Hello! Welcome to the last Glee recap I will EVER WRITE! It’s obviously not the last time I’ll ever write about Glee, period — my co-pilot Heather Hogan and I have some #endofglee posts planned for this week and next — but it’s my last recap. Heather will be recapping next week’s two-hour finale spectacular (I’ll give her my notes, of course). I’ll have some final feelings and thoughts on the last page of this recap, but first, LET’S DISCUSS THIS PENULTIMATE EPISODE OF GLEE!
Welcome to the to the eleventh recap of the sixth season of Glee, a late-night talk show about sister wives who have lesbian sex in an underground bunker and make gluten-free onion dip for their tiny dogs:
UNBREAKABLE!
We open in the Glee room, where the Glee Club is rehearsing for the first time in Glee history! It’s never too late to turn your whole life around, folks.
Alright we gonna do the basic steps: slide to the left, slide to the right, take it back now y’all! One hop this time! Right foot lets stomp. Left foot lets stomp! Cha cha real smooth!
The Warblers have clearly never read Entrepreneur Magazine ’cause they think a five-minute break will irreparably harm their chances of succeeding at the Divisional Sectional Spectacular Titilational Singing Ball Bash. Furthermore, they think Spencer and Roderick should stand in the back at Sectionals ’cause they can’t dance.
Warbler: You dance like a blind man with a back brace who hasn’t taken a dump in three weeks!
Spencer: Hey, I don’t need to dance good, I just need to look good, and I do.
Other Warbler: Get over yourself, we all look good!
Look, how about instead of everybody jumping on him for implying the existence of an absolute gender binary, we take this opportunity to educate?
We then creep stealthily into the hallowed hallways of McKinley High School For Kids With Decent Pipes, where Roderick is opening his locker. Roderick opens his locker. Everything falls out of Roderick’s locker. Because he’s a failure! If he can’t even keep all his shit in his locker, how will he and Spencer ever learn how to dance???!
Dude it’s pretty obvious that you’re not wearing underwear today
No homo.
But the two bral pals can’t decide who’s gonna teach them to dance! Luckily, I have some ideas.
Idea #1: This girl.
Idea #2: This girl.
Idea #3: This guy
Idea #4: This guy
Idea #5: All three of these girls at the same time:
Okay that was just an excuse to reminisce. The boys decide that Fake Quinn will teach them to dance.
In the April Rhodes Memorial Pavillon, Sam’s trying to convince Rachel not to pull a Lea Michele and/or a Chris Webber and go pro before acquiring that holy piece of paper known as Ye Olde Bachelor in Fine Arts. However, acting school basically exists to help young people have successful acting careers and if she’s already got one then she probably doesn’t need Fake Julliard? But whatever. Rachel insists she needs to make this choice on her own.
Going down on Quinn was something I had to do FOR ME, okay?
Sam departs, disgruntled, and Rachel breaks into “Listen To Your Heart,” only to be joined mid-song by Jesse St. James!
Just too unreal, all this. Watching the words fall from my lips—
Baiting some girl with hypotheses—
Haven’t you heard the word of your body?
This is primarily an opportunity for us to witness the joy Lea and Jonathan Groff feel when they get to sing together. I’ve always loved that part of this show, too — how it kept bringing Broadway onto the television, easily snagging superstars like Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth for side roles. Anyhow, Jesse St. James is in town to coach his mother through her tummy tuck, and thought he’d drop in to talk Rachel into eschewing Fake Julliard in favor of the Russell Simmons musical, co-starring yours truly, Jesse St. James.
Jesse: It’s really fun to come home every now and again and coach a Glee Club or, in my case, help your Mom use her grabber tool to pull a box of cereal off the top of the fridge, but you and I both know that you belong on Broadway. You need to get your ass back to New York!
Really, that was YOU muff-diving with Quinn Fabray on the staycation livestream this morning?
Do I have pubic hair in my teeth?
Rachel reminds him that she is going back to New York, she’s just not sure if it’ll be to work at The Olive Garden or to perform elaborate musical numbers outside the tkts booth. Furthermore, she notes that her life fell apart after she dropped out of Fake Julliard, so probably she should rectify that situation. But that’s not what she did wrong, and everybody knows it:
Jesse: Rachel, your mistake was not leaving NYADA. You got a lead role in Funny Girl, nobody could’ve expected you to turn that down. Your mistake was leaving the show too early to do that stupid sitcom.
Jesse St. James says they “make great music together,” which is code for anal sex.
Cut to the dance studio, where two male characters we have zero investment in are playing out Glee’s third incarnation of the “old clunkers learn how to dance” subplot.
Now before you open your mouth, ask yourself, “does any woman REALLY need to her how I feel about anything, EVER?”
And keep in mind that if you choose to speak anyhow, that’s what we call “mansplaining.”
but
Spencer takes up about as much space in my heart as one of Teen Jesus’s dreadlocks, so I care about as much as Dalton cared about its Warblers temporarily blinding Gay Blaine with rock salt when Spencer falls and twists his ankle.
Oof
What show introduces a whole new cast for a farewell season? Seriously! The closest thing I can think of is how Buffy added the whole team of new Slayers in the final season. Regardless, we follow these ciphers to the locker room, where Spencer says he’s gotta be the tough guy who makes it through the rain with a shot of Novocain, just like the gymnasts did in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. Beiste says he could ruin all his joints forever with that attitude but really there’s only one more episode in the season, so I say SHOOT ‘EM UP.
All I wanted was to eat the chicken that was smarter than all the other chickens to absorb its power.
Backstage, Kurt interrupts Rachel organizing her makeup brushes to talk about The Future and whether or not she wants flaxseeds on her strawberries tomorrow morning.
Please tell me this isn’t gonna be another conversation about dental dams
Rachel: What if I say no and then I never get cast on Broadway again? It could be like career suicide!
Kurt: That’s not going to happen to you. Listen, you could do Broadway or NYADA, you’re gonna be great at whatever you choose. When I first heard that you and Blaine were going back to Lima to coach your old Glee Clubs I thought you were crazy, but I’m so lucky you made the decision that you did. You inspired more than just this group of kids, you inspired me too. What we’re doing really matters. We have a profound effect on these kids and their self-esteem and what they go on to accomplish. Look we only have a few years left to go to college and learn all the fun stuff like acting and fencing and choreography. We also get to go to school and be inspired in the process. I mean how lucky are we? I just want you to think about that while you’re making this decision.
Kurt says they can start over again ’cause he’s going back to Fake Julliard and Blaine got into NYU and their entire lives could be different, everything could be fantastic and so great and so much better!!
In the Glee Club room, a bunch of packages have arrived! Kurt says they’re from GLAAD and might be a gift for hosting the Trans Choir. The children gleefully rip open the boxes, probably hoping to find a dick or a smaller box, but alas!
IT’S SO GAY!!!!
I imagine a bunch of writers with unkempt hair, kinda stoned, eating macaroni and cheese from Boston Market and writing this scene.
EVERYONE IS GAY!!!!!
The glitter bombs are especially bomb-like, destroying everything in sight! For example: a piano. Also, everybody in the entire school is vomiting on everybody else. Obviously this is Sue Sylvester style domestic terrorism.
Sue: Everyone at this school is experiencing wheat I like to call Monte-Su-ma’s revenge.
Oh, me? I’m Jane Lynch. You may have heard. I can do no wrong.
While everybody throws up, Will is informed that HIS CAR IS ON FIRE! I swear you stop paying attention to this show for one minute and then somebody’s car is on fire. Abby just went, “There’s a fucking CAR BOMB on this show?” I don’t know what to tell her. Then Will gets revenge by pretending to be a hairdresser and shaving Sue’s head? I don’t know what to tell anybody about anything anymore!
We then cut to a dark locker room where Sue’s watching Hitler videos and talking about how Vocal Adrenaline is a machine like the Nazis. Sheldon finds this offensive ’cause Hitler probably would’ve hated trans folks. For the record, I don’t think anybody requires a personal connection any of to Hitler’s loathed populations in order to find Hitler films offensive, but I digress.
You want to rub my head? You think I can make your wishes come true? You think I’m a genie in a bottle? You think you can rub me the right way?
Pages: 1 2 3See entire article on one page
Dang, Riese. Reading your thoughts on this last page was a privilege, truly. And it made me good-cry. Thank you for, well, everything.
Glee is how I fell in love with Heather’s writing.
AAAAAHHHH! Thank you for sticking with this nonsense through the years
Page 3 just said everything that I can’t articulate about why I’m forcing myself through this final season. THANK YOU for putting to words the uncomfortable process we’ve been through with Ryan Murphy and this glorious shit show. And for the trip down memory lane when Kurt’s coming out was BIG GAY NEWS and Brittana felt like a revelation. Those years when we actually went out and bought the box sets of Seasons 1 & 2 because it was that important to us. And then, like any relationship pushed past the honeymoon stage, it started getting complicated… Anyway, thank you for that. I related to hard. One more…
I own the box sets of seasons 1-5 and I’m not even ashamed.
Thank you so much Riese for all the recaps over so many years, through the highs and lows and insults and triumphs. You deserve to be thrown all the Junior Mints.
thank you i will sit here with my mouth open waiting for the junior mints
The last page of this is brilliant. Thank you for your words. Thank you for expressing this. In the last six years, most of the fans of Glee have felt hurt at some point or another by the show, and few of us have been shy about expressing that hurt. But I think what also needs to be acknowledged is that we wouldn’t have felt that hurt if this show hadn’t made us feel in the first place. Glee wasn’t perfect. Sometimes it wasn’t good. But it did change things. This was wonderful, Riese, thank you so much.
As an aside…in 2010 I broke up with my very first girlfriend. Three days before we were supposed to leave on an already planned and paid for vacation. As only true lesbians would do, we went on that vacation anyway. I will always remember sitting in a hotel room in Orlando, on separate beds in awkward silence and flipping on Glee, only to see Santana on top of Brittany in a bed. There were gasps! Exclamations of amazement! We were so upset we weren’t at home because we didn’t have a DVR and couldn’t rewind to make sure that really happened!
I’m not even a Brittana fan anymore, but that moment was a game changer. We were so starved for representation, and it was right there in front of us, suddenly, on a Tuesday night. Glee paved the way.
Yes, absolutely — our disappointment in a show is always relative to our expectations of it, you know?
That’s such a cute story about you and your ex… even in the worst of times, scissoring brings us back together to share a moment of joy…
Wow, that last page. That last page so so so beautiful, and not at all overly romantic or nostalgic. It was honest. And I loved it.
The week that Santana told Brittany she loved her in season 2 was the same week that Paige told Emily, “If I say it out loud… If I say I’m gay. The whole world will change”. The recap of those two episodes was the first thing that brought me to this website. Back then, I was still figuring out my sexuality, quiet, shy, and unsure of so many things. But those episodes felt like gasps of air pushed into my lungs that I didn’t even know I needed. And I was so desperate to find someone, anyone, to talk about it with. Searching for that community gave me Autostraddle. And Autostraddle felt right. So I made it an internet home of sorts, put up my feet, and never left (Thank you for being a more generous landlord that Ryan Murphy ever was).
…. What I’m trying to get at here is, thank you! 71 is a lot of episodes to have dealt with. But I know your words made a difference to me, so they probably made a difference to loads of others as well.
that was such a week in gay television, lemme tell ya… and i’m so glad that it brought you here. <3
I’m not crying you’re crying
NO I’M NOT SHUT UP
Kristoff’s home!
I’d bet all my moneys that Sue Sylvester burnt down Dalton.
GOOD CALL
Listen, I love Glee. I love it so much. I love the music and I don’t even care that the story stopped making sense a long time ago. I own all of the DVDs and I met Alex Newell at an event last year and have never been so excited. It’s silly, and something I can connect with my best friend and brother over. It’s just my favorite show (and, yes, I realize I have actually terrible taste in TV). I have enjoyed your glee recaps all these years!
While we are reminiscing though, let’s talk about “Proud Mary” in wheelchairs. Remember that?
Oh that was a great number
THANK YOU, Riese. For all the hours you spent watching and recapping this beautiful/terrible show (I’m sure we enjoyed more reading your recaps than you enjoyed writing them). For loving and hating and loving to hate everything this show did, and for always having the right words to express exactly what I was feeling. For all the ways you travelled from Lima to New York and back.
Watching the show without yours (or Heather’s) recaps wouldn’t have been the same. So just.. thank you.
Oh man Glee. Freshman year of college, hanging out in my dorm, smoking by myself for the first time and watching this strange show because Finn looked kinda like a guy I had a crush on. So many memories.
I jumped ship a while ago, and now just watch the musical numbers, but I still feel sad that it’s ending. I was hardcore into it for a bit, and think it’s awesome that the questioning and baby gays out there have it to watch if they feel isolated (although I probably would’ve avoided it like the plague for fear of people catching on to my desires).
These recaps have been a really nice goodbye to the show, I’m really glad we have them.
My phone almost never loads pictures and I am really bad at remembering names so whenever I read a recap I am like ahhhh what is a Roderick or a Spencer or a Trixie etc???? Anonymous glee person cannot dance and another anonymous glee person is bad at organising their locker OH THE HUMANITYYYYYYYY
But i do know who Jesse St James is so yay! Didn’t he make vocal adrenaline throw slushies on her last time they met? Why are they friends who kiss again? Who ARE all these people??? Really? Remember when Sam was briefly a stripper? Remember when Brittany thought thr irish guy was her imaginary friend who only she could see? Is this what being high feels like?
I have no idea what is happening but I am thankful for your recaps because I get to feel like I watched the show but in much less time.
“Remember when Sam was briefly a stripper? Remember when Brittany thought thr irish guy was her imaginary friend who only she could see? Is this what being high feels like?”
I was going to say YES THIS IS WHAT BEING HIGH FEELS LIKE but then realized I might just think that because I’m unable to watch Glee without being high. (when it airs, of course. when i re-watch it to write the recap, i’m sober as a judge) no but really often while watching glee i think ‘were they high when they wrote this episode?’ and i hope that the answer is yes a lot of the time
IT WOULD EXPLAIN SO MUCHHHH!
I also now understand how you have gotten through watching so much Glee. One of my friends just started watching it from S1 and she got through 4 seasons in two months and I had to keep mesaaging her to make sure she hadn’t run off into the wilderness due to too much Glee exposure.
My inbox is full of messages back and forth saying I HATE MR SHOE LOLLLLOLOLOLOLOL
Thank you for your dedication Riese.
When I saw Brittany and Santana kissing in the beginning of that episode, I was eating cookies and playing bananagrams in a professor’s apartment (she was one of the cool ones who lived in a freshman dorm to be a part of the support system for the students and had open hours the nights that Glee aired and we convinced her we needed to watch it…we eventually got about 15 people crammed in there every week) when the world kind of stopped for me. Now I know why, but back then I was so surprised anything on primetime TV, and a show about kids in high school, just showed something so casually…and then continued on like nothing happened. At least for a little while. I agree with sentiment expressed above that Glee made me feel so much early on that it just ended up disappointing me when it fell flat later on.
I guess I am trying to say it was great how Glee made me realize it was ok to talk about all the feelings I was feeling so acutely but didn’t want to talk about because they felt so bad, but in a good way. You know?
Ugh Ugh Ugh, Riese this final page killed me! The Glee recaps on this site were the first thing I regularly read. I found autostraddle through Annika’s posts and then i got hooked on the glee recaps. I still remember your recap of the episode where Finn outed Santana and they sang rumor has it/someone like you and as I read what you wrote I was like “Yes! someone thinks about this show just like I do!” I’m pretty sure the first time I ever commented on an article that I didn’t write was one of your glee recaps. I was crying reading the last page of this. Thank you Riese.
aw mey these things you say are so lovely
my emotions. glee was such an important part of my life. it came out when i was in hospital and didn’t want to do anything, let alone watch tv but Kurt and Mercedes and the music wormed its way into my heart. i was deep into the fandom, met some really important and amazing people through forums, started questioning my sexuality around the time Santana told Brittany she loved her, cried over Klaine and then I gave up after S4 and returned for the final season. i hate the show but i also love it and ugh, thank you for that final page.
I have a really hard time letting go of things, so I pretty much can’t believe I stopped watching Glee almost 2 seasons ago, but you should know I’ve never stopped reading the recaps and watching the music videos whenever there’s a song I like, someone from Broadway guest stars, Brittany dances, or Jane or Rachel sing.
But mostly reading the recaps.
Thank you, Riese for all thr time and energy and utter creativity in recapping this show. It has literally changed my life. I remember discussing the throwaway “sex isn’t dating” comment and how exciting it was with the straight girl who made me realize I wasn’t straight. I made and sustained strong friendships in a new city by having all of us clamber into the washroom so we could livestream the episodes between classes. I befriend and eventually fell in love with my current girlfriend because we both shipped Faberry. For a few years, being an overt and devoted fan of Glee defined me, and the bitterness of the show’s betrayal in telling our stories properly still hurts. So thank you for creating a subcommunity here on AS for the rest of us who still feel chills seeing a bunch of weirdo kids wearing red shirts singing Journey.
I think the first time i ever heard the word ‘Faberry’ it was from you! Thank you for being one of the people who stuck around throughout the years, too. It sounds like Glee was to you what The L Word was to me.
♡
It’s the end of an era! I’m sure this has been said before, but if y’all made these recaps into a book I would definitely buy it. As it stands I guess I will read them from the beginning again to celebrate the end that had to happen someday. I haven’t watched Glee since Idina Menzel adopted Quinn’s baby but these recaps are everything.
I watched two episodes, but I read every word of every recap because they were the funny and real in a way the show could only dream of being. Kudos, Riese.
I haven’t watched in several seasons, but I read this today, and I’m so glad I did. That last page, Riese, thank you… I remember those revelatory moments of Season 2 so well. I was in college and about to come out. Everyone was obsessed with Lady Gaga and it felt like a whole new world.
I guess for me the wonderful thing about it is, we’re living in that brave new world. Queer characters are sprouting up everywhere. Hell, some of us are making them happen! We no longer have to wait with baited breath on Ilene Chaiken and Ryan Murphy. Thank the goddesses. The most beautiful thing about Glee right now is the fact that it’s almost irrelevant.
And as I read that L Word listling posted earlier and reflect on how the L Word gave birth to the Autostraddle community, and read the comments on this article and see how many people found their way into this community via the Glee recaps… we’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Here’s to queer media made by queer people for queer people, from teevee to this very website! And here’s to the friendships and communities that happen around and because of that media! *clinks glass and plans queer world domination*
Riese, thank you for this wonderful final recap, and for keeping the commentary flowing and the ambivalent fires burning all these long often lean and frustrating years. You’re a shrewd observer and a writer of just the right blend of wry and passion, at least for me (and many others, judging by people’s comments).
Just to add a bissel to what you and others have already so thoroughly and movingly covered: thanks for the parting gift of naming “We Are Young” as Glee’s big song all team finale. It’s a pitch perfect choice! It’s always been one of my favorites, too, because it so captures the essence of what appealed to me about Glee the Show (as opposed to Glee as Background for Brittana): young people, outwardly or inwardly eccentric at a time of life when being normal most matters, banding together in their own group for: angst, romance, self-discovery and empowerment, the burgeoning of empathy for others, good times, and chart-busting musical numbers. Bonus points for a group number that includes the always missed Cory Monteith, Brittana matter-of-factly holding hands, and the inimitable Dianna Agron sashaying across stage to welcome and twirl Amber Riley home. (The friendship between Quinn and Mercedes, fortunate enough to have escaped full-on development by Murphy and crew – did they even have a portmanteau? – was one of the sweetest of Glee’s many how-can-I-count-the-permutations pairings.)
Fans/readers often write straight from the heart about the importance of this show on their emerging lives: possibilities revealed and validated, awesome parallel role-models, an example of what one’s future might be. Speaking as an older brittana [and yes even glee] fan and autostraddle reader (my next Big Birthday will be 70), for some of us this show was simultaneously an extraordinary fruition of what we worked for and dreamt of 40 or 50 years ago, and a reminder of the particular wonder, joy, and pain of young love.
When I think about what kept me coming back to Glee even infrequently, as I did in the alternately disappointing and insulting 4th and 5th seasons, it was frequently the music, sometimes RIB’s flashes of brilliance (Kurt kicking the winning field goal to Beyoncé with the football dance team?! Genius! Kurt and Burt? heartmelting!), and always the incandescence of the cast, both onscreen and off. Not to take away from the professionalism of any of the actors, most of whom had been cultivating their craft for years and some of whom had already enjoyed significant professional successes, but part of what was so captivating about Glee was the blurring of meta and story, the overlay of life and stage. It was frequently so transparent that the cast were having the time of their lives, revelling in fame and fortune and hard work and camaraderie, flirting with each other and their fans and the world. And that reality show aspect of Glee burst into its brightest moment with the double friendship of Naya Rivera and Heather Morris, Brittany S. Pierce and Santana Lopez.
Without delving into the did-they-or-didn’t-they buzz surrounding Heya, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they DID meet and connect and frolic with an unstudied joy that totally fueled and fired their onscreen roles and enchanted and inspired especially young women but clearly so many more of us. As Joe (Samuel Larson) said, “Love is love, man”, and all the world loves a lover: young and old and queer and cis and across culture class ethnicity and race. However they manifested their love for one another, Heya was the real deal and they brought all that joy and mischief and integrity to Brittana, and the world roared in recognition and appreciation.
When I was 19 and fell in love with my first one true love (some of us have been fortunate in our lives to have a couple of true loves – that first girlfriend is still dearest family today), I’d never seen two women kiss. Not on the screen, in photos, nor in real life. There was no fan fiction to tell me what and how, no waiting web filled with 103,000 tumblr queers or YouTube videos encouraging us that things would get better. The scant gay people in literature pretty much died or repented or were monstrous and/or pitiable. I would never have in a million years guessed that in my lifetime Fox [of all studios, even forced there by fandom] would prominently feature a story line involving the maturing first love relationship of bisexual and lesbian, Latina and white high school cheerleaders. Wow. What a difference a few decades and a zillion brave people have made.
I’m so grateful that I got to live long enough to see this (although bummed I may not live to read the behind-the-scenes memoirs ;) and to have been a small part of paving the way for it; so thankful for Naya Rivera, Heather Morris, and Vanessa Lengies and Brad Falchuk, Ian Brennan and yes even Ryan Murphy. And I’m thrilled beyond words to see the splendid world that you at Autostraddle and in the fandom are creating, beyond Glee and surpassing meta. I hope there will be more and more room for all of us eccentrics and queers, more justice, more challenging of even the new normal, and more love: always more love. Proudly so.
I stopped watching Glee at some point during the third or fourth season. . . but I kept reading these recaps. I think I’m actually going to miss them even though I haven’t cared about the show for awhile.
I know this is several days old and probably no one will see this comment but I wanted to post my thoughts, Firstly thank you for all the recaps over the years, and especially thank you for the 3rd page. I feel like I need to share my story of how Glee changed my life, saved my life, not by what it showed on screen but by how it affected the rest of the world.
I am a transgender woman who’s always been timid and afraid of who I am, that’s my deal and that’s my mistake. I felt like I could stay in this shell and pretend to be a man and I could survive. So I got into an unhappy relationship with a straight woman and just went along. But see, I never really passed as a man, not in movement, behavior, mannerisms. So the world saw me as a gay man, and I got attacked and harassed about that as if I was, dating a woman didn’t help. So I avoided any implication of gay things, so when my sister tried to get me to watch a season 1 episode of Glee with Kurt being very flamboyant, I rejected it as a defense. But I secretly watched it. And when Santana and Brittany became real, I became obsessed. And I started reading fan fiction, and I read This fan story Taking the Long Way among others. and When I got to the story-line of Britanna having a baby, it all came crashing over me how unhappy I was in my life and how much my unhappy relationship was killing me and how I needed things to change.
Wow holy run on sentence.
Anyways I wanted to get that out there and also say We are Young is my favorite ending group song too.
Hey, you’re strong and cool and brave, and I hope things keep looking up for you. :)
Hi Riese,
It’s weird that I’m feeling emotional right now about your last recap/riesecap especially because of how emotionally divorced I feel from the show at this point. Tuning into this last season was mostly an experience of complete numbness punctuated by brief moments of horror. Seriously, they pulled some really nutso plot stunts and gut-punching offensive one liners this season, even for Glee. Last night I saw that you had posted your last recap and realized that I had totally forgotten the show was still happening after Brittany and Santana’s wedding. I had nothing better to do and Kip is currently in Mexico so I got ridiculously stoned and powered through the rest of the season. A big part of me wanted to just skip to the finale, but I made it this fucking far. In some weird way I owed it to myself to watch the rest of the episodes. I needed to see exactly how it turned out. I needed to know all the things that happened that I didn’t like.
I’m not a Brittana fan. Glee in no way helped me come to terms with my sexuality. While I am thrilled to see two hot ladies singing at each other and talking about sweet lady kisses on network television, Santana and Brittany’s relationship always felt too divorced from reality and their kisses were too chaste to ever rouse any support or excitement in me. If you asked me why I watched almost every episode, I’d have trouble explaining the reason to you. I came into the show liking Leah Michele from Spring Awakening, and I was enough of a broadway fan to be endlessly thrilled every time a musical theatre number was on the show (Leah’s Don’t Rain on My Parade still makes me burst into ecstatic, gasping sobs if I listen to it all the way through). I liked some of the other music, but I never bought a single on itunes or anything. But this isn’t enough for a person to hold on to if they’re gonna make it through the ringer of 5 seasons of literal insanity that is Glee. People talk about the good ol’ days of Glee, but I remember watching the pilot with my choir friends and even then thinking, “Really? This show is so sloppy.” So why did I stick around?
I think it is because I’m jealous. Like, really jealous of Ryan Murphy. Because, are you kidding me? I would have LOVED to get my hands on Glee. I could have made so many ridiculous, glorious, and campy things happen on that show. I watched week after week, aghast as Glee squandered opportunity after opportunity. Or, in many cases, I watched them show bold, radical, wonderful things on television, only to undermine them almost immediately, sometimes even before we reached the next commercial break. I watched Glee evolve into a show that genuinely impacted the lives of it’s fans and I watched Glee become something irreversibly steeped in Ryan Murphy’s own disdain, bitterness, and bullish behavior. I watched week after week, letting myself be emotionally jolted around by this insane rollercoaster. This show’s wonderful achievements were constantly flanked by some of the worst writing I have ever seen. Not even just on a “this is bad politics” level. Just a “this is really, really bad writing” level. The worst part is that as the show wore on and Glee continued to make a huge impact in the lives of it’s audience and ridiculous strides in LGBT representation (in part no doubt thanks to cast sprawl), all Ryan Murphy did was lean into the worst aspects of Glee out of some sort of inexplicable, misplaced resentment for the show’s success. The show went from having loose plot consistency to having basically zero disregard for any sort of consistency. The Glee writer’s room must look like a fucking Lamps Plus from all the lampshade hanging they did. ZERO accountability. For their characters, their show, or their audience.
It was like watching a trainwreck week after week after week after week. Set to music! And they would always find such new, inventive ways of fucking things up! I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t watch the damn thing if I wasn’t stoned, either. Your recap was the first thing I ever read on Autostraddle. The captions totally slayed me… and then I was like, “oh, what is this? A website for queer women that sounds like how my brain sounds? Let me read EVERYTHING”. And then reading Autostraddle led to me coming to A Camp and meeting some of the most incredible people in the world and having my whole life flipped upside down and shaken around until things fell into what seems like the natural, gay order of things. So thank you for that. But also thank you for writing all of these recaps. By the time I discovered them, all of my old choir friends had stopped watching the show. I was the only one left, and I couldn’t quite explain why I was still watching, but then I found you here, on the internet, a kindred soul as equally interested in holding Ryan Murphy accountable for his bullshit as you were in rolling your eyes at the stupid plot inconsistencies and making up subplots about characters giving each other sex toy advice just to get through the whole thing. Having you out there was a sense of comfort every time something next-level dumb happened on the show. I could watch Finn pull some ridiculous holier than thou bullshit and instead of just raging by myself I could think, “Oh I can’t wait to hear what Riese has to say about potatoface this week”. Also, it was really nice to be able to just read the recap if I didn’t think I’d be able to drag myself through the week’s episode. * Insert poignant anecdote about two sets of footprints in the sand and you carrying me through the tough times here *. I have enjoyed making this journey with you, even during the times I hated it. Thanks for giving us your countless hours, and thanks to Fox for cancelling this show so you can get back to writing about better things. Good riddance.
However, if in 20 years you’re interesting in co-writing the series revival and trying to actually make it good this time around, hit me up.
xoxox,
Monique
Riese! I’ve only just read this recap (and realise I’m a bit late here), but just wanted to say thank you. Your recaps of Glee (and of the Real L Word) have made me laugh more times than I can count.
Glee – for better or worse (probably worse) – will always be a show I think of fondly, even though I could barely stomach it at times. When Santana told Brittany she loved her, I was in love with a very close friend and could barely believe a TV character was speaking words so honestly. For that, Glee will always matter to me.
I’ll miss your recaps, but hopefully something equally as bad will come along for us all to watch ;)