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“Glee” Episode 206 Recap: And Kurt’s Still Never Been Kissed

I’ve seen a lot of comments about how this episode had a plot, and it did. It had tons of plot. But it also had a theme, and I don’t mean a musical theme. In fact, musically this episode was kind of forgettable.

Everything in “Never Been Kissed” was about things being the opposite of what they seem — Coach Beiste, who’s hard and tough on the outside, turns out to be soft and lonely on the inside. Tough guy Puck is scared and runs away, and Kurt stands up and fights back against the abusive slushy-tossing football goon, who turns out to be a serious closet case. And, in case anyone out there missed it, we had the big thematic anvil of this week’s Glee Club challenge: Boys doing songs conventionally done by girls, and girls doing classic/hard rock.

Of course, we can’t escape the real theme of this season of Glee, which is hygiene. No, no shower scene this week (sorry, boys), but Sam and Finn take side-by-side baths — Finn in steaming hot water, Sam in a tub of ice. (Theme alert.)

The two bond over the fact that they found the “only two girls in the school who won’t put out,” and share tips on how to “cool off” when things get too hot. Finn, as we know, uses the tragic encounter of the hood of his car and a postal carrier, and Sam decides to visualize Coach Beiste in her underwear.

In the halls of McKinley High, slushy-throwing jock goon is on a rampage of harassing Kurt, slamming him into lockers whenever he sees him. Also, the Glee Club’s own bad boy is back from his stint in juvie. That’s right, the Puck drought is over. Let there be rejoicing across the land, etc.

Mr. Schuester announces that their competition for sectionals will be an all-boys private school, Dalton Academy (“Oh wait, hold up,” says Santana. “Like, a million awesome gay jokes just popped into my head.”) and “The Hipsters,” a group of elderly people going for their GEDs.

Will decides to repeat last year’s “boys against the girls” challenge, and as the groups split up, without even turning around to see how they’re organizing themselves, he says, “Kurt. I’m going to say it again: Boys’ team.”

Kurt drags himself over to the Neanderthals, I mean, the guys, and sits down, misery and isolation written all over his face. It would be his usual tragic diva routine, except it’s clearly not. We know this because Chris Colfer is a god with the acting. He can say more with one little quiver of his lip than the rest of the cast with an hour of well-written speeches.

Also, Mr. Schue? You suck.

Back in the halls, Puck swoops down on Artie and says he’s taking him under his wing as his community service, a requirement of his probation from juvie. He can’t go back to the detention center, he tells Artie; “There are no chicks, and no kosher meal selections.”

And as they pass by, football goon (I should look up his name, shouldn’t I? Okay, it’s Dave Karofsky, played by Max Adler) goes after Kurt again. But this time Kurt lashes out. “What is your problem?”

Goon, er, Dave, is all, “Do you want a piece of the fury?” Which it turns out is his pet name for his fist.

“With that level of creativity,” Kurt tells him, “you could end up being assistant manager at a rendering plant.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Dave replies, “but if I find out it’s bad, the fury’s gonna find you.” Said with a slam against the locker for emphasis.

Finally an adult notices Kurt’s repeated crash landings against a bank of lockers; Mr. Schue sits him down, gives him a cup of water (does he think Kurt is Cindy Lou Who, who was not more than two?) and asks, “Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” Kurt says. “This is my hill to climb alone.”

Okay, Kurt’s wrong and being a drama queen, but hello, Mr. Schuester. You’re an adult. You don’t ask the teenage queer kid who is being slammed around by a homophobic goon if there’s anything you can do. You freaking well figure out what you need to do and then you do it. Complete fail.

Ah, but it gets worse.

“Can I be honest?” Will says. “I think it’s getting to you. [Ya think???] Usually this stuff [what, being bashed????] just rolls right off your back. But lately, you’ve been belligerent, angry, pushing people away…”

Kurt snaps back, “Can I be honest with you? You and everyone else at this school are too quick to let homophobia slide. And your lesson plans are boring and repetitive. I mean, boys against girls? That doesn’t challenge any of us.”

Will meeps how Kurt’s just mad because he wouldn’t let him sing with the girls, and Kurt stands up and says, sure, he’s lonely and unhappy because he’s the only out gay kid in the school, but his real problem is he’s never challenged at McKinley. Too fierce for this world, Kurt.

Will does take what Kurt says to heart, and tightens up the Glee Club challenge by saying the boys have to sing songs traditionally done by girl groups, and the girls have to do hard/classic rock (because, of course, Janis Joplin, Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, and Melissa Etheridge were never born. But I digress.)

So Sam and Quinn are making out, and I’d skip that whole scene because what on earth is the advantage of writing for a totally queer website if you have to cover the opposite sex kissing stuff, but damn them, they snuck some plot in there. Basically Sam calls Quinn “Beiste” during a heated moment when he invokes his coach’s lingerie-clad image to help prevent a little unwanted spillage.

Quinn storms off to Sue for advice (say what?), and Sue sees it as a possible way to rid herself of Coach Beiste and get her full budget back. She encourages Quinn to make a big public scene with Sam about the issue.

Puck, still giving the love to Artie as his community service project, sets them up as buskers on campus, then intimidates the students into throwing money into his guitar case. Which he says they’re going to use to double date with Santana and Brittany. And Puck gives some excruciatingly bad advice about women to Artie, and makes snotty comments about my beloved Brittana, and I’m really starting to hate you, Puck.

Meanwhile, or for all I know it’s a week later, Kurt goes off to spy on their competition at the all-boys school. I can’t imagine why he chose that as his target, can you?

Now, half the Glee viewing audience was waiting to see Santana and Brittany make out, which we saw a couple episodes ago, and the other half was waiting for this: The first time Kurt and Blaine (Darren Criss) lay eyes on each other. (Yes, I’m ignoring any part of the audience that is interested in anything else. This is my own all-queer version of Glee.)

I kind of like that the girl/girl couple on this show is all angsty and promiscuous and unconventional while the boy/boy couple goes running down the Brideshead Revisted-esque halls of an all-boys school while holding hands. Edgy.

The little banter when they meet, and the hand-holding thing, give the video clip of Blaine flirting with Kurt while he sings “Teenage Dream” a whole new context. So while my initial feeling was, “If you hurt Kurt I will cut you,” I’m now totally on Team Kurt/Blaine. If someone would just explain to me what we’re supposed to call them … I mean, Kaine? Blurt? Kuaine? Help a girl out.

Blah blah, Mike and Tina making out. Tina makes a joke about Mike’s abs, and then it turns out she’s using Coach Beiste dressed as a ballerina as her “cooling off” technique, and she also calls Beiste’s name instead of Mike’s. Then Quinn picks her fight, loudly, with Sam, and Coach Beiste and Will both overhear it, and Mike comes by and warns Coach Beiste to stay away from his woman, and then Will gives Mike and Sam the obligatory lecture about how Coach Beiste is an outsider just like the glee kids and that they suck. Okay, back to the queer storyline.

Blaine and two other Dalton students take Kurt out for coffee, and Kurt hesitatingly asks if they’re all gay. Turns out only Blaine is, but Dalton has a “zero tolerance” policy regarding harassment, and therefore everyone in the school is totally cool. (Skipping over the complete unreality of that; this is Glee, after all.)

Blaine then asks his friends to excuse him and Kurt, and the straight guys leave. And Blaine goes right to the heart of things, and asks Kurt if he’s being bullied at school. Kurt cries and admits he is, and Blaine says that he was “taunted” at his old school, too, and that’s why he transferred to Dalton.

Blaine says he tried to tell some of the faculty, but their attitude was, “Hey, if you’re gay, your life is going to be miserable. Sorry about that.”

He advises Kurt to stand up for himself, and says he needs to teach football goon something, to help him with his ignorance. (Yes, because it’s on us to fix homophobes. Great.)

It turns out Blaine regrets that he let bullies at his old school make him run away, and he doesn’t want to see Kurt do the same. (Allow me to say, this advice really sucks, and is an excellent way to get your head bashed in with a bat. Not that I have bitter and terrifying past experiences to base that on or anything. And I grew up in San Francisco, not Lima, Ohio.)

So, the girls are sewing costumes for their number when Artie and Puck come in. “Remember,” Puck warns Artie, “don’t trust your instincts.” Then they act like total jerks and Brittany and Santana swoon over them and I just want to delete this whole scene from both my DVR and my memory. Along with the date when they go on it. Yuck.

So let’s just skip ahead to the girls’ song. They chose Bon Jovi’s “Living On a Prayer” mashed with the Stones’ “Start Me Up,” and let me just say Heather Morris, Heather Morris, Heather Morris, in leather, with her tummy peeking out, and dancing her leather-clad ass off shaking her hair in the wind machine. (I sincerely apologize to all of you who have a thing for anyone else in this scene. If there was anyone else.)

And then in the middle of all that, Kurt gets a text from Blaine, just one word: “Courage.” And he’s glowing and radiating enough light to fuel New York City and Brittany is dancing and there’s all this hairography and how I see it is, best queer minute on television ever.

Becky Jackson runs in as everyone’s applauding wildly, with a note from Sue demanding Will’s presence in the auditorium.

Sue has her two confetti cannons back, and she blows them off and laughs maniacally as she tells Will that Coach Beiste quit. “And it was your kids who made it happen, Will. It finally occurred to them to stop singing all that nonsense about how awesome it is to be alive or ugly or whatever the point is you guys are always trying to make. And instead, they just got mean. Congratulations, Will.”

Will’s shocked. “What, Coach Beiste quit?”

“I believe I just said that, Annie Sullivan. You want me to sign it into your palm?” she replies.

Will, of course, looks deeply troubled. And then Kurt’s walking down the hall, mooning over his “courage” text from Blaine, when goon sends him and his iPhone flying into the lockers. Again.

This time Kurt’s had enough, and flies after Dave into the locker room. Dave’s all, get out of here and stay way from my junk.

Kurt is furious and full of scorn. “Guess what, ham hock,” he says. “You’re not my type.”

“That right?” chokes Ham Hock.

“I don’t dig on chubby guys who sweat too much and are going to be bald by the time they’re thirty.”

This of course inspires Dave to rev up the fury, but Kurt just keeps sneering at him. “You can’t punch the gay out of me any more than I can punch the ignoramus out of you. You are nothing but a scared little boy who can’t handle how extraordinarily ordinary you are.”

And then Dave looks like he’s going to explode or cry, and he grabs Kurt and kisses him. Hard.

And then he breaks away, and flees, and Kurt stands there with his hand pressed to his mouth with so many emotions on his face it made me want to smash the TV screen and get him a puppy and a car and really, anything at all he wanted.

Will someone get Chris Colfer an Emmy like, yesterday? He can take the most over the top, clichéd scene and make it feel real and important.

Will gathers the Glee Club kids and tells them they drove Coach Beiste out, and how disappointed and upset he is at them. She’s a person, he says, with feelings. Rachel is confused and asks what she did, and Finn says, no, it was them. The boys.

“And Tina,” says Mike.

Santana says the whole mess is because Quinn and Rachel won’t put out: “If everyone just put out, we’d have a winning football team.”

Principal Figgins comes in then, asking Will to come to the office. It turns out Puck’s probation officer is not happy that Puck’s “community service” is helping Artie get a date, and she threatens to get him sent back to juvie.

Puck complete melts down, and for the first time in the episode, I get the point of his arc. “Since when does any one of you care about helping me?” he yells as he slams his probation officer’s notebook to the floor.

I saw the parallel with Kurt’s situation, although it’s pretty hard to wrap my brain around Puck — big, strong, popular Puck, who throws Kurt and Artie into dumpsters on a regular basis — as a kid in need of help. But maybe that’s on me.

As if we hadn’t already had a lot of Kurt/Blaine goodness, we see Blaine and Kurt walking up the outside stairs at McKinley High. Blaine’s there to get Kurt’s back in a confrontation with Dave about the locker room kiss and the bullying.

Dave sees the two of them, and starts his usual mocking routine. Blaine tells him Kurt told him what happened, and Dave says, “And what’s that?”

“You kissed me,” Kurt says.

Dave denies it, and Blaine says he understands Dave’s confused, but he needs to know he’s not alone. And Dave slams Blaine into the wall, which makes Kurt totally lose it; he flies to Blaine’s defense and I had chills.

Blaine seems a little shaken, but he just says, “Well, he’s not coming out any time soon.”

Kurt sits on the stairs, and tears are in his eyes. Blaine is totally freaked out and worried, and sits next to him, asking him what’s wrong.

Kurt says until the day before with Dave, he’s never been kissed before — at least not one that counted. And he starts to cry. And right then, totally, in a just world, Blaine would have kissed Kurt. And I’m still really angry that he didn’t, but instead, he says, “Let me buy you lunch.” And they go off, not even touching.

Will has gone to see Coach Beiste, to convince her not to quit. “I get it,” he tells her. “All of us are scarred by high school.”

Coach Beiste doesn’t really think Will gets it. She talks about how she’s two people, her tough, masculine outside, and the girl inside. She says that she’s not gay, and has only been involved with one guy, who was a freak.

“I’ve never been kissed, Will,” she says, and then she makes the observation that kissing is the “doorway” to all kinds of other experiences that make us human. Which obviously was about her and about not fitting in when you don’t gender-conform, but of course, it was about Kurt, too, and his feelings of not belonging, not being safe. It was really quite powerful.

Then Will kisses her, and seriously? He’s being nice and all, but that’s just crap. But she takes it a friendly way and they hug. And she agrees to come let the Glee Club guys apologize to her.

Artie rolls up to Puck, who is emptying his locker into his backpack. Turns out he’s so terrified of going back to juvie — which he’d earlier claimed to have “ruled” when he was there — that he’s going to take off. He won’t just do the alternative community service, because picking up trash is too “ghetto” for him.

So now we’ve seen our brave diva, Kurt, stand up to a dangerous bully, and tough-guy Puck running away from his problems.

Artie offers to tutor Puck in geometry and kind of be his pal while he’s doing his trash duty, and I suddenly think, hmmm, I could ship these guys. And would their name be “Partie”?

And then I’m completely stunned because Dave slams Kurt into a locker again, and Kurt just sinks to the floor, the most amazing array of emotions flitting over his face — again, paging Emmy for Chris Colfer — and even while my heart was breaking for him, a tiny part of my femme-y little brain knew that I wanted his yellow boots.

Coach Beiste shows up at Glee Club and the guys apologize by singing The Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love” mashed up with En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind.” And the episode ended with a big group hug, and her forgiving them and deciding to stay at McKinley.

And Kurt has still never (really) been kissed.

Selected #gaysharks tweets about this episode…

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