Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Extraordinary Merry Christmas

Well, that was a fairly disposable episode of Glee. I'm not sure that's all too surprising, given that the competition episode last week felt like the real halfway point of the season, and this week had an agenda to push some Christmas album sales.

But I do wish it hadn't been quite so transparent in that agenda. There was almost nothing in the way of plot this week; instead, we got nine(!) songs. (A Glee record?) What little plot there was seemed forced. Rachel was suddenly extra-selfish after several tame weeks, just to set up the Christmas moral. Sue was just the opposite, suddenly extra-nice for similar reasons. It all seemed stretched to fit an array of Christmas songs picked out months ahead of time to allow time to produce an album... which it probably was.

The only real highlight was Artie's Christmas special itself -- though even that wore out its welcome after two solid acts of black-and-white, deliberately over-acted weirdness. (Well, the real highlight was Mercedes' deadpan delivery of "I think these are the end times.") And Glee was asking for even more suspension of disbelief than usual to imagine that could all be produced on anything close to Artie's supposed $800 budget.

So, at the risk of being branded a Scrooge, I'm going to dismiss this episode as a D. There simply wasn't much to see here. Sorry, Chewbacca.

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