(Spoilers lurk below.)
This is Glee‘s first direct sequel to a tribute episode, and one has to wonder why the hell they decided to revisit Britney Spears. I mean, Madonna or Michael Jackson would have made sense. They’re legends. You want to give them another episode, I might think it would be redundant, but at least I’d understand. But Britney Spears? On top of the fact that “Britney/Brittany” wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, I really don’t see the point.
“Britney/Brittany” also featured the adults fighting against using Spears’s music at all every step of the way and the climax of the episode was an incredibly negative experience involving a riot during a performance of “Toxic.” And yet, Will somehow remembers the whole thing as very cool and inspiring, so much so that he brings it back. I think that Will might need to see somebody about those memory problems. Early-onset Alzheimer’s can be an ugly thing.
I did like that they decided to address Brittany’s academic issues, since they’ve always been the elephant in the room with her that no one wants to talk about. Sue decides to show her some tough love by kicking her off the Cheerios until her grades improve (“Tough love feels a lot like mean”), which leads Brittany into an apparent spiral of depression. Will decides to try to snap her out of it by doing Britney Spears music (you ever notice that Will is really bad at this kind of thing?), and it takes them a while to realize that “the whole singing at her thing isn’t helping.” A much better idea is Will and Emma’s insistence that Brittany start receiving tutoring after school (though Emma really should have gotten on Brittany’s ass about that last year… seriously, this woman has tenure?), and by the end of the episode she manages a C minus on a test, even if her answers are still written in alternating-color crayon.
Brittany has always been pretty bad at expressing her emotions, what with her Bob-Newhart-like deadpan demeanor, and it actually makes sense that the other members of the club wouldn’t know how to help her or even realize to what extent she needs help. This is especially true now that Santana is gone (she had a short cameo during a hurried Skype call with Brittany), since she has an almost supernatural ability to understand Brittany and give her what she needs.
Sam, who based on this and his approach of Marley in “The New Rachel” is setting himself up as the wise senior of the group, realizes that Brittany is mostly pretending to spiral out of control in an attempt to imitate Britney Spears, who came out of her spiral to land a gig on X Factor. Brittany starts going to tutoring, her grades improve a little, and she gets back on the Cheerios. And everyone is totally happy.
Well, not quite. I said before that Brittany is hard to read even for her friends, and no one in this episode really picks up on the fact that to the extent that Brittany is truly depressed, it’s because she misses Santana so much. Everyone latches onto her dismissal from the Cheerios as what has to be affecting her, since that’s the tipping point, but no one realizes what her real problem is at the moment. I like that; it’s a little more subtle than Glee usually is.
Speaking of subtlety, one of the things I liked about “The New Rachel” was the subtle characterization of Cassie July as extremely insecure. Since Glee can’t leave well enough alone, they decide to just spill her whole story in this episode through Kurt’s sudden exposition. Kurt saw a video on YouTube of Cassie in her first Broadway play, during which she lost her shit when an audience member’s cell phone rang and climbed down off the stage to assault him. The incident made her unhirable in the business, so she had to leave the theater and go into teaching, where she is quite successful but not the superstar she always wanted to be.
I like this backstory, but I wish it had been revealed in more effective way. Let Cassie tell us about it when she’s ready, don’t just have Kurt vomit it out secondhand. It loses all its impact that way. I really liked Cassie’s final scene with Rachel in this episode, in which she explains that she is hard on her students because she knows that it’s tough out there in the world. If you can’t take a teacher poking fun at you and pushing you to your limits, how are you going to take being on Broadway? Well… probably about as well as Cassie did. That’s the tragic implication, that Cassie acts the way she does because she genuinely doesn’t want her students to turn out to be failures like her. I like this a lot, but they let it play out too quickly and in a way that divorced the drama from its proper place in the story, giving the reveal to Kurt instead of Cassie.
Rachel seems to learn the right lesson from her feud with Cassie, that she is there to learn and she’s not going to be a superstar right away. She didn’t have to deal with not being the best of the best at WMHS, but at NYADA she does, and it was probably a bitter pill to swallow, which is why she lashed out the way she did.
I liked the bits with Rachel and Kurt moving in together, and their chat in the dark of their cavernous studio apartment was the standout scene of the episode. Even though it would probably be a huge failure, I’d love to see these two get their own spinoff. I mean, I’d watch it.
Brody continues to be a fairly boring character, but I did like the implications that Rachel may actually be willing to move on from Finn. Despite the fact that Finn has yet to make an appearance this season, he is a huge presence in Rachel’s life. However, at the end of the episode, Rachel paints over the “Finn” in a heart that she had decorated their wall with. Finn has actually been all the more conspicuous for his absence, and I admire their restraint for keeping him offscreen for now.
Despite the fact that Will refused to let Jake into the glee club in “The New Rachel,” he spends most of this episode trying to convince him to join. Will handwaves this by saying that cutting Jake was a mistake, but I have to wonder why it happened in the first place if they were just going to have it mean nothing in this episode. Does Will think that violent emotional outbursts are a bar to entry to the club or not? Why have him decide one way in one episode and the exact opposite in the next episode? It makes me worried that this season will continue to feature the writing staff failing to work as a unit.
I’d like to say that I liked the bits with Marley and Jake, and I really did (despite, again, how quickly plot points seem to be moving this season) up until the end of the episode when Kitty steps into the picture to announce that she and Jake are dating. The Jake-Kitty-Marley triangle is virtually a carbon copy of the Finn-Quinn-Rachel triangle of the first two seasons, and dear God I really do not need to see the rerun of that. Find something new and different to do with these characters, please!
Puck even shows up in this episode to confront Jake about being a dumbass (apparently flying all the way from LA just to give Jake a five minute lecture in the choir room), which only serves to highlight the too-obvious similarities of the two characters. Apparently the Glee staff has only so many characters available to create, and they’re already having to start reusing old characters. It’s hard to imagine another reason for the appearance of Kitty (Quinn) and Jake (Puck) this season. They’d better figure out something else to do with them fast.
I will say that I liked the “loser montage” as Jake looks at the people he’s decided to associate with after finally joining the glee club.
It’s hard to summarize what I thought of this episode. It had a lot of good ideas, it failed at several levels in the execution for various reasons, and I really think that the Britney Spears connection held them back creatively. It’s episodes like this that make me glad I don’t assign star ratings, because it’s hard to pin one single badge of quality to something that is so all over the place.
The music was all okay, but for the second episode in a row nothing really stood out all that much. I was hoping for good things from “Oops!… I Did it Again,” but I really didn’t like their arrangement. The choreography was good (even if perhaps overly suggestive, even for college), but the arrangement was so slow and devoid of energy that the song just seemed to lie there more than push forward. Jake and Marley’s “U Drive Me Crazy/Crazy” was cute, even if I really don’t think their budding relationship paid off. “Womanizer” was okay, but it stuck out as a really awkward number to get into and an artificial and unnecessary way to lend characterization to Jake. The highlight for me was probably “3,” which, while not important to the plot, at least had a lot of energy and a great acoustic arrangement.
Other thoughts:
Brittany’s confusion about whether she was doing a voiceover or talking aloud reminded me of Community‘s Abed, but they steered clear enough of the full fourth wall break that it didn’t really bother me in that way.
Wade seems to be dressing as a woman full time now. I’m going to go ahead and use the female pronoun for her in the future anyway regardless, unless something major changes, since she’s made it clear that she identifies as a woman. How she dresses from scene to scene really shouldn’t affect that. Hopefully they don’t end up just turning her into a walking cross-dressing gag like Steve on The Drew Carey Show (who, to be fair, was explicitly not transgender).
I was glad to see that Puck cut his hair, so now his mohawk bears a much smaller resemblance to a dead squirrel.
I hope we see more of Santana soon, because I’m pretty sure I’m starting to show symptoms of Naya Rivera withdrawal.
