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“Glee” Episode 207 Recap: Darn those noisy bisexual primates of Borneo

Last night’s episode of Glee had me at “Conjunction Junction.”

And it could have kept me, too, with just 10 seconds of Brittana, but no. Instead we got Mr. Schuester having sick sex with his ex. (By “sick” I mean an actual virus, not perversion — although on second thought, I mean both.)

We also, fortunately, got us some Kurt and Blaine, and much subtextual gayness as well, but for lesbians, there wasn’t much beyond the beautiful Gwyneth Paltrow as substitute teacher Miss Holly Holliday, and Sue Sylvester using the word”bisexual” in a sentence.

Oh, and Rachel and Miss Holliday channeling Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon from Chicago. If that counts, which I’m not sure it does, given their lack of chemistry.

The episode opens with a super-gross scene in which Lauren (Ashley Fink) is prompted by a masked-and-gloved Sue to sneeze an infectious dose of Borneo bisexual primate virus all over Principal Figgins. (I hate when that happens.)

With Figgins incapacitated, a clause in Sue’s contract, negotiated when she blackmailed a member of the town council, makes her principal. Her first mission, she tells Will, is to destroy the Glee Club.

“I thought we were friends,” he whimpers.

“That got boring,” says Sue. (For us too, Sue.)

Will ends up getting the virus, and before crawling home to his bed, he hallucinates the whole class as little grade-school versions of themselves. Naturally this scene was impossibly adorable, and for that reason has already been discussed, video-ized, Facebooked,Tweeted, screen-capped, analyzed and for all I know, had an extensive fan fiction oeuvre developed for it, already. It would most likely be entirely gratuitous for me to add to that beyond saying that, while adult-Rachel is not my favorite character, mini-Rachel was my favorite mini-character.

Anyway, with Mr. Schue out for a while, Rachel steps up to lead New Directions, prompting the show’s hottest moment, Santana surging up out of her chair to kill her while her fellow Glee Clubbers hold her back. (Rewind, rewind.)

Kurt, who we learn has been spending all his free time with Blaine (cue angel song and fluttering doves), takes a more devious approach to the problem, and asks Miss Holly Holliday, the substitute teacher who took over Mr. Schue’s Spanish class, to take over Glee Club, too.

Miss Holliday, who is teaching her students to say “Lindsay Lohan has been in rehab five times” in Spanish, is at first reluctant. How, she asks Kurt, could you suggest such a thing?

Kurt gives her his patented glowing look, which we are seeing much more often now that he’s met Blaine,and says that she subbed in his English class one day and he never forgot it.

That’s when we get a flashback to Miss Holliday and friends performing… be still my heart… “Conjunction Junction.”

It was perhaps the most awesome moment in the history of Glee except for when Brittany and Santana were making out and talking about scissoring, and possibly that time that Kurt’s father said he loved him and threw Finn out, and okay, it was pretty cool when Sue Sylvester … okay. You get my point. It was an extremely great moment in Glee history, but not the greatest. As was when Kurt turned to one of his classmates and stated,”You smell homeless, Brett. Homeless.”

Rachel is all a-twitter over Miss Holliday stepping in, but when she starts asking them what songs they’d like to do that Mr. Schuester never let them do (flashback to Mr. Schue saying, “Come on, guys. There has to be one Journey song we haven’t done!”), they warm to her.

“There was that one Cee-Lo song,” Puck says (I guess his days of singing only songs by Jews are long over), which is Miss Holliday’s cue to launch into a sanitized version of his “F–k You,” now sung as “Forget You.”

Which really makes me wonder, if you have to dip the song in bleach before you can sing it, why not sing another song? And yes, I mean both “making the song cleaner” and “making the song whiter” when I use the word “bleach.”

Although the sheer ecstatic joyfulness of watching Kurt dance, first with Holly and then, adorably, with Santana, is enough to make me forget I ever had a political or music-critical thought in my head. So, you know … carry on dancing.

Sue’s next target is the football team, which she announces she’s disbanding immediately. Coach Beiste points out that her Cheerios will have no one to cheer for, and Sue,once more unaccountably thwarted by the Beiste, slinks off in defeat. But not for long; she tells her right-hand Cheerio, Becky Jackson, she’s going to ban the consumption of tater tots on campus — which isn’t going to go over well with Mercedes, who has been loading up on tots to help her deal with losing her BFF Kurt to his new “friend,” Blaine.

“Outstanding,” says Becky approvingly. And may I take this moment to say how much I heart Becky Jackson this season?

So, Mr. Schuester is home watching cooking shows on television and suffering from a high fever. He wakes up to find his scary stalker ex, Terri, soothing his fevered brow and spoon-feeding him chicken soup. She points out that however toxic their marriage was, she was always good at taking care of them.

“That’s because you like me when I’m weak,” he says.

Kurt and Mercedes are in the school cafeteria, and he tells her has to cancel his plans with her because Blaine got them tickets to Rent at the community theater.

Mercedes asks if Kurt and Blaine are going out, and if they are, he needs to tell the rest of Glee Club.

Kurt scoffs; “This isn’t some Jesse-Rachel traitor situation,” he says. “We’re just hanging out. Glee Club never even comes up.”

Given all the debate as to whether or not Kurt and Blaine will have a full-fledged romance, I found this whole arc extremely interesting. Mercedes is feeling the loss of her tots, but also of Kurt’s friendship. Even when he’s with her, all he talks about is Blaine,and I’m starting to like how they’re handling the development of this relationship. Yeah, I read all the interviews with Ryan Murphy about how even they don’t know what’s going to happen blah blah blah, and I’ve heard it all before. I think they’re showing Kurt and Blaine get to know each other and flirt and be cute and cautious with each other just like a lot of teenagers do, and it’s really very adorable.

And again, I love how we have this cat-like sexy predator,Santana, and the cheerful slut, Brittany, as Team Girl, and take-it-slow starry-eyed romantic Kurt and Blaine as Team Boy. This show can work my last feminist nerve sometimes, but I still find that to be fascinatingly subversive— not that I trust them not to screw up Brittana, given the complete lack of any explanation of how they got from “Duets” to here. (Oh, yeah, I’m bitter.)

Will continues to have a high fever, and has a bizarre dream in which he and Mike Chang are dancing to “Make ’em Laugh” from Singing in the Rain. It’s amusing. The dancing is great, Mike’s more so than Will’s. It’s also completely random, other than the little bit of a”Singing in the Rain” theme that runs through the whole episode, even if I can’t quite make sense out of that. Any of you old-movie buffs see a deeper meaning here?

Rachel is still so concerned that her path to total world Glee Club domination is going to be thwarted by Miss Holliday that she’s masked up and come to see if Mr. Schue can take over again. We get a flashback of Sue and Holly watching “Hoarders” together while touching up their highlights;I’d pay money for a few more minutes of that scene. But even though Will’s concerned, he’s still too sick to return.

In the meantime, the Cheerios sweep the school cafeteria and dump all the tots in the trash. “They look like deep-fried deer poop,” says Brittany. Mercedes has a small melt-down and storms into Sue’s office where we find out that Richard Nixon is one of Sue’s heroes and role models.

Miss Holliday tries to mend things with Rachel by telling her she’s totally annoying. Then Holly asks Rachel if there’s anything she wants to sing that she never got to (flashback to Rachel suggesting a number and Mr. Schue saying “No, but I have good news! I found a Journey song we haven’t done!”). Holly and Rachel kiss and make up in true Glee fashion, by agreeing to do a number together.

Back at the Schuester Infirmary, evil ex Terri is still doing her Florence Nightingale routine, which morphs into naughty nurse, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Okay, so, Kurt has done his gay BFF duty and tried to fix Mercedes up with Anthony Rashad, a guy from the football team who’s also president of the Black Student Union.

“It has nothing to do with the fact that he’s one of only five black students in this school?” she asks. “Does he have any non-black activities?”

“I don’t know,” Kurt says, exasperated. “MyGoogle search was a little…” and he shrugs.

He’s just assuring Mercedes that love is just around thecorner when Dave Karofsky walks by.”Wassup, homo?” he says, and winks.

Mercedes may not know what to make of that, but she is missing her tots — she climbs up on a chair and silently holds up a sign reading “TOTS,” doing her best Norma Rae impersonation while the rest of the students chant in support while Sue and Becky fume.

Rachel and Miss Holliday do a lackluster version of “Nowadays / Hot Honey Rag” from Chicago, and then Will finds out that Sue has now been named permanent principal of McKinley High, and he’s fired.

Finally, we see Blaine again! He and Kurt and Mercedes are at Breadstix, and this scene was really just too perfect. The two boys are finishing each other’s sentences and they both have the same favorite Vogue cover for 2010, and if these two aren’t having a romance, I’m just going to quit watching television shows for money and go back to work as a pet columnist.

I also kind of like that Mercedes is bored instead of hanging on the gay boys’ every word (all of which she hears as “Gay gay gay gay gay gay gay.” Except for the part where every time Kurt opens his mouth, a little purse falls out).

Back at McKinley, Mercedes stuffs a platter of tater tots up the tailpipe of Sue’s car, which turns out to be a rare and expensive 1979 LeCar that suffered $17,000 worth of damage for her little act of civil disobedience. That’s a felony, Sue tells her, adding, “I and my attorney, Gloria Allred, will be pressing charges.”

Miss Holliday is in the room with them, but when Mercedes turns to her to intercede, she is clueless about what to do.

Realizing she’s in over her head as a permanent teacher,Holly goes to see Will, and confesses that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”I’m a terrible teacher,” she tells him.

It didn’t used to be that way, she says, until a student named Cameo (“She looked like an attractive Biggie Smalls”) hit her in the face one day. Since then, she’s refused to settle down in a job or an apartment. “Last year, a guy asked me to marry him, and I moved.”

Then crazy stalker Terri walks in and says she’s Will’s wife. “Ex-wife,” he corrects her. “This is Holly Holliday.”

“Are you a porn star or a drag queen?” Terri asks. (Okay, that was clever.)

“Wow, your wife’s a bitch,” Holly says.

Will tells Terri to get out, and Terri says he’ll regret it. I have no doubt of that. I’m guessing we’re heading for some major drama here.

Mercedes and Kurt are back at their lockers — and we see that Kurt has a photo of Blaine in his locker (he did last episode, too, but I missed it the first time). Mercedes proudly shows him she’s smuggled in tots,and he frowns, then sets his chin.

“I’m not breaking it off with Blaine,” he tells her. “I really like him. You are substituting food for love, Mercedes. And more importantly, you’re substituting me for a boyfriend.”

I’m going to break into his speech here, because what happens later is not something I want to interrupt mid-stream with commentary. But I feel a need to point out that’s not all Mercedes is doing. She’s also being pissed off that Kurt has twice now canceled plans with her to do something with Blaine. Being less available because you’re in a new relationship is always hard, but it’s understandable. Actually canceling plans with your old friends to spend time with a new friend or lover is rude, and Mercedes should be mad about it. But back to Kurt’s speech:

“Look at me; two weeks ago, I thought there was no way I’d ever find someone like Blaine. But there he was! You will find somebody. Until then, you’ve just got to take care of yourself. Treat yourself with a little respect.”

“You’re right,” she says, and heads off in search of Anthony — with, however, her tots still clutched in her arms.

Then, bam, the scene changes. Dave is there, looming over Kurt, who looks at him defiantly.

“Question for you,” Dave says. “You tell anyo ne else what happened? How you … kissed me?” He looks slightly vulnerable here.

“You kissed me, Karofsky,” Kurt answers.”And I understand how hard this is for you, so no. I haven’t told anyone.”

“Good,” Dave says. “You keep it that way.Because if you do, I’m going to kill you.”

And he walks off, leaving Kurt standing there, stunned.

All the people I talked to about this scene believe it makes a Kurt/Dave romantic relationship less likely, but I’m not reassured. I think such a relationship would be really twisted, and I’d have a very hard time watching this show if its creators thought having Kurt get involved with someone who physically attacked him, harassed him, forced an unwanted kiss on him, and then threatened his life was in any way romantic or even vaguely okay. I think it’s romanticizing violence to even play with this, and I hope to hell I’m reading this scene wrong; certainly every single person I asked thinks I am.

Anyway, that’s the end of that arc for the week. We get one more visit to Sue’s office, where she re-hires Will, and says the Glee Club members convinced her to bring him back. (I’m sure Brittany cinched it by saying, “He taught me the second half of the alphabet. I stopped after m and n; I thought they were too similar and got frustrated.”)

The club will have to pay to fix her Le Car, however. She has an idea for how Will can help them raise the money: “I suggest you sell yourself on Craigslist under ‘Men seeking men with butt chins.'”

Will then pitches “Singin’ in the Rain” for Sectionals, and the students are less than enthusiastic. Faster than you can say “plot device,” he finds Holly at her newest temporary teaching assignment, and implores her to help him make the number “more modern.”

She comes back and they do a mash-up of “Singin’ in the Rain” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” with a stage flooded with rain and more rain falling from overheard, and everyone playing with their umbrellas while they sing and dance. It’s cool, it’s fun, it’s great, it’s fantastic, but it’s completely impossible to believe McKinley High could create an effect like this, or sustain all this water on the stage, or clean up after it. And if this number is supposed to be a Sectionals candidate, why were Mr. Schue and Miss Holliday so prominent in it?

Sorry to be a squee-harsher. I’m all about the suspension of disbelief in this show, but this one went too far.

So to sum up: Too much evil ex, just the right amount of Kurt, and not even remotely, not even close to, enough Brittana. Could someone please do something about that?

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