The problem for me musically was the premise of performing songs from movies. Too often, Glee was trying to trade on moments and performances that were much stronger in the original movies they were aping. Numbers like "Shout" and "Footloose" had partly original staging, at least... but recreating the iconic scene of Say Anything with Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" fell well short of the original. The Fred Astaire dance number from Royal Wedding (however skillfully performed in one take by Matthew Morrison and Jayma Mays) was clearly limited by the television budget. The pottery scene from Ghost has been ruined for me forever by the hilarious parody in one of the Naked Gun sequels. And as for Moulin Rouge? (Which they went to not once, but twice!) It's one of my very favorite movies; no recreation of it was going to pass muster for me.
Alright, so the "Danger Zone / Old Time Rock and Roll" mash-up was fairly clever in both concept and presentation. But why say the episode is going to feature mash-ups when that was the only one? ("Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" doesn't count. They threw in only a few seconds of Madonna, and the entire performance was exactly as performed in Moulin Rouge, right down to the shouting of character names from that movie. Huh?)
But there were some interesting plot developments. Finn spurring Schu to pursue his runaway bride out of a secret sense of guilt (which he finally confessed in the end) was a nice thread. Santana's sleuthing certainty that Brody is a drug dealer is an interesting wrinkle, even if it seems like that should have been set up a bit more than one episode in advance. Even better was seeing Santana's prickly exterior immediately melt away the instant she realized how much that Rachel truly needed her friendship.
The episode was fun to a point, but dwelled within the shadow of most of the movies it name-checked along the way. I give it a B-.
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