Funeral

A few weeks back, Glee ran a special 90-minute episode. This week, the show probably would have done best for itself by balancing that out with a 30-minute episode.

Half of tonight's episode was outstanding. Just last week, I was saying that there needed to be a serious storyline for Sue to re-humanize her. I even suggested that it might involve her sister. I swear I had no idea that tonight's development was coming. At the risk of it looking like I'm patting myself on the back somehow, I'd say this was just what the doctor ordered. It's harsh to kill off Sue's sister, but I think the writers had taken Sue to such a lunatic extreme in the second half of this season that something equally extreme was needed to balance the scales.

Sue's grief seemed utterly real. (And Jane Lynch's performance was -- no pun intended -- pitch perfect.) She still tossed about a few Sylvestery barbs, but it was believable for her to react that way to her loss. And while the Glee club rallying around their nemesis seemed like an awfully big stretch, this was at least acknowledged with some justification, that they empathized with the deceased as a fellow outcast.

This wave of tender emotion set up one of season's best performances in "Pure Imagination," a really touching television portrayal of a funeral service, and the surprisingly sad breakup of Finn and Quinn. All top quality Glee.

Unfortunately, all of this material was literally broken in half by a what felt like a completely different episode. An episode we've already seen, in fact -- A Night of Neglect. As though at a loss for a way to naturally work songs into the main plot line, the episode seemed to not even want to try. Instead, we got four back-to-back-to-back-to-back performance numbers even more American Idol-style than that season low episode from a few weeks back. The kids were literally auditioning, and literally being critiqued by a character trying to behave like Simon Cowell. Which specifically was another low point for the episode. The writers, apparently unwilling to lose the outlandishness of old cartoonish Sue Sylvester, decided to graft all her mannerisms and zingers onto Jesse St. James this week.

The worst part of all of this was that a great, dramatic episode was put on pause to serve up this two acts of plotless nonsense. All the momentum that was built up at the start of the hour was thrown away, and then had to be built back up again from scratch. Were it not for the amazing performances from Jane Lynch and Matthew Morrison in the reading of Sue's eulogy, I don't think they even would have built it back at all.

So what do I do with 20 of among-the-worst-ever minutes of Glee stuffed inside 20 of among-the-season's-best minutes of Glee like some kind of Turd Oreo? Well... I think I literally average an A and an F, and call this episode a C. I really wish the writers had decided to be truly bold and risked an episode with only a single song. I think they could have made their strongest hour since "Grilled Cheesus" at the start of the year.

Of course, they'll probably never do such a thing. An 80% drop in iTunes download revenue for a week? (Gasp!)