Yes/No

Glee is back for the new year, and delivered a mostly good episode. But there were some minor misfires along the way.

The opening presentation of "Summer Dreams" was undeniably perfect for the situation, though the song choice from Grease did probably put Glee in damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't territory. The staging was straight out of the movie, and I can't decide if that was the boring way to do it, or the only way to do it.

Helen Mirren cameos as the internal monologue of Becky? How awesome is that?!

Emma gets to sing again after a long time since her last number, and the staging of it was solid too! Okay, now we're rolling!

...except then came a lukewarm Glee mashup. The idea of putting "Moves Like Jagger" with a Rollings Stone song is an undeniably clever idea, but the actual orchestration of it was the epitome of "will you just pick a song and go with it?" to me. Still, Kevin McHale has one of the best voices on the show, and doesn't get nearly enough solos. So I guess between that and the good dance staging, I'll call this one a net positive.

But I'll have to call Will asking Finn to be his best man to be a net negative. Not so much for the awkwardness of a teacher asking a current student to do that, but just that I didn't buy any of the things Will was saying about how stalwart a person Finn has been. I've been watching the show the whole time, you see. (P.S. -- The background music in this scene was really odd. At one point, I swear they were about to start singing "Eminence Front" by The Who... though I couldn't figure out what possible connection to the story that would have had.)

If a downhill slide began there, though, it was completely stopped by the best musical number of the hour, the girls' performance of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." The montage that went with it, and the emotions plain on the faces of the singers, really made it a moving and powerful performance.

...which was then totally undermined by Will going to Emma's parents for permission to marry. The writers just had to get last more bump in the road in the Will/Emma relationship, I guess. I just couldn't fathom any other reason why Will would go to seek the approval of people he expressly told Emma should not be pursued for approval the last time we saw them. And they were even more horrible parents in this episode than they were the last time around. It sort of makes the prickliness of Mike Chang's father in this season's earlier storyline seem tame by comparison.

Next came the bombshell about Finn's dad -- not a war hero, but a failure. I wasn't sure at the time why this was being tossed into this episode (though it did turn out to be building somewhere). But it did provide the setting for another great performance by Kurt's father... and an equally good one from Finn's mother.

It all worked its way to that incredibly odd swimming pool proposal. I'm not quite sure why it felt like "Emma" to Sam or Will. It just felt like the writers expressing a need to unleash their inner Busby Berkeley. But at least the proposal itself went off without a hitch.

A tender moment between Becky and Sue (a rare human one for Sue), and now we're heading toward a happy endi---

Stop the presses! Finn sits Rachel down for a speech, and from the moment he tells her to wait for quietly to finish, you know where it's going... and watch it like a car wreck in slow motion. And despite the fact that it was all just horribly awkward, I think it was meant that way, and is an interesting thing for the show to do. I do wish they'd laid the track for Finn's impulsiveness over maybe another episode or two -- perhaps suggesting the army one week, finding out the truth of his father in another, then tailspinning into the proposal in a third.

Then again, I probably wouldn't have wanted to see that much screen time devoted to Finn anyway.

Despite the fact that I noted a lot of bumps in the road above, I would say overall that the highs of the episode peaked higher than the lows dipped low. The story between Becky and Artie was interesting and felt honest. The groundwork for future material with Sam and Mercedes was promising. Sue being a rather normal human being was absolutely a step in the right direction.

All told, I'd call the episode a B+.