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“Glee” Episode 301 Recap: Glee’s Got the Beat! Yeah! They Got It!

It’s Jacob Ben Israel (Josh Sussman) and his microphone, so this must be the start of a new school year at McKinley High. We get equal parts heavy-handed exposition and salacious gossip-mongering, just what we need to know that yes, my darlings: Glee is back!

Allow me to recap the recap: Mercedes and Sam are “so last June” and Sam moved out of state when his father got a job. Mercedes has a new football-playing boyfriend, Marcus (Lamarcus Tinker), and he knows she’s going to be a big star. Artie and Tina are juniors, but Mike Chang is a senior, as are Finn, Rachel, and Kurt. Finn has absolutely no idea what he wants to be when he grows up, but Kurt and Rachel are heading for New York City as fast as they can click their shiny red heels together and say, “There’s no place like Broadway.”

According to Santana, senior year “is all about being the Cheerios top “O” (or possibly “ho.” It’s hard to tell) ‘… and modelling my fierceness after my numero uno Latina, Paula Abdul!”

Jacob reminds her “that Paula Abdul is an Arab.”

Finn thinks to himself that he doesn’t know who he is, and is quickly reminded with a slushy in the face. “Taste the rainbow, beyotch!”

Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink) has dumped both Puck and the Glee Club, to keep her coolness quotient up. I’d be sobbing over that but rumor has it she’ll still have a strong storyline later in the season. I love me some Zizes.

Now that we’re all caught up, we get a scene with Will and Emma in bed together. I feel like I just walked in on my parents. Please make it go away.

At McKinley, Will sets out the 12th place trophy from Nationals and tells the kids he’s not going to let them down this year. Especially, it seems, since the guy who replaced him in April Rhodes‘ show won a Tony. Ouch.

He brings in a bunch of purple pianos, reclaimed from foreclosed homes, and says he’s having them set randomly around the school. He wants the New Directions kids to break out in song whenever they see one, as a way of recruiting new members. This will not end well.

Rachel and Kurt tell Emma they intend to go to Julliard in New York City, only to have their dreams crushed when she tells them there’s no musical theater department at Julliard. She arranges for them to attend a mixer of local students who want to go to The New York Academy of the Dramatic Arts in New York.

“You can check out the competish,” she says. Oh, Emma. You’ve changed. It worries me.

Meanwhile in Sue‘s office, Becky is giving her advice on her run for Congress. She’s currently behind a rapist running from his prison cell and “don’t call me at dinner time,” so she’s pretty desperate. She thought, she tells Becky, that people wanted to vote for someone who was for something, but her pro-deportation platform didn’t catch fire.

“People are angry,” she tells Becky. “They want a candidate who’s against something.”

“Be against toast,” Becky suggests. “Bread’s already baked. I don’t get toast.”

“Oh Becky, your twisted genius excites me,” Sue says. But she has a different idea: she’s going to run on an anti-arts platform. She launches it by smashing one of the purple pianos and making racist comments to Mike and Tina. Hi, Sue! I’ve missed you!

She’s not the only one I missed. Our darling boys, Kurt and Blaine, are in their local coffeehouse.

“You’re quiet,” Blaine says.

“No, I’m passive aggressive,” Kurt corrects him. Seems Blaine is not being as swift to transfer to McKinley as Kurt expected. He doesn’t think being competitors will be good for their love, but there’s more.

“I just honestly want to see you more,” Kurt says, not at all passive-aggressively. “I want my senior year to be magic, and the only way that can happen is if I spend every minute of every day with you.”

ASDFGHKL. Tell me that wasn’t the sweetest thing anyone has ever said in the history of Glee?

To serve as a bitter-spicy chaser to the Klaine sugar-fest, we get our first glimpse of former good girl Quinn, who now has pink hair, piercings, and “an ironic tattoo of Ryan Seacrest.”

She struts her bad-ass stuff past the playing field, where a perky Brittany and Santana try to get her back on the Cheerios. “I have a bar of soap and a bottle of peroxide in my locker with your name on it,” Santana says. “Come on, Quinn; you can’t break up the unholy trinity.” And a thousand fanfics are launched. (Or actually… didn’t this episode kind of remind you of a thousand fanfics? Check those writers’ Tumblr accounts.)

Anyway, our Quinn, it seems, has joined up with a bunch of girls who dwell beneath the bleachers. They’re known as “The Skanks,” and Quinn is not just wearing ripped up clothes and too much eyeliner, she’s smoking. And not in a “smoking hot” kind of way. In the yellow-toothed, lung cancer kind of way. Euuuw.

Rachel follows her into the netherworld and tries to get her to come back to Glee Club, but Quinn isn’t buying that any more than she bought the Cheerios.

Sue announces her anti-arts campaign on Sue’s Corner, and then she and Will rehash their old enmity for the forty bazillionth time. Sue is going to destroy the Glee Club. Where have I heard that before?

Becky and Santana are in Sue’s office. Sue has covered the seats in plastic, she says, because the girls are going to wet themselves when they find out they’re going to be co-captains of the Cheerios. Santana manages to threaten to cut Becky while still indicating she respects her as a human being and doesn’t look down on her for her disability. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it is, and I think Naya Rivera should get an Emmy immediately. And no, I’m not biased. Why do you ask?

Sue recruits Becky and Santana to the anti-arts cause, and tells them to destroy the purple pianos. Then she gives Santana a sharp eye. “You like to play it both ways,” she says smoothly.

Santana’s eyelashes flicker in a way that makes me want to give her another Emmy.

Sue presses on. “Which team are you on: winners or losers?”

“Team Sue,” Santana says brightly.

It doesn’t last long, though; when the Glee Club bursts into the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” in the school cafeteria, Santana and Brittany run hand in hand to the stage, I mean, tabletops, and shake their Cheerio’d butts for all they’re worth. And those particular butts? Worth their weight in gold. On behalf of the Lesbian Nation, I thank the costume designer, the choreographer, and the director for making this moment possible, even if we did have to really dig for our Brittana in this episode.

When they’re done, instead of inspiring a stampede to sign up for New Directions, they’ve inspired Becky to start a food fight.

When it’s over, Brittany complains, “I have pepperoni in my bra.”

Santana sighs. “Those are your nipples,” she says. Ooops, and there’s another thousand fanfics.

The performance did inspire one try-out, new student Sugar Motta (Vanessa Lengies), who has “self-diagnosed Asperger’s” and says whatever she damn well pleases. She performs (note I didn’t say “sings”) “Big Spender,” while everyone in the room looks ill except for Brittany, who is totally grooving on it.

Will is in agony. He tells Coach Beiste that he’s never turned anyone down for Glee Club (not true, Mr. Schue; you turned Becky down last year).

Coach Beiste says that just that day she cut 60 guys from the football team. “I crushed ’em like pigs in a blanket.”

The arts are different, Mr. Schue argues.

“If you win Nationals this year,” Beiste says, “that will buy ten more years of Glee Club.”

Emma joins them and says Sue is rising in the polls. Beiste offers to “go Deliverance” on her, which I would pay money to see, but Will says it will be his fight. Something else I sense will not end well.

Now, normally I’m all about the Kurt and Rachel friendship and their mutual diva-osity, but they do a duet to “Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead,” and it kind of made me cringe. I think we’re supposed to cringe at it; if so, it worked. Although I did fall just a little in love with Kurt’s outfit.

In the gym, Sue is holding cheerleading try-outs. She tells Santana and Becky she has no intention of bringing on anyone new; she just wants to see people cry. Will, however, has other plans; while Emma videos them, Will dumps a bucket of glitter on Sue’s head. “You’ve just been glitter bombed.”

Kurt, in another awesome outfit, is just touching up his hair at his locker when his boyfriend turns up, wearing a bow tie and not his Warbler’s outfit. Yes, Blaine has transferred to McKinley. And we’re only 36 minutes into the first episode of the season. I love Glee. (And by the way, no, that’s not some kind of deep and sarcastic statement. I really love Glee and if Blaine didn’t transfer I’d have cried. It’s true love.)

The two embrace right there in the hallway, and then Kurt pulls back. “Wait… you didn’t do this for me, did you? Because if you did this for me, it would be very romantic, but it could lead to resentment, which can lead to horrible, horrible, nasty breakup…”

“Hey,” Blaine says, “I came here for me, because I can’t stand to be away from the person I love.”

Sigh.

So after the second most romantic scene of the night, Blaine teams up with the Cheerios and does a kick-ass version of “It’s Not Unusual.” And flirts with Kurt and shakes booty with Santana. I’m fairly sure this is the gayest show there has ever been. Are you with me?

At the conclusion of the number, Quinn walks by and tosses a lit cigarette on the purple piano, which bursts into flames. Maybe I was just too distracted by the awesomeness that is Santana Lopez, but when it’s later said that the Cheerios were responsible for that act of arson, I kind of didn’t get it. Did they douse it in lighter fluid? Did we get told that, or were we just supposed to assume it?

If you’d like to know how many stitches are in the hem of Santana’s Cheerios skirt, however, I can tell you that.

After being serenaded by his boyfriend, Kurt trots off to the NYADA mixer with Rachel. The two of them are prepared to blow the other students’ minds with their musical theater amazingness, but things don’t go as planned.

They’re greeted at the door by The Glee Project fourth-place finalist Lindsay Pearce and a cast of Rachel and Kurt clones, who perform a well-rehearsed version of “Anything Goes” mashed up with “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”

Since Lindsay is one of the main reasons I couldn’t stand to watch The Glee Project, and no, she can’t sing remotely as well as Lea Michele, and none of the boys there was close to being as darling as Kurt, I was forced to suspend disbelief when the whole experience devastated Kurt and Rachel.

Sobbing in the car afterward, Rachel says, “They were so…”

“Fabulous,” sniffles Kurt.

He goes on. “Rachel, we might be hot stuff at McKinley, but outside the walls, we’re not even stuff.”

Rachel says that their only choice is to move to another town, erase their identities, and resign themselves to a life of community theater.

Kurt says he is ending the pity party. “Rachel Berry, you are one of a kind. There’s no one like you.”

She disagrees. “It’s actually kind of funny, but it seems that there is.”

“They have more experience,” he says. “They have more talent. But you are fierce, Rachel. Your ambition does push-ups while you sleep. You’ll get into the school.”

Rachel laughs again. “You make me want to be your boyfriend,” she tells him, then assures him he’ll be getting into the school, too. “I’m not the only fierce one.”

They pledge to buff up their extra-curriculars and get into the school. They pinky swear, and Kurt says, “You realize we just did the gay high-five?”

From the heights to the depths: Will and Emma are in bed again. He’s still all angsted up about telling Sugar she didn’t make New Directions, even if it’s the right thing to do for the club.

Back at school, Sue has no sympathy for Will’s dilemma, but she does thank him for his “pixie dust hate crime,” saying it sent her up seven points in the polls. “Everyone loves a martyr,” she tells him.

The Glee Club welcomes Blaine, except for Finn, who says he wants Blaine to realize they’re not the Warblers. Really, I don’t know what that means. And I thought Finn liked Blaine?

Then Will Schuester makes every lesbian in teevee land hate him forever by throwing Santana out of Glee Club for “disloyalty” in getting the Cheerios to set fire to one of the pianos. He makes a point of saying Brittany, even though she’s a Cheerio, had no part in it; Brittany says it’s because she’s a water sign and looks like she’s going to cry as Santana flounces out of the room.

“If we want to win Nationals this year we need to be united,” he says. Yeah. Nice try, Will. I still hate you.

Rachel then says she thinks they should do West Side Story as a school musical.

“Is that the one with the cats?” Brittany asks, undoubtedly thinking of having Lord Tubbington audition.

And then Kurt announces he’ll be running for senior class president, while Blaine beams and pats him.

Rachel brings the episode home by launching into the anthemic “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from Hairspray, which morphs into a full-production group number in the auditorium. It’s one of the best musical performances the cast has done in all three seasons, with everyone having a star moment, including some great dancing from Brittany and Mike.

And up in the catwalk, a pink-haired Quinn watches, sorrow all over her face.

Welcome back, Glee! I missed you!

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