It was my 16-year-old cousin who texted to tell me Cory Monteith had passed away. I’d chatted to her months earlier at a family reunion. She’d been tucked away in a corner reading her Bible (no joke), too shy and self-conscious to talk to all these strangers who called themselves family. I asked her the normal things: school (fine), summer vacation (fine), getting her driver’s license (fine), hobbies (she plays multiple instruments in the band and the orchestra). And so I said: “Do you watch Glee?” Her posture relaxed, her breath escaped her body in a relieved rush of air, her face lit up like Christmas. Watch it? Watch it? She lived it.
She talked at me for two solid hours, barely pausing to breathe, telling me about artsy kids in her school getting slushied in real life, and how Glee was her refuge, her stronghold, and on TV it made her laugh and cry and swoon and it filled her up with a kind of bravery she didn’t know teenage musicians could have, and when it wasn’t on TV that was OK too, because she was in fandom. Did I know about fandom? Had I heard of it? Tumblr? Fan Fiction? AO3? She had two ships, she said (did I know what a ship was?), and one of them was Finn and Rachel (the ultimate supercouple) and one of them was Kurt and Blaine (duh, soul mates; but don’t tell her mom, OK?). And, if she was being honest, she kind of shipped herself with Finn too. She talked about Cory Monteith the way Ariel talked about Prince Eric.
It was funny listening to someone who adored Finn’s heroism, loved the way he was always swooping in to save the day. She watched TV in a way I barely even remember: eyes overbright with optimism, hands clasped in adoration, singing and swaying along with the music. She wasn’t deconstructing narrative as a feminist, examining every writing and directing choice through the lens of queer visibility, weighing every TV moment in front of her against a lifetime of damaging tropes behind her. She was sixteen. She’d never been in love. She’d never seen Superman get shot out of the sky.
That’s the main thing I was thinking leading up to “The Quarterback.” I was thinking about the day when you realize the world isn’t split into Jedis and Siths, about the day when you learn that good guys don’t always win, about the day when you finally understand that not every story has a happy ending. In fact, not everything that happens in life fits neatly into a narrative. There just aren’t stories for some things. I was thinking, “How does a show built on the promise of ‘It Gets Better’ contradict its core message with the heartbreaking truth that sometimes it doesn’t?” I was thinking, “How does a show that prides itself on Important Life Lessons tie a neat little morality bow on such an enormous tragedy?” I was thinking, “How do you write a story about death on a show that is a celebration of wide-open life?”
And shockingly (elegantly, even), Glee didn’t. “The Quarterback” didn’t pass a verdict on whether or not It Gets Better, it didn’t try to teach us anything, it wasn’t even a story. It was a showcase of the ways we grieve and a graceful, courageous invitation to mourn with a cast and crew who knew (really knew) and loved (really loved) Cory Monteith.
The episode opens with “Seasons of Love,” everyone dressed in black, newbies first and veterans later, somber faces and impossible questions about measuring the meaning of a life. Mr. Schue has invited everyone back to McKinley to celebrate Finn. When did he die? Three weeks ago. How did he die? Frankly, it’s none of our business, Kurt says. Everyone returns to Lima, except Rachel, whose grief is too big to even contemplate. (Well, and also there’s no Brittany or Quinn due to real-life babies and information we’re not privy to.) And once we’re in Ohio, we experience the loss of Finn through the eyes of the people closest to him.
There’s Finn’s family: Kurt, Burt, and Carol. Kurt wraps himself up in Finn’s letter jacket. Burt breaks down wishing he would have hugged him more, could hug him one more time right now. And Carol comes completely unraveled, saying she’ll wake up every day for the rest of her life as a parent, but she won’t have her child. It seems impossible that an episode featuring Monteith’s real-life girlfriend singing “Make You Feel My Love” would pack its most powerful emotional punch anywhere else, but Romy Rosemont‘s performance is absolutely devastating. The Hudson-Hummels wrap each other up in a giant Finn-sized hug, crying and know they’re going to miss their son and their brother forever.
There’s Finn’s friends: Puck arrives on the scene and steals the memorial tree that was planted in Finn’s honor, just to have a physical thing to hold onto. Finn was his rock and his moral compass and more than anyone else, Puck doesn’t know how he’s going to move on with his life without Finn’s guidance. He gets a drunk to deal with it until Coach Bieste finally convinces Puck that the best way to honor Finn is to become the man Finn always knew he could be. So he decides to join the Air Force. In this episode, it’s impossible to know where these characters stop and these actors start , but it’s very clear that Coach Beiste’s grief is all Dot Marie Jones.
Mercedes honors Finn with a solo of “I’ll Stand By You,” and of all the miracles Amber Riley has made with her voice over the years, this performance is her most earth-shaking. Artie and Sam lead New Directions in an acoustic performance of “Fire and Rain” that is as poignant as it is appropriate (“I always that that I’d see you again…”). Mark Salling gives us Springsteen‘s “No Surrender” and never makes eye contact with the camera or anyone else in the room.
And Santana. Santana whose heartache causes her to rush out during the middle of “If I Die Young,” a scream of anguish tearing itself from inside her. She takes all of her anger and rage at herself out on Sue, who graciously accepts it. And even she can’t make sense of the huge awfulness of losing someone with a heart like Finn’s. More than anyone else, they really counted on the full spectrum of Naya Rivera and Jane Lynch‘s abilities in this episode, and they crushed it. “Grief siesta” and “No me gusta” landed actual laughs, the physical and verbal assault on Sue was both shocking and real, and their collective inability to be vulnerable in front of the group rang really true.
And then there’s Rachel. Rachel shows up near the episode’s end to see Finn’s memorial and to perform “To Make You Feel My Love.” It was the first song she and Finn sang together in the car. How Lea Michele managed this, I’ll never know. The whole time she was singing, I was thinking of the phoenix song from Harry Potter, about Fawkes singing his beautiful, terrible lament and Harry marveling that the music was inside him, healing his soul somehow, speaking directly to his grief. I was thinking about Dumbledore saying, “Ah, music! A magic beyond all we do here!” And I was thinking Lea Michele knew all that, and this was her gift to the people who loved Finn and Rachel, and who loved Cory Monteith. It’s one of the bravest, most selfless things I’ve ever seen.
Rachel and Mr. Schue hang a Lillian Adler-esque photo of Finn in the choir room, with one of his own quotes engraved on it: “The show must go…all over the place…or something.”
Finn’s letter jacket is the only real plot of the episode. Kurt rescues it from Carol’s donation box, wraps himself up in it, wraps Santana up in it, and then it goes missing. It is Mr. Schue who has it, of course, and the episode closes with him clutching it and sobbing.
The reason I mentioned my cousin at the beginning is because of how she reminded me what it’s like to watch TV with pure, undiluted emotion. And because she was one of the people who needed Lea Michele’s phoenix song. And because sometimes I forget that Glee doesn’t exist to provide a perfect platform for moving the queer cultural conversation forward. And because my extended family has never accepted the fact that I’m gay. They’re mostly super-conservative, right-wing Christians who think I’m a deviant at best and demon-possessed at worst. It sounds silly, but in rural Georgia it’s not all that uncommon. When my cousin’s mom saw how animated her daughter was talking to me about Glee, she decided to watch it so she could connect with her kid too. She met Kurt, she met Santana, she met Brittany and Blaine and Unique. She liked them. She knew them. She finally understood that whole lesbian thing. She hugged me and cried and told me so.
All because her daughter fell in love with Finn Hudson.
Cory Monteith quarterbacked a show that has completely altered the landscape of LGBT television. He hosted the GLAAD Awards and talked openly and often about gay rights. And he was, by all accounts, a warm-hearted, soft-spoken, people-loving man who truly understood how much his character and his music meant to millions of people. He changed so many lives – and for all the shit I’ve given Finn over the years, it turns out Cory changed my life too.
What did you think of “The Quarterback”?
