showed up today ordering tater tots like he’d been into them all along. Well, but Kurt protested that he could love tater tots too and eat them just as good as Mercedes even though he’d only come to appreciate their deliciousness later in life. Santana is on one side of the theater rolling her eyes* and Rachel is on the other side doing the same. But nobody is rolling their eyes when Kurt and Mercedes team up on “I Am Changing” from Dream Girls because they crush it. Like standing ovation levels of crushing it.

(*While Brittany stares at her adoringly.)

In the bathroom, Rachel offers Santana the olive branch of 10 shows of her choosing after the first three months of Funny Girl so her mom and her abuela can come see her, but Santana refuses because she doesn’t want to half-win; she wants to whole-win. Rachel is like, “Honestly, why? Why with this whole thing?” Santana pauses at the door, thinks for a long moment, shrugs, bounces. She landed the role of understudy like four episodes ago, Rachel. You can’t expect these writers to remember what motivations they imbued into a character all the way back at … the beginning of the month.

There’s no money for a nationally acclaimed glee club at McKinley High School, but there is definitely money for an animal husbandry club, which Holly Holiday crashes dressed as animal behavior genius Temple Grandin. She wastes no time whipping off her costume and teleporting everyone to a foam-raining disco for a performance of “Party All The Time.” The glee kids who come along for the field trip have a delightful, sudsy time. Bubbles! ’70s get-ups! Sangin’! Dancin’! The animal husbandry club? Not so much. They stand on the sidelines and look pissed. Not as pissed as I imagine the New New Directions actors look, what with their last episode featuring a ten-minute solo by Gwyneth Paltrow (and only a 10-second group hug for them). But still: pissed.

Bonus points to truly homosexual viewers who caught Rachel and Quinn dancing together for three milliseconds in the foam.

Having very obviously just finished watching the world’s greatest lesbian rom-com, Imagine Me & You, Brittany fills the choir room with lilies and invites Santana to join her on a one-way trip to that lady-on-lady paradise known as Lesbos. Santana’s heart can barely handle it, so she deflects the invitation, which would work on anyone who isn’t Brittany S. Pierce, the world’s foremost expert in the study of Santana Lopez.

Santana: You don’t want to run away with me, Britt; you want to run away from MIT – and I just happen to be standing here radiating incandescent love for you. Brittany: Just because I’m running away from my nightmare doesn’t mean I’m not also running toward my dream. When a face looks like my face and a body moves like my body moves, you get to meet a lot of people, and let me tell you what I’ve learned about people: They’ll never fit us the way we fit each other.

Santana: But my dreams also include becoming rich and famous, with a new bonus side plan of beating Rachel Berry at her own game. Brittany: Hey, remember how hard it was for you to come out because you were so terrified of what other people thought of you? And remember how good it felt when you finally said out loud who you truly are? Santana: Yeah.

Brittany: Closets come in lots of shapes and sizes. You busted out of the most oppressive one. Don’t let yourself get shoved into a different one made of other people’s dreams. Santana: I just thought maybe I could be everything to everybody. Brittany: No. But you can be anything you want to be, and everything to me. Santana: How come you’re the only person on earth whose words I hear in my heart? Brittany: That’s my real problem with math, you know. It discounts magic, which I know exists because of me plus you.

I think people are always their most true selves right when they wake up in the morning, before they have a chance to hoist up their defenses and soak in their insecurities and put on the many masks it takes to survive just a single day out in the mean world. And I think the best love is the kind where you can be your wake-up self around another person almost always. I don’t even think Santana knew her wake-up self before Brittany. Santana is all words, words, words, but Brittany never responds to that. She asks the questions and gives the answers to the things Santana is breathing between the noise. She says, “Yes, yes, you’re a panther” while stroking her terrified kitten fur. And Santana does the same for Brittany, but in the opposite way. She says, “You’re a sweet puppy, you’re my sweet puppy” while helping her grow into a majestic dire wolf.

When Tina finds out she got rejected from Jewish community college in New York because of how she’s not Jewish, she leans into a hardcore meltdown, but Blaine and Artie and Sam are there to remind her that there’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a condescending song. They perform a stripped down version of “Loser Like Me” that is pretty stunning, actually, except that every time Darren Criss plays the piano, there’s a sixty percent chance it’s going to be the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in your life. Remember that version of “Teenage Dream” he did in the piano bar in New York that was so depressing the ASPCA fired Sarah McLachlan and hired him because his thing felt exactly like homeless puppies? They make it out of this one unscathed and Tina agrees to go to New York with them.

In the auditorium, Santana finds Rachel running her lines and says she texted the Funny Girl director to let him know she’s quitting the show. Rachel is like, “For me?” And Santana is all, “No, for me, and that’s my sticking point on this thing.” They agree that life is going to be tricky for them as friends because when there are two suns in the same universe, gravity is a mess, but for now they duet on Oh Honey’s “Be Okay.” What is amazing is that they bring more energy to the room/screen just sitting there singing together on their stools than Holly Holiday’s entire disco circus.

Speaking of which bubble tomfoolery: Sue got so many complaints about their little field trip that she can’t allow any more music in any more non-musical after school groups. Holly wants to formulate another plan, but Will shuts her down. So she requests Artiepants’ help with one last project. He thinks it’s the project of being in love. So much so that he’s halfway to breaking up with Kitty via text before Holly says she only needs his camera.

The last duet of the glee club belongs to Puck and Quinn, who announce that they are going to be long-distance boyfriend/girlfriend. Quinn says it’s hard to know who you are when you’re Ryan Murphy‘s own personal Mary Sue and each week is tantamount to a new Dollhouse adventure, but Puck was pretty great to at least one incarnation of her personality, so she’s going to try to color in the lines of herself with his love for a while. Santana goes, “I remember coloring in your lines, twice, one night.” Quinn smooches Puck and waves her off. After the snogging, Will declares New Directions officially dead.

At the end of the day, he receives an invitation to the auditorium where the kids have put together a really lovely tribute to him for his baby. For me, Mr. Schue’s deal has almost always fallen somewhere on a scale between insufferable and outright offensive, but that’s not Matthew Morrison‘s fault. He’s played that guy with a whole lot of heart over the last five years. And there’s no other show on TV that has ever hit the L and the G and the B and the T in the same classroom at the same time, a classroom that he shepherded. So it is a kind of sadness to see him go, even though the show will be infinitely better for it. All the New and Old Directions sing him off with a powerful performance of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and it absolutely had to be Kurt stepping in for Finn, and it was. It’s the original New Directions and then the first year recruits and then the New New Directions and then Will joins them on stage for a final hurrah.

And then! The Glee-est thing to ever be Glee-ed.

Truly, there has never been a more accidentally meta commentary on this or any television show. April and Holly stand in the doorway smiling. Their goal, their stated and plotted goal, was to save glee club, at which they failed monumentally. And as they stand there watching the flame of New Directions burn out right before their very eyes, the manifestation of their failure, they toast their success. And also agree to celebrate by taking a lackadaisical trip around the world robbing banks. Have you ever seen a more astute metaphor?

Glee: Here’s what we’re going to do. Glee: [Fails spectacularly at what it said it was going to do.] Glee: [Glasses clink!] We did it! Glee: [Plots more crimes.]

Graduation is short and it is sweet. I really wanted to see Sue’s face when Blaine’s graduation speech was a half-hour-long choreographed musical montage complete with costumes and props and a smoke machine. Alas. Tina announces that she’s going to Brown, instead of New York. (Oh, Jenna Ushkowitz, I will miss how much you were able to do with how little you were given.) The New New Directions hug it out and say goodbye. (Oh, all you guys whose names I never learned except Alex Newell who is wonderful in every way, I’m sorry the writers never gave you something to do that made me care about you. You’re all very pretty.) Becky and Sue embrace on stage. (Oh, Lauren Potter, you are a wizard; I wish you’d had one last chance to flip a xylophone.) Santana even pulled some strings to get Brittany a diploma.

In the bathroom, Santana tells Brittany that her research into Lesbos has revealed some shocking information: It’s an island full of German tourists and not like an Olivia cruise. So, new plan. Lesbos, yes, for a while. Then Hawaii for a couple of weeks. And then Santana wants Brittany to come with her to New York to start a new life together. Brittany grins and shrugs shyly, like that’s all she’s been wanting Santana to say since she left Louisville. They kiss. And are perfect. And are endgame.

On the piano bench in the choir room that will soon be filled with computers, Will and Sue admit that even though they hate each other, they also love each other (and love to hate each other). Sue even got Will an interview to coach the kids over in Vocal Adrenaline. She’ll miss insulting him, mostly, and being inspired by him, occasionally. Oh, Sue. Won’t we all. She leaves, but before he goes, he turns off the lights and takes a bow.

Next week: Kurt and Blaine go shopping for twin beds, Sam gets a haircut, Artie is as boss in the Big Apple as he was in Lima, Rachel gets her own car and driver, and Brittany and Santana blow up FanFiction.net.

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