Welcome, everyone, to the final season of Glee, the first reality competition in history that seeks to find out what happens when its audience, rather than its contestants, are thrust to the edges of their sanity. Riese and I will be co-recapping season six, alternating from week-to-week, because remember in Interstellar when — SPOILER ALERT! — Matt Damon became an axe murdering sociopath after being stuck on that ice planet by himself for so long? That’s why. Riese’s recap of “Homecoming” is right here, so click on over when you’re finished with this one.

OKAY, BYE!

Here’s what you missed on Glee:

Rachel?
Do you want to be on Broadway?
Come on, let’s go this way
We’re going to New York
Through this magic port
You’ll be the best some day!
You used to be a no one
But now you’re not
You can probably touch the sky!
Do you want to be on Broadway?
You’re gonna be the best on Broadway.

Do you want a TV pilot?
Kick your childhood dreams right in the balls
Tell your boss you’ve got the stomach flu
Screw who you’ve got to screw
To do something banal
(Hang in there, Fabray!)
Sure, you will be lonely
But you’re in full bloom,

Trash your ambitions from junior high—
(Tic-Tock, Tic-Tock, Tic-Tock, Tic-Tock, Tic-Tock)

It’s a new day in Los Angeles, California, where Rachel Berry is sitting in her trailer on the set of That’s So Rachel while her agent reads reviews of the pilot of her TV show. They are not good. So not good that Dean Pelton drops by to tell Rachel her show is just super cancelled and that, as a millionaire white guy, he will be leaving to run another network, but she, a lady-person, will never work in this town again.

I guess it’s not funny, life is far from sunny, when the laugh is over, and the joke’s on you.

Dean Pelton: We have offended literally every minority and special interest group on this planet, and since you’re the face of the thing, blame rests squarely on your beautiful shoulders.
Rachel: Is this some kind of thinly veiled meta commentary where I’m Ryan Murphy and you’re the internet?
Dean Pelton: Probably, but not as meta as the “Post-Modern Gay” you’re going to meet real soon. Anyway, sorry your life is ruined. Toodles!

Rachel sadly rides away on a sad golf cart sadly singing Alanis Morissette‘s “Uninvited.” She arrives back in sad Lima and is met with the sad news that her dads are divorcing. Also her childhood home is sadly already on the sad market. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything,” her dad says, which is a fine Fight Club quote, but I think a better Tyler Durden pep talk would have been: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

Probably they’re saving that for Sue’s series finale monologue.

I said a venti seven-pump vanilla soy green tea latte at 180 degrees with no foam! What’s so hard about that?!

Blaine also has returned to Lima because he and Kurt broke up and so he slid into a bitter depression, flunked out of NYADA, and decided to come back to Ohio and coach the Warblers. “Coach the Warblers?!” Rachel says when she meets him for coffee. “Don’t you need like a college degree for that?!” Blaine laughs in her face because there are no laws in Lima, silly-billy. You can gyrate on your students here while singing about date rape. You can kidnap babies. You can marry yourself. You can sell pot brownies at a school bake sale. Even the natural laws of the universe don’t apply to Lima. Quinn, I think you will remember, used her willpower to heal her paralyzed legs so she could dance at prom. College degree. Berry, please.

Blaine and Rachel agree to stick together from here on out and turn their lemons into lemonade. It’s a nice sentiment, but I’m pretty sure what Rachel needs right now is for someone to turn some potatoes into vodka. They sing “Suddenly Seymour,” which is a life-affirming ballad from Little Shop of Horrors about how everything is going to be okay if you feed the assholes in your life to a man-eating plant.

And I was like, “OK, but how is four fingers *not* fisting?”

And now that the clunky exposition is out of the way, we can get to the glory of exposition as masterfully performed by Jane Lynch.

America, Ohio’s winningest cheerleading coach is now Ohio’s winningest principal. Test scores are up. Body Mass Indexes are down. How’d I do it? The Sue Sylvester Three-Point Plan. One: a complete dietary overhaul — protein shakes and raw kale. Number two: Random mandatory weigh-ins and body-shaming. Three: Occasionally releasing hounds. My crowning achievement? Getting rid of that glee club.

And indeed she has run off all the New New Directions, shipped Will to Carmel High where Vocal Adrenaline lives, and turned the choir room into the Becky Jackson Memorial Computer Lab. Rachel sees all this and is, of course, appalled. I see it and feel that pang of guilt I always get when I realize I am accidentally rooting for like for the original Cylon on Caprica or Mona on Pretty Little Liars or Loki in The Avengers or the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I know Rachel is the Jeff Goldblum of this remarkable social experiment gone awry, but I just love T-Rexes, man. I don’t want Sue to eat off Rachel’s face, but maybe Will Schuester’s face, though.

BUDDY THE ELF, WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE COLOR?

In New York, Kurt walks us through what happened to him in the off-season. For NYADA’s third-year work study program, students are encouraged to get out of New York and do art things. He’s going to be directing a Real Housewives stage play at the retirement home where he did Peter Pan, and after taking some time off from dudes (“out of respect for Blaine”), he has decided to put himself out there by going speed dating.

It’s exactly what you’d imagine speed dating in Brooklyn to be like. There’s: an accountant, a server at a mediterranean-themed vegan restaurant for pets, a psychic, a guy who does pirate reenactments as a career. I have met all these people in New York and I have only been living here a year. If there was a guy who showed up on one of those 1870s-style high wheel bikes sporting a handlebar mustache and talking about how his signature cocktail includes chamomile foam, it would be pretty much everything you need to know about Williamsburg. But it doesn’t take the psychic long to figure out that Kurt is not over Blaine, which is true, obviously, but also: I am so sure any gay man on Tindr anywhere on earth is going to swipe past Chris Colfer‘s face.

Blaine takes Rachel to Dalton Academy so the New Warblers can bebop Ed Sheeran‘s “Sing” at her. They sound good. They always sound good. I’ve always been nuts about the Warblers’ style and if they were a group of dapper queer women, I would listen to/watch little else. Pitch Perfect 3: Wellesley College, for example. The only critique Rachel has is that Blaine is too old to be wearing one of those red and blue blazers, but I feel like Glee is going to be trotting out the Unholy Trinity in cheerleading uniforms until the end of time, so I’m not going to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.

Advice about Quinn? Everything I know about women could fit into this Gatorade cup, Rachel.

McKinley High football practice.

Sam: Hey, I am an assistant coach here now.
Rachel: Cool, cool. Do these sunglasses make me look as sexy as Tami Taylor?
Sam: No, sorry.
Spencer: Teammate, you are a homo! Get back on the field! Homo!
Rachel: Excuse me, sir, gay slurs are not welcome at this school! We spent three seasons eradicating that shit!
Spencer: I am kind of a — quote — “postmodern gay teen. You see, positive representations of gays in mass media has given me the confidence I need to be myself,” which is an ass.
Rachel: Wait, so you’re like Ryan Murphy’s self-referential mouthpiece commenting on the social impact of this show inside the show while explaining why he thinks minority-on-minority crime is a-okay and also hilarious.
Spencer: I should have known the Lesbian Blogger Community would react this way.

Riese has a far more generous reading of this fellow; probably she is correct — but heavens, he irked me.

No, I’ve never eaten a magic chicken and absorbed its powers. What the fuck does that even mean?

Rachel complains to Sam about how the only options for success at McKinley now are to be a star athlete or a star science student. There’s no room for the arts at all. Sam feels her, he really does, but he’s just a lowly Gatorade-maker now, getting hit in the head with empty plastic cups hurled by Postmodern Gay. (“What a sweetheart!”) He says Rachel should take it up with Sue, and so Rachel marches right into Principal Sylvester’s office — which is now guarded by and prisoner in an orange jumpsuit chained to one of those bowling balls like from the cartoons — and tells her she has to let McKinley have a glee club. She just has to! Sue goes, “You were the best the arts had to offer, and get a load of your life now. So no. Now get out of here before the convicted felon behind you stabs you with a shiv!” Not quite as intimidating as when Becky was Sue’s secretary, but Rachel’s scared enough to skedaddle.

Kurt is sitting in a cafe, waiting for a date to start, wearing monochrome polka dot jeggings, I kid you not, when he finds himself flashing back to the night he and Blaine broke up. The gist of it is: Blaine was late to dinner because he was rescuing kittens from a burning building or whatever Blaine thing, and he had a wedding planning errand to run. Kurt was doing that thing where he’d been having an argument in his head with Imaginary Blaine for like the last twenty minutes and when Actual Blaine walked in, he landed in the middle of the fight that was already happening. The fight was about how Kurt always arrives on time and Blaine never does, about how Blaine got mad when Kurt used a towel to wipe toothpaste off his mouth the other day, and about how they’re just kids and probably should not get married. You know, just the regular kind of squabbles every couple gets into when one person’s blood sugar drops too low.

“Lord Frey kills Robb and Catelyn and all the Stark bannermen. Littlefinger kills Joffrey. And Tyrion kills his dad. SO THERE.”

“I will never forgive you for this!”

Blaine: Are you kidding me right now? Are we seriously breaking up again?
Kurt: Stories need conflict, Blaine. Tension. Do you want to have a storyline on the final season of this show or not?
Blaine: There’s not another way to tell our story? The only way to do it is for us to break up and get back together, over and over?
Kurt: I suppose the show could add an asshole gay character—
Blaine: Santana is this show’s asshole gay character.
Kurt: I wasn’t finished, Blaine! God! Let me talk! An asshole gay character who lives inside this show and monologues self-congratulatory mastubatory commentary on what our presence inside this show means outside the show.
Blaine: That sounds awful; let’s just break up.

And so they do.

Kurt’s date arrives in the present day but Kurt is sobbing his beautiful eyeballs out, so he takes his polka dot jeggings and goes. I blame Spencer for this. (Spencer the Postmodern Gay, not Spencer Hastings. I do not blame Spencer Hastings for anything, ever.)

Merciful Jesus, he’s covering my ears so I don’t have to hear him anymore.

We have gone 2/3 of this episode without an appearance by Will Schuester, but our luck has run out. He is at home with his baby, twirling that kid around and around in one of those baby wheely chairs talking about — wait for it — himself. “I coach Vocal Adrenaline now,” he says. “They used to be coached by Rachel Berry’s mom who is a literal ice queen and the adopted mom of the little girl who could have been your half-ish sister if my first wife had been able to buy her from one of my students like she was originally planning to do. Whatever, though, little baby. Water under the bridge. Do you have any problems I could swoop in and fix in the most disempowering, insufferable way possible?” The baby does not and so Will sits right down on the floor and has an existential crisis, which continues the next day at Vocal Adrenaline practice when it becomes obvious that his students simply want him to teach them how to be awesome at show choir and not, you know, get personally involved in the most intimate details of their teenaged lives.

They sound as good as ever on “Dance The Night Away,” but Will doesn’t care about that garbage. Will cares about how he feels about how they feel about him. Rachel peeps him from the cheap seats in the auditorium and gets it. She knows a thing or two about thespian narcissism. She’s obviously coming to him for comfort and so he spends ten minutes talking about, “Look at me now, Rachel! The coach of the most famous show choir in the world!”

*Charlie Brown grown-up squawk noises*

Which, to be fair, is probably less of him making everything about himself for once and more like, “You can still achieve your dreams even if you are perpetually the worst!” Which is a sad, true fact about life, but Mr. Schue doesn’t rest on that beat. He weaves a metaphor about life being a bow and arrow and how if you don’t bend you’ll break, or maybe he’s trying to give her some helpful advice about how Hollywood is the real life Hunger Games? Oh man, you know who would be the best mentor for Rachel Berry? Effie Trinkett! Those broads would conquer the universe together.

Will & The Boys insist that the best way for Rachel to get over her failure is to watch That’s So Rachel until she doesn’t want to throw up any more. It is a Friends-style multi-camera laugh-track sitcom with bright colors, every kind of minority character, and a bunch of Urkel-y jokes. It’s like Bojack Horseman’s Horsin’ Around but with black and gay people. I want to say it’s awful but also it exists in a world where Two and a Half Men is still a thing, so probably it should have just been on CBS and not Fox and everything would have been okay. But it was not and so here we are.

So mysterious to me.

Watching it does give Rachel the courage to go to the school board, though, and request permission to restart the glee club at McKinley; she even offers to to fund it herself.

You know the next part even before it happens: She goes home and Kurt is sitting on her bed, crying. Blaine is a good rebound companion, but Kurt is her best friend, so it’s good and right that he’s here and they can heal together, especially since he’s the only one whose dreams haven’t completely unspooled between seasons, even though he broke up with Blaine. Kurt’s therapist says he was always picking fights with Blaine because men argue to stay connected, but Blaine didn’t want to do that because he’s not afraid of intimacy. I do not know if that is true about men. I started to Google “fighting to stay connected” but Google suggested “fighting to save the world” and the first result was “SUPER FIGHTING ROBOT MEGAMAN FIGHTING TO SAVE THE WORLD,” so I … lost a little bit of time on that one.

Maybe I *did* get this button-up at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Maybe I’m going *through* some stuff. Get off my dick!

Rachel has the perfect idea and it is that she and Kurt will bring the glee club back to McKinley, together. Sue takes the news as well as you would expect. She calls Kurt a “cartoon gay walrus” and promises that they’ll beg for death before this show is finished, which actually doesn’t feel like meta commentary, but I’m going to take it as such. Rachel thinks some more about how Mr. Schue said she should buy a bow and arrow. And Sue shakes pencil shavings and sheets of paper all over the former Becky Jackson Memorial Computer Lab before storming out to do whatever amazing things she does with her free time. Building a nuclear reactor from some plans she found on the internet. Playing Mortal Kombat. Raising a herd of baby dragons in her backyard. Who’s to say, really. Who’s to say.

It’s truly ridiculous how many plots the final season is rehashing when there are ten billion new stories to tell, but I honestly never get tired of Sue’s schtick because Jane Lynch is so good at it. Also, there’s a new character in the next episode and her name is Jane and I am so into everything about her, including how she tells Blaine she’s gonna be her own savior and he can just step; maybe she’ll be fresh enough to see us through to the end!

“I love everything about the person I’m changing Blaine into.”

Scandals! I was hoping we’d see Scandals again before the end! Blaine and Kurt meet up at Scandals so Kurt can tell Blaine he’s there to win him back blah blah of course and Blaine tells Kurt he loves him forever and — oh, whoa. Wait. No. Blaine tells Kurt he’s dating Karofsky. Karofsky! That Karofsky! Blaine and Karofsky met at Country Bear Night a couple of months ago and now they call each other Yogi and Boo-Boo!

Oh, man. I had heard this rumor, but Yogi and Boo-Boo? Kurt looks like he is about to vomit all over everything. Instead, he goes to the bathroom and cries. I want to feel sorry for him because as I have said repeatedly over the years, watching Kurt Hummel cry is like some kind of Sarah McLachlan homeless puppy depression hellscape, but then he sits down on the floor of a public restroom and I am the one who has to vomit. GET UP, HUMMEL! Go to a clean floor and cry! I cannot comfort you down there! Take a shower and I will hug you. (Take two showers and I will hug you.)

“Let’s see. Strengths. Works well with others as long as they leave me the fuck alone.”

Mr. Schue drops by McKinley to ask Rachel if now is a good time to talk about her dead boyfriend. Then he decorates her office how he likes it. The real mystery Glee‘s final season is: Will I ever feel another pang of empathy for Mr. Schue in my entire life? My own personal money is on no, but it would be a nice shock if it was yes.

Ghosts chasing me and throwing papers everywhere never bothered me anyway.

Rachel decides it is time to sing Let It Go, and she crushes it like shamazowa, like it’s in her actual DNA or something. There’s a hurricane in the school, lockers slamming open, papers flying through the air, but she powers through and settles into her office and hangs up a glee club sign-up sheet and also that ubiquitous gold star.

Rachel?
Please, I know you are scared
Seeing you in Lima fills me with chagrin
They say “be gentle,” and I’m trying to
I’m cheering out here for you, just don’t give in
You only have each other
It’s just you and Quinn
What are you gonna do?

Do you wanna be on Broadway?
You’re gonna be the best on Broadway.

Leave McKinley High.

 Glee Episode 602 recap: Right here. 

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