Glee 311 Recap: Michael Would Probably Not Do This

Then Quinn launches into “Never Can Say Goodbye” and I feel it’s one of Glee’s best put-together numbers.

It’s a story about a beautiful fairy princess with golden hair, bright red lips and pillowy eyelashes wearing the long gown of a sophisticated back-up singer in a ’70s music video.

The Princess had always wanted more power, and she thought she could get it by being mean, and then meaner. But now things have changed and she’s singing about it. Because for her the power would never come from being mean, she was wrong about that. The power would come from the opposite place — from her brand-new willingness to disregard all that. It comes from effortlessly inviting young men to dance with her, all those little boys she thought she’d loved, and then carelessly casting them aside. Now she knows her fantasies and artifice were just that: fantasies. Artifice.

Then the princess goes to her locker to look at things that used to hurt but don’t anymore and at things she knows how to love better, now. Then she returns to the classroom filled with goofball child-singers. In this scene she’s easy like Sunday morning in her white dress and precise headband and tasteful cardigan. There’s no self-consciousness or agenda anymore, she’s just happy to be singing.

Next up, Kurt’s in one of McKinley’s many rooms for kids with too many feelings, stewing over Sebastian and fabricating fire-related revenge fantasies. Santana pops in and pops back: “today is your lucky day, because Auntie Snixx just arrived on the Bitchtown Express.”

They pitter-patter back and forth about the right philosophy behind their plan and, I assume, eventually select a plan of some kind. For Sebastian. Or whatever. You don’t really care, do you? I don’t. I don’t care much about the Sam/Mercedes duet that comes next either, so I’m just gonna run past it like Forrest Gump.

So wheeee Kurt is a “finalist” for NYADA, because NYADA is, apparently, a very unorthodox school with a strange admissions process. NYADA is leaving Julliard and Carnegie-Melon in its avant garde dust.

Anyhow, my girlfriend says that “Kurt’s Dad is the most under-appreciated member of the Screen Actors Guild.” Seriously every time he’s onscreen, she cries. She teared up during this scene.

“Hey Andrew McCarthy,” Santana says as she struts her black mini-skirtsuit-of-power-and-fantastic-rack into the Chair Storage Room. Sebastian, flanked with Wiley Warblers on both sides, slithers forward.

Santana: “Don’t know if you heard, but Blaine may lose an eye. The same Blaine who was just besties with most of you not four months ago.”
Trent: “Wait, are you serious? Is he gonna be okay?”
Santana: “Well, sure. If he doesn’t care about seeing in three dimensions.”
Sebastian: “Trent, I got this. Bummer about Blaine, he was pretty. He shouldn’t have gotten in the way, though. That slushy was meant for Kurt.” God, could he be more hateful?
Santana: “You may look like the villain out of a cheesy 80s high school movie, but you should know that I am fully prepared to go all Danny LaRusso on your ass. Admit you put something in that slushie. What was it, huh? Glass? Asphalt?”

Here’s the Michael Jackson version:

Here’s Glee:

The cellos strike up and Santana and Sebastian jot about like spies in the last scene of a movie stuck on a wild circular conveyer belt. The strings are hyper and serious. So they dart about. It really gets going when Santana starts singing. It’s like she’s begging you to stop asking questions with that “I don’t know, I don’t know,” or maybe it’s anguish from somewhere else.

When the song ends, Sebastian cracks like an unsub in Criminal Minds lured in via decoy suspect because they couldn’t handle anyone else taking credit for their work — he spills the beans to Santana that it was “rock salt” in the slushie. Then he tosses a rock-free slushy at Santana’s lovely face.

This is rock salt:

Back at Glee, Santana reveals she’d taped spy equipment to her underboob, which is the closest this show will ever get to her overboob, and henceforth she’s got a recording of Sebastian’s confession re:rock salt. But then Kurt the Turtlenecked Killjoy is like, bla bla bla haters bla bla payback bla bla bla come to the auditorium so we can beat them in song Bla bla i love seesaws bla bla bla bla.

Oh! Santana:

Santana: “If Kurt would’ve taped this to his junk, I would’ve never heard the end of it! We would have had a whole week of songs about it.”

Ooooh, show! Thanks for the wink and the nod! Your microwave is in the mail! Love it.  What a week that’d be, huh? Hopefully we could start with The Gay Pimp’s holiday classic, “Dickmatized.” What if one week Will strode in and wrote “The Gay Pimp Podcast” on the whiteboard? Wild.

Finn and Rachel duet unbearably (the unbearableness of it is exacerbated by the fact that whenever Rachel sings, she’s basically announcing to the world that she’s gonna ‘make it’, NYADA or not.) Do I have to tell you how I spent this scene, reader? Do I?

I remain in Child’s Pose while Artie Etc vomit cheez-whiz onto the screen via dim-witted platitudes about how the Warblers don’t “understand Michael” but The Glee Club does. This is 100% impossible because nobody understood Michael. He wanted us to, but he would’ve had to understand himself first, and I’m not sure that he ever did. SO STOP FRONTING, ARTIE.

Soooo everyone kerbangs to the auditorium to heal the world and make it a better place for you and for me and the entire human race.

During Black or White‘s unexpected morphing sequence my girlfriend pointed out that some Glee fans might not even know the reference and I said, Oh god, what if you’re right? But everybody knows this. You do, right? We’ve all seen this video. Right? 

The thing about the “Black or White” video, gushingly earnest adages and all, is that when I saw it, it felt at once of the moment and of the future. It felt ‘of the moment’ because it was a relatively optimistic time, a time when we enthusiastically organized our recyclables into new labeled bins and learned in school that racism was on its way out and we believed it, too. Like we could make it go away just by smiling. Michael Jackson, the eternal child, even provided us kids with an ambassador in his music video — Macaulay Culkin — rapping and causing trouble like the 10-year-old white boy he most certainly was.

But it was also ‘of the future’ because it was the fifth or sixth time morphing had been used in popular entertainment and the first time I remember seeing it. We were just dumbstruck by it. I couldn’t believe my EYES!

Over 500 million people in 27 countries watched the premiere of that video, the largest audience ever for a video premiere at the time. It felt like pop music for children and maybe that’s because Jackson famously remained almost child-like for so long.

Anyhow where was I? Oh yes, this:

One-two-three baby you and me!