Welcome to episode 302 of Glee, “I Am Unicorn.” It’s like “I Am Woman” except you take out all the women and replace them with unicorns. Speaking of women, I am a woman and writing this recap is apparently like sitting on a bed of plastic forks, otherwise I would’ve finished it 30 years ago. Actually it’s like recapping a rock or a tree. Hey tree. What’s up. Leaves are changing, I see. Just like they do EVERY SEASON.Â
This week’s episode is entitled “Me and My Hag” and, just like all the storylines from this godforsaken shitshow, this week’s plot is based on the true story of Ryan Murphy’s adolescence, starring Chris Colfer as Young Ryan Murphy and Lea Michele as His Hag. You know gay men love their divas!
Speaking of divas, lemme just get this off my chest — I have approximately 46 counterproductive feelings about this imaginary production of West Side Story. See I love West Side Story. It was the first Broadway show I ever saw (it was on tour) and subsequently any time anyone in the Detroit Metro area was putting on West Side Story — be it community theater, a band of traveling kittens or a junior high school — I WAS THERE. I’ve also seen the movie 678 times. Probs this originated ’cause my name is Marie and for most of my childhood adults enjoyed singing “Maria, I just met a girl named Maria!” to me so I asked my Dad what all the fuss was about and he took me to the Masonic Temple. Google it.
Right, so! DIVAS. Are we really going to have to suffer through a Diva-Off next week? Because I get it, I get it — Mercedes needs more solos, many argue she’s a better singer than Rachel. But recycling that plot all over again over West Side Story is just lazy. Mercedes is Anita and everybody knows it.
In fact, let me just cast this motherfucker so I can move on:
Rachel – Maria
Mercedes – Anita
Blaine – Tony
Santana – Bernardo (I’m serious. Think about it!)
Quinn – Velma
Brittany – Graziella
Puck – Riff
Kurt – Chino
Finn – Officer Krupke
Mike – Pepe
Tina – Rosalia
Actually you know what’d be really subversive? Having Kurt play Anybodys.
Anyhow YOU’RE WELCOME GLEE. No need for auditions.
We open with Brittany offering her student council president campaign management services to Kurt, whose outfit suggests an ambitiously ornithological preparation for autumn and/or civil war.
She explains that Kurt is a unicorn, because he’s magical and isn’t afraid to show it, and she’s popular and has slept with a lot of people. So together it’s a dream team, like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
Brittany: “No, okay, no, the point is, a unicorn is somebody who knows they’re magical and isn’t afraid to show it. You went through hell last year, and you never forgot how special you were. And I slept with a lot of people and I’m really popular so I think I can get you mega-votes.”
“Big news,” Will says as he enters The Glee Room. “Big news” is his standard greeting now, the children have learned not to trust his assessment of the news. When Osama Bin Laaden got shot, Will started yelling BIG NEWS from the Teacher’s Lounge and for the finale just screamed BIG NEWS until everybody’s eardrums broke and they all died.  True story.
In preparation for nationals, at which point they’ll disregard everything they did all season and perform a brand new song/dance Finn wrote the night before using magnetic poetry, Will’s launching “Booty Camp” to teach the chitlins to dance better. He saw Dancing With the Stars last night and figured if Nancy Grace can do it, Finn can do it, just like in Footloose.Â
Vocal Adrenaline lost their coach and, like Ursula in The Little Mermaid, took everybody’s voices with her. So now New Directions has a “real shot at [Nationals]” as long as Finn and Rachel can keep their tongues in their own mouths and Blaine keeps wearing this bowtie:
Here’s hoping hijinks will ensue and nobody will remember last time Will created Dance Camp and Rachel broke her nose. Â Will’s giving up directing West Side Story in order to focus on Nationals, which luckily is the only thing he ever talks about so I think he’ll have no trouble focusing. He’s passed the directorial reigns to Artie and these two sterling women:
Sure! Why not?
Lest we dwell excessively on existing characters and storylines, let’s bring back another Broadway Buddy and in her honor, dig up whatever nonsensical plot justified her inclusion the first time! Â Maureen FromRent is back!
MoMo Shelby explains that her return is ostensibly because Al Motta so desperately wants his daughter Sugar to shine in show choir that he donated a chunk of cash to the school in exchange for yet ANOTHER Show Choir, directed by an Esteemed Show Choir Director, in which Sugar could be a star.
But Shelby’s not just there to auto-tune sugar, she’s there for her own baby-mama-drama. In fact she spends the rest of the episode trotting around the school having feelings. She’s like this purple tamale of sassy maternal flavor explosion. Bitch gets DARK.
As much as Quinn’s relationship with Puck Jr completely fascinates my stuffed animals, as far as parentage goes, I think we’re all way more curious about Rachel’s gay Dads than we are about all this teenaged offspring.
At this point, I’m basically envisioning Rachel’s parents look like this:
Or this:
Or this:
And I’ve got absolutely no way to shatter these stereotypes if I’m not given something else to work with.
Over at the Sanctuary of Skank, our favorite Hot Topic customers are giving whirlies to Matilda in order to steal her lunch money, which is so 1988. Seriously, Quinn has never looked better. The best part about New Quinn is that she’s exactly like Old Quinn, just with a less enthusiastic voice and a different outfit.
Sue Sylvester busts up the punk pretty party to hornswaggle New Quinn into Sue’s anti-arts anti-Will agenda, because that’s what Sue does. She roams the halls like a fierce dinosaur hungry for a carrot, finding fucks to give and then hurling them upon other people.
Quinn: “You have no power over me anymore. Because I’ve got nothing to lose.”
But Sue looks at New Quinn and sees her Very Own Joe the Plumber.
Overlooking the fact that Quinn’s outfit and bedazzled denim vest is its own work of art, Sue’s got Quinn in mind for a tearjerking heartbreaking move-of-the-week about how The Arts destroy lives, seeing as Glee Club is responsible for Quinn losing her boyfriend and other assorted tragedies.
Sue: “You’ve never looked worse. You’ve lost your child, your boyfriend, your rep and worse, your high pony. You know who I blame? The Glee Club.”
Quinn says she’s got a few demands, including but not limited to installing a sofa under the bleachers for recovery from that heady post-cigarette feeling so many rebel teenagers enjoy.  I say “including but not limited to” because Quinn says she has ‘a few’ demands, but only says one of them. Ultimately, this isn’t the first time Glee’s had problems with math.
Sue says it’s a deal, and then swipes Quinn’s nerd-extracted cash from the sink ledge where it is so vulnerably perched. Quinn is apparently too cool to try and stop Sue from stealing. She just stands there and watches her money get taken away. JUST LIKE SHE DID WITH HER BABY.
Over at campaign HQ, Brittany, wearing a unicorn horn I hope she never takes off, has raided Fire Island and presents Kurt with a Gaysplosion of Gay McGayerson Gay Gay. It’s adorable, really — Brit’s eager to please, Kurt’s excessively self-conscious — it’s a great scene.
So Brit-Brit’s got posters…
… and even “gift bags” for the peons which she calls “Kurt Hummel’s bulging pink fun sacks” which frankly makes me think of blue balls, except pink, because he’s gay, so it’s “pink balls,” although the first time I ever heard of “blue balls” it was from a gay guy and then already, here we are talking about nutsacks on this LESBIAN WEBSITE which is absolutely inexcusable.
I gotta hand it to Brittany. There’s not a mean bone in that incredible body, she loves everyone for exactly who they are and is newly shocked every time to discover others don’t feel the same way about themselves. If we could see the world through Brittany’s eyes…
Kurt, whose sailor hat would lose a regatta to Brittany’s horn any day, isn’t ecstatic:
Kurt: “You know I appreciate your enthusiasm but you know, it’s just all wrong — I think it’s just you know a tad too–”
Brittany: “Unicorn?”
Kurt: “Gay. I feel like I might as well have a big neon sign behind me that says gaygiddygaygiddygagaygaygay.”
Really? That can be arranged …
Kurt’s got a better idea that will alienate everyone under the age of 75 at McKinley High:
You know what this poster says, dontcha?
Brittany in her glorious innocence doesn’t grasp what’s wrong with seeming gay, which means:
1. Gay history should be taught in school
2. Kurt remains both comfortable with himself and his choices while carrying a stomachfull of internalized self-loathing about how he’s perceived by his more masculine peers.
3. Brittany is a unicorn. Or maybe a bi-acorn?
4. Brittany and Santana Should Be Together
Quinn, wearing a bandana indicative either of lesbianism or gang affiliation, is dragged to The Shelby Room for a chit-chat with Shelbykins.
It’s time for a teachable moment, ladies! If you get pregnant as a teenager and feel you’re unable to care for your child properly at that point in your life and therefore give it up for adoption to a loving family who wants a child of their own, then you will forever be haunted by nightmares of your lost child. These nightmares will look like Anne Geddes calendars:
Shelby is many things — a singer, a dancer, the Wicked Witch of the West — but more than all of that, she is a woman with a baby. Midway through La Vie Boheme, Shelby realized Beth could be taking her first baby steps that very minute and fuck me with a corncob if the nanny gets to see that and Shelby does not.
Shelby: “I missed so many firsts in Rachel’s life, I’m not gonna do that with Beth.”
This’d be an ideal moment for the baby to crawl out of a desk drawer and say “show choir,” but nobody listens to my ideas.
Thus Shelby jumped at the chance to leave her dreams behind and take this part-time job and be in close proximity to all of her uterus-related situations.
Shelby: “Look since the day I gave Rachel up for adoption I have been walking through life searching everywhere for her face, imagining what she’s doing, what she may be like — I don’t want you to go through what I went through.”
Shelby says she wants Quinn in Beth’s life but not with that haircut. Quinn responds by talking crazy:
Quinn: “You think you can tell me what to do just because you signed a few papers? You’re not her mom. I’m her mom. That is something you are never going to be.”
Maybe Quinn feels guilty, really, for everything she could’ve done but didn’t do, and this becomes just another one of those things — another squandered opportunity, or unfulfilled potential. Maybe she’s just so fucking angry that it feels sensical to say ridiculous shit like this.
It seems unlikely this could truly be about the baby, despite Shelby’s insistence that it is. But Quinn deals with guilt/self-doubt/loss by insulting people and getting pissed/irrational. That’s not new.
Some bizarre camerawork/wind-whipping noises introduces us to Booty Camp and Mike Chang’s significant arm muscles, which are leading the pack of ragamuffins learning to dance. Mercedes isn’t having it, she’d rather “park and bark,” which means she wants to sing while people dance around her. Again, what do I do with that?
Kurt hears it while doing “the grapevine” that Blaine was planning on auditioning for Tony as well, which Kurt passive-aggressively reacts to, and Blaine, because he is so perfect he’s verging on doormat, backs down, which is fine, because I’m not at all invested in how spectacular Blaine would be as Tony.
At last, Shelby’s lifetime of street-wandering and thinking-about-Rachel’s-face has paid off ’cause she found the piano and the high-strung daughter doing scales next to it wearing a doll’s dress adapted for a grownup body which’s so tight it just honestly screams MAMA WHO BORE ME.
Rachel flips, obviously, ’cause interrupting Rachel practicing for an audition, especially with some kind of emotional drama, is like interrupting RuPaul operating the Dragulator.
Rachel:Â “I almost had to go to therapy because of you.”
I’ve never been mad at Rachel Berry. Not for one single solitary minute. Shelby, making up for the years she could’ve been stage-momming the hell out of this unit, tells Rachel to do “Somewhere” for her audition rather than “I Feel Pretty.”
Shelby: “You will never be a star or get the lead if you play it safe. Try it.”
Or um, Rachel already did I Feel Pretty last season? Rachel takes the challenge and Idina is right there on backup like a champ.
Rachel kills this song, removes her knife of awesome from it, skins it, makes a fierce shrug of it and feeds the rest of it to homeless people and then she wears that shrug to the fucking banquet she hosts starring every limb and meatpiece of this triumphant song not already fed to homeless people.
We swish over to Rachel’s audition, which’s fondly received by the Three Amigos:
Meanwhile, I’m clearly retrospectively floating on a cloud of “I Dreamed a Dream”:
Moving right along to the Quinn Fabray Afterschool special: Mother May I Sleep With Danger And Have a Baby and Then Get All Lyla Garrity On Everyone and Then Dip My Head in a Bucket of Jungle Juice at Phi Sigma Kappa and Then Blame It All on Glee Club.
Sue: “After a long day of snorting Splenda and cutting class, she kills the pain the only way she knows how — smoking cornstarch.”
Sue then leads Quinn into Will’s office for a throwdown, wherein Will locates his balls, extracts them from his Dockers, and launches into perhaps his most triumphant moment of all time (Becky agrees with me):
Will: “Miss Fabray, wait. You know there’s only one person in this world that you care about. And that’s yourself.”
Quinn: [interrupting] “You have no idea –”
Will: “I’M NOT FINISHED! You’re not a little girl anymore, Quinn. How long do you plan on playing the victim card? Since day one you have done nothing but sabotage the glee club that has been there for you over and over again. When you got pregnant. When your parents kicked you out. Mercedes even let you live in her house. And I don’t recall ever hearing so much as a thank you, so now you’re a trainwreck, well congratulations. But you stride into my office and tell me it’s my fault? Well then. I have something to say to you: Grow Up.”
HOT DIGGITY DAMN.
My concerns about an additional unnecessary YouTube related subplot are squashed when Sue says her camera wasn’t on. Still.
Back in whatthefuckeversville, Puck stops by Shelby’s place to see his baby waa waa waa. Waa waa babbybababybaby waa waa. No really I like babies and hope to have one eventually as soon as I get my own eating and sleeping schedule under control, but seriously raise your hand if you care about this storyline. Now light your lighter, because everyone’s got their hands up and it’s time to ballad.
