Hold on to Sixteen

I didn't have the time to re-cap last night's new Glee episode... well... last night. But here it goes now.

Competition episodes are a very mixed bag for Glee. Here, the writers wisely took a page from the past good ones, and had plenty of plot aside from the competition. Those plot developments then informed the song choices when they came around. Good work there.

But actually, if anything, the show had a little too much plot. All the stuff with Sam felt awkwardly shoehorned in. It's not that I'm not glad to have him back on the show. But it was weird to have him back chasing Mercedes when her new boyfriend wasn't even around in the episode. Weirder still to reveal that he was stripping for money, and to not have that be a major dramatic plot point that took an episode to deal with. Weirder still to have his parents on for a minute and a half, and agree to blindly send him off to school in another state with basically no questions asked. It was all too much.

But the other plots worked. Having already committed to going down the hideous road of the Quinn-Puck-Shelby plot over the first part of the season, I think they extricated themselves from it about as well as could be possibly expected. Quinn still probably isn't redeemable in my eyes, but at least she's not going to be a firestorm anymore. And Rachel was the perfect character to pull her off the dark path, because having her deliver the message that an adoptive parent, not a birth parent, is the true parent (when the parent in question is her birth mother) was spot on. In fact, props all around to the use of Rachel in this episode.

And her absence from the performance was so good for other characters. Tina got more to do in this episode than she had in the rest of the series combined. And she proved herself an even better girlfriend than Kurt's dad is a father. She was totally supportive of Mike. She stood up to Mike's father -- and got through. She didn't lash out at Mike when he laid into her from frustration. And she even made sure Mike didn't miss the application deadline. Wow. AND she got to share the lead on one of the songs. I hope Tina now doesn't fade back into the background again for the rest of the season.

The songs were mostly solid. It got off to a truly rocky start with that Toby Keith song. An awful song, and awfully hard to believe the kids would be singing it. Not a good use of Chord Overstreet's pop voice, either. But the competition songs were all great. The return of the Glee Project "Gerber baby" was strong, and the song selection from Evita to twist the knife of Kurt and Rachel was perfect. The "I Will Survive"/"Survivor" mash-up was one that really worked, and the performance was great (if a bit arm wavy). And the "Jackson Medley" performed by New Directions was one of the times you could reasonably believe the crowd reaction in the episode. Good vocal showcases for almost the entire cast, good matching the songs to those voices, and good song selection for plot resonance -- particularly Mike's dad being there for "Man in the Mirror."

There were a few other random false character notes, such as Blaine's objection to selling sex when just last season he was writhing around in a shower of bubbles with the Warblers. And as a complication in the Blaine/Kurt relationship, Sebastian is too big a tool to be believed. But minor quibbles. Overall, I give the episode an A-. Nicely done, Glee.