Hello! Welcome to the last Glee recap I will EVER WRITE! It’s obviously not the last time I’ll ever write about Glee, period — my co-pilot Heather Hogan and I have some #endofglee posts planned for this week and next — but it’s my last recap. Heather will be recapping next week’s two-hour finale spectacular (I’ll give her my notes, of course). I’ll have some final feelings and thoughts on the last page of this recap, but first, LET’S DISCUSS THIS PENULTIMATE EPISODE OF GLEE!
Welcome to the to the eleventh recap of the sixth season of Glee, a late-night talk show about sister wives who have lesbian sex in an underground bunker and make gluten-free onion dip for their tiny dogs:
We open in the Glee room, where the Glee Club is rehearsing for the first time in Glee history! It’s never too late to turn your whole life around, folks.
The Warblers have clearly never read Entrepreneur Magazine ’cause they think a five-minute break will irreparably harm their chances of succeeding at the Divisional Sectional Spectacular Titilational Singing Ball Bash. Furthermore, they think Spencer and Roderick should stand in the back at Sectionals ’cause they can’t dance.
Warbler: You dance like a blind man with a back brace who hasn’t taken a dump in three weeks!
Spencer: Hey, I don’t need to dance good, I just need to look good, and I do.
Other Warbler: Get over yourself, we all look good!
We then creep stealthily into the hallowed hallways of McKinley High School For Kids With Decent Pipes, where Roderick is opening his locker. Roderick opens his locker. Everything falls out of Roderick’s locker. Because he’s a failure! If he can’t even keep all his shit in his locker, how will he and Spencer ever learn how to dance???!
But the two bral pals can’t decide who’s gonna teach them to dance! Luckily, I have some ideas.
Idea #1: This girl.
Idea #2: This girl.
Idea #3: This guy
Idea #4: This guy
Idea #5: All three of these girls at the same time:
Okay that was just an excuse to reminisce. The boys decide that Fake Quinn will teach them to dance.
In the April Rhodes Memorial Pavillon, Sam’s trying to convince Rachel not to pull a Lea Michele and/or a Chris Webber and go pro before acquiring that holy piece of paper known as Ye Olde Bachelor in Fine Arts. However, acting school basically exists to help young people have successful acting careers and if she’s already got one then she probably doesn’t need Fake Julliard? But whatever. Rachel insists she needs to make this choice on her own.
Sam departs, disgruntled, and Rachel breaks into “Listen To Your Heart,” only to be joined mid-song by Jesse St. James!
This is primarily an opportunity for us to witness the joy Lea and Jonathan Groff feel when they get to sing together. I’ve always loved that part of this show, too — how it kept bringing Broadway onto the television, easily snagging superstars like Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth for side roles. Anyhow, Jesse St. James is in town to coach his mother through her tummy tuck, and thought he’d drop in to talk Rachel into eschewing Fake Julliard in favor of the Russell Simmons musical, co-starring yours truly, Jesse St. James.
Jesse: It’s really fun to come home every now and again and coach a Glee Club or, in my case, help your Mom use her grabber tool to pull a box of cereal off the top of the fridge, but you and I both know that you belong on Broadway. You need to get your ass back to New York!
Rachel reminds him that she is going back to New York, she’s just not sure if it’ll be to work at The Olive Garden or to perform elaborate musical numbers outside the tkts booth. Furthermore, she notes that her life fell apart after she dropped out of Fake Julliard, so probably she should rectify that situation. But that’s not what she did wrong, and everybody knows it:
Jesse: Rachel, your mistake was not leaving NYADA. You got a lead role in Funny Girl, nobody could’ve expected you to turn that down. Your mistake was leaving the show too early to do that stupid sitcom.
Jesse St. James says they “make great music together,” which is code for anal sex.
Cut to the dance studio, where two male characters we have zero investment in are playing out Glee’s third incarnation of the “old clunkers learn how to dance” subplot.
Spencer takes up about as much space in my heart as one of Teen Jesus’s dreadlocks, so I care about as much as Dalton cared about its Warblers temporarily blinding Gay Blaine with rock salt when Spencer falls and twists his ankle.
What show introduces a whole new cast for a farewell season? Seriously! The closest thing I can think of is how Buffy added the whole team of new Slayers in the final season. Regardless, we follow these ciphers to the locker room, where Spencer says he’s gotta be the tough guy who makes it through the rain with a shot of Novocain, just like the gymnasts did in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. Beiste says he could ruin all his joints forever with that attitude but really there’s only one more episode in the season, so I say SHOOT ‘EM UP.
Backstage, Kurt interrupts Rachel organizing her makeup brushes to talk about The Future and whether or not she wants flaxseeds on her strawberries tomorrow morning.
Rachel: What if I say no and then I never get cast on Broadway again? It could be like career suicide!
Kurt: That’s not going to happen to you. Listen, you could do Broadway or NYADA, you’re gonna be great at whatever you choose. When I first heard that you and Blaine were going back to Lima to coach your old Glee Clubs I thought you were crazy, but I’m so lucky you made the decision that you did. You inspired more than just this group of kids, you inspired me too. What we’re doing really matters. We have a profound effect on these kids and their self-esteem and what they go on to accomplish. Look we only have a few years left to go to college and learn all the fun stuff like acting and fencing and choreography. We also get to go to school and be inspired in the process. I mean how lucky are we? I just want you to think about that while you’re making this decision.
Kurt says they can start over again ’cause he’s going back to Fake Julliard and Blaine got into NYU and their entire lives could be different, everything could be fantastic and so great and so much better!!
In the Glee Club room, a bunch of packages have arrived! Kurt says they’re from GLAAD and might be a gift for hosting the Trans Choir. The children gleefully rip open the boxes, probably hoping to find a dick or a smaller box, but alas!
I imagine a bunch of writers with unkempt hair, kinda stoned, eating macaroni and cheese from Boston Market and writing this scene.
The glitter bombs are especially bomb-like, destroying everything in sight! For example: a piano. Also, everybody in the entire school is vomiting on everybody else. Obviously this is Sue Sylvester style domestic terrorism.
Sue: Everyone at this school is experiencing wheat I like to call Monte-Su-ma’s revenge.
While everybody throws up, Will is informed that HIS CAR IS ON FIRE! I swear you stop paying attention to this show for one minute and then somebody’s car is on fire. Abby just went, “There’s a fucking CAR BOMB on this show?” I don’t know what to tell her. Then Will gets revenge by pretending to be a hairdresser and shaving Sue’s head? I don’t know what to tell anybody about anything anymore!
We then cut to a dark locker room where Sue’s watching Hitler videos and talking about how Vocal Adrenaline is a machine like the Nazis. Sheldon finds this offensive ’cause Hitler probably would’ve hated trans folks. For the record, I don’t think anybody requires a personal connection any of to Hitler’s loathed populations in order to find Hitler films offensive, but I digress.
Welp, it’s time for the big contest-o! The Sectional Situational Focus Group Glee Club Choir Show Chorus Musical Runaway Bunny Finale! This season’s judges include Donna Landries, Ohio’s favorite vice comptroller, WOGN News 8 Anchorman Rod Remington and Westminster Kennel Club’s trainer of the year Butch Melman, played by Fortune Feimster!
The first team, The Falconers, are here to teach us about owls and how useful they are to young wizards at Hogwarts with a musical number called “Broken Wings.”
https://youtu.be/wpt4dg2Ry4Q
We return from a relaxing commercial break to witness the incomparable Vocal Adreniline tonsil hockey team perform a musical situation, beginning with “We Built This City (On Rock ‘n Roll).” It’s good.
https://youtu.be/JM9_TEbQTlk
I’m glad Glee is using its final moments on this earth to regale us with musical numbers starring a bunch of randoms! No really. I love you Glee. You are so weird. You are like the campiest thing to ever get this far on television in the history of gay men being in charge of things on television. If you haven’t read Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker article about Ryan Murphy then you cannot see this show for what it is and you should rectify that immediately.
Oh then they do “Hey Mickey!” It’s pretty good, too.
https://youtu.be/2kJKC_dDMZs
Back in the Glee Room, Spencer’s getting amped about his upcoming shot of cortisone while Myron the Bar Mitzvah Boy declares, “I am gonna murder this. There will be weeping.” Schuster welcomes his students to the sacred institution of the Show Choir Circle.
They should probably be preparing to perform but instead they’re gonna talk about Rachel’s feelings. How many times have I already asked you to never change? Okay, here’s one more: NEVER CHANGE, GLEE.
Rachel: A couple of months ago I crawled into this choir room with a mission – a selfish one. I needed you guys to help me get my groove back. And it came true! Now the world is opening up to me and the best part is that in this moment, I don’t care. All that matters to me is you guys and the strength of this circle that you have created. So go out there and enjoy it. Enjoy the lights and the applause and the cheers because you guys have earned it. And I know we all know that this could be the last time that the New Directions perform together, so as a member of the old guard, I just want to say that we couldn’t be more proud that you guys are the ones bringing us home.
I think she means she’s really glad that nobody from The Glee Project is in the cast anymore.
Snap-dash over to the locker room, where Spencer’s about to shoot up — therefore risking the ongoing health of his joints and limbs and possibly ruining his life forever and ever —
—when Roderick bursts in and begs him not to do it because HE HAS AN IDEA.
We begin with “Take Me To Church” by Hozier, starring Roderick with backup from Jane and Kitty, eventually, full of the dramatic reveals and boomy ballads this show wedded itself to when it chose to be obsessed with Journey.
https://youtu.be/J4jG8cR7y9c
Next up is Sia’s “Chandelier,” and mid-number Myron shows up dressed like the little girl in the video and seriously if this is the entire reason his character exists, I’m kinda okay with it. This is so ridiculous and funny! I love this! NEVER CHANGE GLEE. SHINE ON YOU TERRIBLE BEAUTY.
https://youtu.be/rv1MHcqEIsc
By the way, Roderick’s big idea is to have Spencer swing in on a chandelier. I guess was jealous abut missing his opportunity to swing around onstage like they did last season for “Roar.” This show is SO uncool, right? Like it remains uncool and I think the only people left are the equivalent of Rentheads. I mean that in an affectionate way, though. I’m still here, so.
We finish the big show with “Sail Away,” which’s the least impressive of the three songs, not partially because that was when my hopes for a Jane solo were summarily dashed.
https://youtu.be/bwN63Ja7kmE
In the teacher’s lounge, the judges attempt to reach a decision, which Donna Landries finds challenging ’cause she thinks they were all terrible.
Donna Landries: What’s up with that bird school? Is that a public school? Is that where my taxpayer dollars are going?
The news anchor likes the New Directions because of the females. He particularly likes Jane because she’s rocking an “au natural Pam Grier Afro.” Jesus Christ.
Rod Remington: Sister’s got it GOIN ON. She’s got me hankering for a piping hot cup of cocoa.
Donna: What the hell did you just say to me?
Butch Melman says the decision is really Trixie’s, ’cause Trixie was invited to be the judge, not her.
Donna hates everything:
Donna: That was the worst music I’ve ever heard. There’s not a single person on earth who woke up and said, “You know what song I just really need to hear today? Hey Mickey.” By the time fatty was signing “take me to the church” I was like, “Okay, provided the service we attend is my funeral.”
Rod says something else and Donna says they should just vote. I agree, lez get this show on the road!
Smash back to the Big Grand Ole Stage Opry, where the teams are assembled to hear which one of them will be sent to an island to battle each other to the death. Guess who wins!!?!?!?!?!
THE NEW NEW NEW NEW DIRECTION WARBLERS!!!
Sue Sylvester and William Schuster face each other’s faces in the Glee Room, where Sue tells William Schuster that he should thank her for handing his Glee Club a victory on a silver platter.
Sue says that because William and Beiste were the only humans who dared defend her honor on Geraldo, she decided to sabotage Vocal Adrenaline from the inside. William can’t believe it, ’cause their routine was quite good, but Sue reveals that the songs she chose were chosen specifically to give the judges PTSD. But what about the glitter bombs? The barf party? She has explanations for all of it. Except for blowing up the car — she did that just for fun.
Alas, William refuses to thank Sue for what she sees as basically giving him tenure and a pony.
Sue: Okay, change of plans, buttchin. I’m gonna take the weekend, maybe fly down to my condo in Boca, brown up a bit, and when I come back, I will have come up with some brand-new ways to destroy you.
I know what she’s gonna do y’all. SHE’S GONNA CANCEL THE SHOW!
Over in the ‘ol April Rhodes Pavillion, Jesse St. James is sitting in the auditorium daydreaming about mashups and teen hormones. He invites Rachel to crash at his apartment in New York, “no strings attached.” I hope its’ as palatial as the Bushwick Barbie Dreamhouse Loft! Unfortunately, Rachel’s chosen to turn down the role and go back to Fake Julliard:
Rachel: I turned down the part and I decided to go back to NYADA. I think I was afraid that going back to college would be a step backwards but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
He says he’s not mad but he’s sad they won’t be onstage together every night, but he’s proud of her for not taking the easy road back to Broadway. There’s no such thing as an easy road back to Broadway though? Besides, I guess, “being on American Idol.”
Jesse say it’s truly inevitable that they’ll run into each other in New York, which’s 100% true. They’ll both be at Angus in about a week circa 2am sharing a fruit plate with vodka shots. Then they kiss! Right on the lip smackers!
We then cut to the Glee Club room where everybody’s celebrating with what I wish was champagne but is probably sparkling grape juice. William tells them to remember this incredible moment in their lives when they put aside their differences and joined together as a team. He points out that although Kurt and Rachel are leaving, it’s just the beginning for everybody else!
Now it’s time to put the trophy into the display case on top of the shelf or what-have-you, which triggers a little memory montage of all the other wins…
and all the other trophies…
Sue glances in and gives a little smile.
Everybody is really proud of themselves for placing a trophy on top of a stationary object, it’s a big moment for carrying things and placing things on top of other things. As the episode wound to its end, I felt sad that there wasn’t a closing number. I love those closing numbers. In lieu of a closing number, I’m just gonna talk about Glee for a minute while listening to one of the 76 Glee covers I have on my iTunes.
Here’s what’s funny, I didn’t really like this show at first. I first heard of it ’cause Lea Michele was my then-best-friend’s best friend once upon a time, and then I heard that it involved singing and dancing and Jane Lynch and well, that sounded pretty cool. Glee premiered in 2009, the year Autostraddle launched, and we prepared aggressively for the show’s debut, certain our five readers were as jazzed for a musical teevee show set in a midwestern high school as we were. We did a liveblog / drinking game for its September 9th premiere, and for about half of Season One, Carly provided you with episode mini-caps. We got up to Episode 112, at which point Carly had to stop writing for us because of her job and nobody else was still watching faithfully enough to recap the season’s back end. We let the show go, then, like we did with so many things during that hectic, cash-strapped time.
I liked the show, sure, but I didn’t love it. (I definitely didn’t expect, five years later, to be the one of the only people in my group of friends who still watch it.) I loathed the fake pregnancy plot, and each episode arc seemed remarkably identical to the last one. I loved the music, though: April and Rachel’s “Maybe This Time,” Kurt and Rachel’s “Defying Gravity,” Mercedes’ “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Mercedes’ “Beautiful,” Rachel and Shelby’s “I Dreamed a Dream” — I spent a lot on iTunes singles that year.
But something else happened that year: Mid-Season-One, Brittany had said that sex wasn’t dating because if sex were dating, then Santana and her would be dating. “I hope they follow up on this budding fuckbuddy situation with Santana and Brittany,” I wrote,”’cause that’s how these lesbian things often truly start, ladies. ” Shortly thereafter, Heather Morris told The Advocate that that little aside was all we’d ever get of Brittana. But we’d never expected a queer female character on the show, anyhow. We’d come for the singing and dancing. Glee was relevant to our interests insofar as we liked musical theater a lot and also Britney Spears, Madonna and Lady Gaga; female artists who each got or were gonna get their own episodes. We did an open thread for the season one finale and then the show went gently into the good night.
“Look, I didn’t know I was going to have to write something about Glee tonight,” said Alex in her recap for episode 201, noting that the only reason she was attempting at all was ’cause “we didn’t post anything today and Riese was freaking out about it!” This feels accurate. See, back then there wasn’t always a lot of stuff to write about. It’s wild to consider now — there are so many queer female teevee characters these days that I can’t fathom devoting such energy to a lady-gay-less program — but we often wrote about Glee because, indeed, something needed to go up. Something, anything. Rather than attempt a full recap, however, Alex made this diagram of how her brain reacts to watching Glee:
I’m not sure how we found Ashleigh, our next Glee recapper. She was an excellent writer but didn’t like our editing process and quit after two episodes: Britney/Brittany and Grilled Cheesus. “I do not love and adore this show like others do,” she told Laneia. “I only enjoy it on a basic level, and probably don’t have the strength left inside to find that tiny needle in the haystack of shit that we have so discussed earlier.” This was the fall of 2010, I’d just moved to California but didn’t have an apartment yet, so I slept on Taylor & Kip’s couch and watched television with my future girlfriend at the apartment she shared with her then-girlfriend, which’s where I was when we turned on the television to find Santana on top of Brittany, giving her sweet lady kisses. I screamed.
The post wrote itself, really, and did so briefly. Still, I expected absolutely nothing to come of it (as did Heather, we have recently learned), but it felt worth mentioning. This was the fall of It Gets Better, when all these young gay people were dying, when I somberly assigned myself the “suicide beat” and recounted death after death after death. Everybody was talking about bullying. We’d heard Glee planned to address it and therefore we really needed to get our shit together about this show. Palmer, our then-Managing-Editor who’d just started law school and usually wrote about politics, would sketch a basic recap and then I’d plow in and beef it up and thrust it out into the world. So we did that for two episodes, Rocky Horror and Never Been Kissed. But it was too much work on top of law school. And then.
riese: we didn’t get anyone to watch glee this week i just realized
i think it was on tonight
laneia: hi hello I am putting away brownies and going to bed. I wish I felt tired. Tireder.
more tired
A million people watched that fucking show. Surely to god one of them can write abt it for us.
Right?
riese: well
you know how people are
i found it on letmewatchthis
i can watch it
laneia: Sigh
riese: ew someone is barfing
on glee
And thus my Glee recapping career began. I didn’t even have Intern Grace yet, I just grabbed images from fan tumblrs — but before I could once again ask if any of our six unpaid writers were interested in taking over, something amazing happened: Furt.
It was our very first Very Special Episode, in which all expectations were met and exceeded, and we saw straight guys standing up for their gay buddies in a manner previously unseen on the television. This was big. Yeah, it was about boys, but it was a big fucking deal, and Glee was telling this story at the height of its popularity — when everybody was talking about the movie, the tour, dominating the iTunes charts, all that. Maybe because we were dying, Focus on the Family restrained itself from ruining our moment. I’ll talk more about this in our Things Glee Did Right post this week, but Furt is when I signed on, when I wanted to be the one to write about whatever gay shit this show was up to. Because this show has been nothing if not fearless, even when recklessly, outrageously so.
So I did — I didn’t write about the straight parts or the adult parts, just the gay parts and the music and the parts I liked. One week nothing gay happened so I didn’t recap and I was surprised when people asked me where my recap was. People really cared about my recap? Really? So, gradually, I committed. See, Season Two was undoubtedly its best, although Season Three had its moments. Season Two is when I blamed my “Blame it on the Alcohol” recap on the alcohol and they accidentally created a lesbian episode without any lesbians in it. Season Two is when “Trouty Mouth” happened. When this adorableness happened:
More importantly, Season Two is when I pulled up my formspring one cool May evening to find SANTANA IS A LESBIAN!!! in my inbox (I didn’t have a teevee at the time, so I had to wait for it to go up online) — LADIES I was SURPRISED. I did not see this coming and I was fucking PUMPED. Santana’s story was like mine in a way no other queer female character’s had been — and I talked about it then, and will talk more about it this week in that post I mentioned before.
We were all in, now, and I had Intern Grace on board for all things screencap and graphic-related. Everything changed, then: now that Santana had come out as a lesbian and Brittany had confirmed her bisexuality, we had a stake in things, and feelings about how their characters were being handled. Blaine and Kurt’s subversive teenage romance shifted from being a universally celebrated thing to a thing many Brittana fans disdained for its blatant prioritization over the show’s lesbian relationship.
But it wasn’t just rivalries or increased expectations that sunk the show. It got messy. They fucked up a lot in really major ways. Finn outed Santana and basically got a medal for it, Glee clumsily handled Issue Episodes including but not limited to teen suicide, intimate partner violence, texting and driving, eating disorders, transgender bathroom bills and catfishing. Any semblance of consistency was thrown out the window, which made it hard to care about the events of any given episode when you knew those events could vanish from collective memory within a week. The show took a huge hit when Cory died, too. I can’t imagine anything was the same for the cast after that.
The Glee Project was failing as its own show and Glee‘s obligation to onboard its winners wasn’t doing them any favors. Unique had potential to be a revolutionary character but turned out to be the Idea of Tolerance wrapped in last year’s paper. Glee started suffering for cast sprawl just like The L Word — another six-season show that started out brilliant, fumbled a lot, had a brief comeback, binged on guest stars and wrapped everything up in a clumsy abbreviated last season that was half fanservice and half the opposite of fanservice — they kept adding and subtracting characters dodgeball-style, waiting to see what stuck and then rearranging the damaged bits next week. People stopped watching. You stopped watching! I missed you, my dearhearts, but have clung ever-tightly to those of you who remain here, still talking to me about this weird show.
Ratings for Glee episodes plummeted as did ratings for people reading Glee recaps. Sometimes an episode would be so awful I could barely believe it had made it onto television. Sometimes an episode would be so brilliant that I could barely believe it happened the week after such an awful episode. But Glee was never smooth, exactly. The degree to which many romanticize its former glory is ridiculous. Every episode was about the same thing for many years: somebody tries to sabotage Glee Club, Glee Club finds a way to make it despite it all. Shit got recycled: We need to teach these guys to dance! Glee Club needs to raise money! Let’s get [person] to join Glee Club! [Person] is quitting the Glee Club! [Competition] is right around the corner and we’re not ready!
“There’s a common belief that Glee eventually flew off the rails,” wrote Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, “but really it just became a roller coaster, even within episodes.” Maybe we also didn’t mind the bumpiness so much in the beginning. When you’re first meeting a show, you’re a listener and the writers are explaining The World Of The Show to you, and you’re deciding whether or not you like it and want to move in. Then you move in, and everything changes, because even though the landlord’s in charge, you do, after all, live here. You are paying rent. And you hate those drapes and are confident that your sofa looked better before Rory, Joe, Ryder, Jake and Marley sat on it. You were kinda bummed about the rules about pets and then they changed the rules about pets — something you’d never anticipated happening! — but it was just a rule changed in writing, you still couldn’t get approval from anybody to actually get a pet. So you kept walking by the pet store, looking at a puppy named “lesbian action” and crying softly to yourself. You never would’ve renewed your lease if they hadn’t changed those rules, after all. Had you been tricked? Why was the landlord devoting all his attention to his new building instead of the one you still lived in? You have a lot of questions and you file a lot of complaints.
But through it all, Glee was rarely boring. It took risks, and fell flat on its face more and more as time went on, but it never stopped trying. Even when the show sucked, the music was still fun, and I stayed for the music. I tried to remember that this crew spent so much time every week practicing and recording and performing the episode’s songs that to them, the dialogue that happened in between each number probably felt pretty inconsequential. The choreography was so cheeky and campy and there was a little bit of everything I liked: Broadway, forgettable pop hits, classic rock. I always liked those big ending numbers, too! Everybody wore such colors. It was like a circus but also a high school but also a soap opera but also a rich gay man playing with puppets and a generous budget.
In Queer Eyes, Full Hearts, Emily Nussbaum argues that Ryan Murphy is a pioneer and a radical “worthy of our respect if not precisely our trust: he pushes the limits of television in ways as exciting as anyone up on that Mt. Rushmore of TV. His shows—which by now form a distinct portfolio—need to be considered in their logical framework. That context is not Shakespeare, or Dickens, or even Scorsese, but camp. Realism means little to Murphy; authenticity, less; subtlety, almost nothing.” Indeed.
In this last season, we finally got a lot of what we asked for, including a Brittany and Santana marriage. This season has focused entirely on the gay couples rather than the straight ones. I feel grateful for that, even though this season has also inspired a lot of eye-rolls and produced a relatively unimpressive soundtrack. I’ve recapped more episodes of this show than any other show in the history of shows — 71 altogether — which’s weird, ’cause I don’t think I’d even call it one of my favorite shows, but I can’t deny that this show broke the ground right open and it did so very, very, very queerly. It changed the game.
And, because this episode didn’t end with an all-team Ending Musical Number, I’ll just add my own — my favorite one, “We Are Young.”
https://youtu.be/o8KtQ5aY6AQ
FAREWELL MY LOVES! FAREWELL! Thank you for sticking with me.
Comments
Dang, Riese. Reading your thoughts on this last page was a privilege, truly. And it made me good-cry. Thank you for, well, everything.
Glee is how I fell in love with Heather’s writing.
AAAAAHHHH! Thank you for sticking with this nonsense through the years
Page 3 just said everything that I can’t articulate about why I’m forcing myself through this final season. THANK YOU for putting to words the uncomfortable process we’ve been through with Ryan Murphy and this glorious shit show. And for the trip down memory lane when Kurt’s coming out was BIG GAY NEWS and Brittana felt like a revelation. Those years when we actually went out and bought the box sets of Seasons 1 & 2 because it was that important to us. And then, like any relationship pushed past the honeymoon stage, it started getting complicated… Anyway, thank you for that. I related to hard. One more…
I own the box sets of seasons 1-5 and I’m not even ashamed.
Thank you so much Riese for all the recaps over so many years, through the highs and lows and insults and triumphs. You deserve to be thrown all the Junior Mints.
thank you i will sit here with my mouth open waiting for the junior mints
The last page of this is brilliant. Thank you for your words. Thank you for expressing this. In the last six years, most of the fans of Glee have felt hurt at some point or another by the show, and few of us have been shy about expressing that hurt. But I think what also needs to be acknowledged is that we wouldn’t have felt that hurt if this show hadn’t made us feel in the first place. Glee wasn’t perfect. Sometimes it wasn’t good. But it did change things. This was wonderful, Riese, thank you so much.
As an aside…in 2010 I broke up with my very first girlfriend. Three days before we were supposed to leave on an already planned and paid for vacation. As only true lesbians would do, we went on that vacation anyway. I will always remember sitting in a hotel room in Orlando, on separate beds in awkward silence and flipping on Glee, only to see Santana on top of Brittany in a bed. There were gasps! Exclamations of amazement! We were so upset we weren’t at home because we didn’t have a DVR and couldn’t rewind to make sure that really happened!
I’m not even a Brittana fan anymore, but that moment was a game changer. We were so starved for representation, and it was right there in front of us, suddenly, on a Tuesday night. Glee paved the way.
Yes, absolutely — our disappointment in a show is always relative to our expectations of it, you know?
That’s such a cute story about you and your ex… even in the worst of times, scissoring brings us back together to share a moment of joy…
Wow, that last page. That last page so so so beautiful, and not at all overly romantic or nostalgic. It was honest. And I loved it.
The week that Santana told Brittany she loved her in season 2 was the same week that Paige told Emily, “If I say it out loud… If I say I’m gay. The whole world will change”. The recap of those two episodes was the first thing that brought me to this website. Back then, I was still figuring out my sexuality, quiet, shy, and unsure of so many things. But those episodes felt like gasps of air pushed into my lungs that I didn’t even know I needed. And I was so desperate to find someone, anyone, to talk about it with. Searching for that community gave me Autostraddle. And Autostraddle felt right. So I made it an internet home of sorts, put up my feet, and never left (Thank you for being a more generous landlord that Ryan Murphy ever was).
…. What I’m trying to get at here is, thank you! 71 is a lot of episodes to have dealt with. But I know your words made a difference to me, so they probably made a difference to loads of others as well.
that was such a week in gay television, lemme tell ya… and i’m so glad that it brought you here. <3
I’m not crying you’re crying
NO I’M NOT SHUT UP
Kristoff’s home!
I’d bet all my moneys that Sue Sylvester burnt down Dalton.
GOOD CALL
Listen, I love Glee. I love it so much. I love the music and I don’t even care that the story stopped making sense a long time ago. I own all of the DVDs and I met Alex Newell at an event last year and have never been so excited. It’s silly, and something I can connect with my best friend and brother over. It’s just my favorite show (and, yes, I realize I have actually terrible taste in TV). I have enjoyed your glee recaps all these years!
While we are reminiscing though, let’s talk about “Proud Mary” in wheelchairs. Remember that?
Oh that was a great number
THANK YOU, Riese. For all the hours you spent watching and recapping this beautiful/terrible show (I’m sure we enjoyed more reading your recaps than you enjoyed writing them). For loving and hating and loving to hate everything this show did, and for always having the right words to express exactly what I was feeling. For all the ways you travelled from Lima to New York and back.
Watching the show without yours (or Heather’s) recaps wouldn’t have been the same. So just.. thank you.
Oh man Glee. Freshman year of college, hanging out in my dorm, smoking by myself for the first time and watching this strange show because Finn looked kinda like a guy I had a crush on. So many memories.
I jumped ship a while ago, and now just watch the musical numbers, but I still feel sad that it’s ending. I was hardcore into it for a bit, and think it’s awesome that the questioning and baby gays out there have it to watch if they feel isolated (although I probably would’ve avoided it like the plague for fear of people catching on to my desires).
These recaps have been a really nice goodbye to the show, I’m really glad we have them.
My phone almost never loads pictures and I am really bad at remembering names so whenever I read a recap I am like ahhhh what is a Roderick or a Spencer or a Trixie etc???? Anonymous glee person cannot dance and another anonymous glee person is bad at organising their locker OH THE HUMANITYYYYYYYY
But i do know who Jesse St James is so yay! Didn’t he make vocal adrenaline throw slushies on her last time they met? Why are they friends who kiss again? Who ARE all these people??? Really? Remember when Sam was briefly a stripper? Remember when Brittany thought thr irish guy was her imaginary friend who only she could see? Is this what being high feels like?
I have no idea what is happening but I am thankful for your recaps because I get to feel like I watched the show but in much less time.
“Remember when Sam was briefly a stripper? Remember when Brittany thought thr irish guy was her imaginary friend who only she could see? Is this what being high feels like?”
I was going to say YES THIS IS WHAT BEING HIGH FEELS LIKE but then realized I might just think that because I’m unable to watch Glee without being high. (when it airs, of course. when i re-watch it to write the recap, i’m sober as a judge) no but really often while watching glee i think ‘were they high when they wrote this episode?’ and i hope that the answer is yes a lot of the time
IT WOULD EXPLAIN SO MUCHHHH!
I also now understand how you have gotten through watching so much Glee. One of my friends just started watching it from S1 and she got through 4 seasons in two months and I had to keep mesaaging her to make sure she hadn’t run off into the wilderness due to too much Glee exposure.
My inbox is full of messages back and forth saying I HATE MR SHOE LOLLLLOLOLOLOLOL
Thank you for your dedication Riese.
When I saw Brittany and Santana kissing in the beginning of that episode, I was eating cookies and playing bananagrams in a professor’s apartment (she was one of the cool ones who lived in a freshman dorm to be a part of the support system for the students and had open hours the nights that Glee aired and we convinced her we needed to watch it…we eventually got about 15 people crammed in there every week) when the world kind of stopped for me. Now I know why, but back then I was so surprised anything on primetime TV, and a show about kids in high school, just showed something so casually…and then continued on like nothing happened. At least for a little while. I agree with sentiment expressed above that Glee made me feel so much early on that it just ended up disappointing me when it fell flat later on.
I guess I am trying to say it was great how Glee made me realize it was ok to talk about all the feelings I was feeling so acutely but didn’t want to talk about because they felt so bad, but in a good way. You know?
Ugh Ugh Ugh, Riese this final page killed me! The Glee recaps on this site were the first thing I regularly read. I found autostraddle through Annika’s posts and then i got hooked on the glee recaps. I still remember your recap of the episode where Finn outed Santana and they sang rumor has it/someone like you and as I read what you wrote I was like “Yes! someone thinks about this show just like I do!” I’m pretty sure the first time I ever commented on an article that I didn’t write was one of your glee recaps. I was crying reading the last page of this. Thank you Riese.
aw mey these things you say are so lovely
my emotions. glee was such an important part of my life. it came out when i was in hospital and didn’t want to do anything, let alone watch tv but Kurt and Mercedes and the music wormed its way into my heart. i was deep into the fandom, met some really important and amazing people through forums, started questioning my sexuality around the time Santana told Brittany she loved her, cried over Klaine and then I gave up after S4 and returned for the final season. i hate the show but i also love it and ugh, thank you for that final page.
I have a really hard time letting go of things, so I pretty much can’t believe I stopped watching Glee almost 2 seasons ago, but you should know I’ve never stopped reading the recaps and watching the music videos whenever there’s a song I like, someone from Broadway guest stars, Brittany dances, or Jane or Rachel sing.
But mostly reading the recaps.
Thank you, Riese for all thr time and energy and utter creativity in recapping this show. It has literally changed my life. I remember discussing the throwaway “sex isn’t dating” comment and how exciting it was with the straight girl who made me realize I wasn’t straight. I made and sustained strong friendships in a new city by having all of us clamber into the washroom so we could livestream the episodes between classes. I befriend and eventually fell in love with my current girlfriend because we both shipped Faberry. For a few years, being an overt and devoted fan of Glee defined me, and the bitterness of the show’s betrayal in telling our stories properly still hurts. So thank you for creating a subcommunity here on AS for the rest of us who still feel chills seeing a bunch of weirdo kids wearing red shirts singing Journey.
I think the first time i ever heard the word ‘Faberry’ it was from you! Thank you for being one of the people who stuck around throughout the years, too. It sounds like Glee was to you what The L Word was to me.
♡
It’s the end of an era! I’m sure this has been said before, but if y’all made these recaps into a book I would definitely buy it. As it stands I guess I will read them from the beginning again to celebrate the end that had to happen someday. I haven’t watched Glee since Idina Menzel adopted Quinn’s baby but these recaps are everything.
I watched two episodes, but I read every word of every recap because they were the funny and real in a way the show could only dream of being. Kudos, Riese.
I haven’t watched in several seasons, but I read this today, and I’m so glad I did. That last page, Riese, thank you… I remember those revelatory moments of Season 2 so well. I was in college and about to come out. Everyone was obsessed with Lady Gaga and it felt like a whole new world.
I guess for me the wonderful thing about it is, we’re living in that brave new world. Queer characters are sprouting up everywhere. Hell, some of us are making them happen! We no longer have to wait with baited breath on Ilene Chaiken and Ryan Murphy. Thank the goddesses. The most beautiful thing about Glee right now is the fact that it’s almost irrelevant.
And as I read that L Word listling posted earlier and reflect on how the L Word gave birth to the Autostraddle community, and read the comments on this article and see how many people found their way into this community via the Glee recaps… we’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Here’s to queer media made by queer people for queer people, from teevee to this very website! And here’s to the friendships and communities that happen around and because of that media! *clinks glass and plans queer world domination*
Riese, thank you for this wonderful final recap, and for keeping the commentary flowing and the ambivalent fires burning all these long often lean and frustrating years. You’re a shrewd observer and a writer of just the right blend of wry and passion, at least for me (and many others, judging by people’s comments).
Just to add a bissel to what you and others have already so thoroughly and movingly covered: thanks for the parting gift of naming “We Are Young” as Glee’s big song all team finale. It’s a pitch perfect choice! It’s always been one of my favorites, too, because it so captures the essence of what appealed to me about Glee the Show (as opposed to Glee as Background for Brittana): young people, outwardly or inwardly eccentric at a time of life when being normal most matters, banding together in their own group for: angst, romance, self-discovery and empowerment, the burgeoning of empathy for others, good times, and chart-busting musical numbers. Bonus points for a group number that includes the always missed Cory Monteith, Brittana matter-of-factly holding hands, and the inimitable Dianna Agron sashaying across stage to welcome and twirl Amber Riley home. (The friendship between Quinn and Mercedes, fortunate enough to have escaped full-on development by Murphy and crew – did they even have a portmanteau? – was one of the sweetest of Glee’s many how-can-I-count-the-permutations pairings.)
Fans/readers often write straight from the heart about the importance of this show on their emerging lives: possibilities revealed and validated, awesome parallel role-models, an example of what one’s future might be. Speaking as an older brittana [and yes even glee] fan and autostraddle reader (my next Big Birthday will be 70), for some of us this show was simultaneously an extraordinary fruition of what we worked for and dreamt of 40 or 50 years ago, and a reminder of the particular wonder, joy, and pain of young love.
When I think about what kept me coming back to Glee even infrequently, as I did in the alternately disappointing and insulting 4th and 5th seasons, it was frequently the music, sometimes RIB’s flashes of brilliance (Kurt kicking the winning field goal to Beyoncé with the football dance team?! Genius! Kurt and Burt? heartmelting!), and always the incandescence of the cast, both onscreen and off. Not to take away from the professionalism of any of the actors, most of whom had been cultivating their craft for years and some of whom had already enjoyed significant professional successes, but part of what was so captivating about Glee was the blurring of meta and story, the overlay of life and stage. It was frequently so transparent that the cast were having the time of their lives, revelling in fame and fortune and hard work and camaraderie, flirting with each other and their fans and the world. And that reality show aspect of Glee burst into its brightest moment with the double friendship of Naya Rivera and Heather Morris, Brittany S. Pierce and Santana Lopez.
Without delving into the did-they-or-didn’t-they buzz surrounding Heya, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they DID meet and connect and frolic with an unstudied joy that totally fueled and fired their onscreen roles and enchanted and inspired especially young women but clearly so many more of us. As Joe (Samuel Larson) said, “Love is love, man”, and all the world loves a lover: young and old and queer and cis and across culture class ethnicity and race. However they manifested their love for one another, Heya was the real deal and they brought all that joy and mischief and integrity to Brittana, and the world roared in recognition and appreciation.
When I was 19 and fell in love with my first one true love (some of us have been fortunate in our lives to have a couple of true loves – that first girlfriend is still dearest family today), I’d never seen two women kiss. Not on the screen, in photos, nor in real life. There was no fan fiction to tell me what and how, no waiting web filled with 103,000 tumblr queers or YouTube videos encouraging us that things would get better. The scant gay people in literature pretty much died or repented or were monstrous and/or pitiable. I would never have in a million years guessed that in my lifetime Fox [of all studios, even forced there by fandom] would prominently feature a story line involving the maturing first love relationship of bisexual and lesbian, Latina and white high school cheerleaders. Wow. What a difference a few decades and a zillion brave people have made.
I’m so grateful that I got to live long enough to see this (although bummed I may not live to read the behind-the-scenes memoirs ;) and to have been a small part of paving the way for it; so thankful for Naya Rivera, Heather Morris, and Vanessa Lengies and Brad Falchuk, Ian Brennan and yes even Ryan Murphy. And I’m thrilled beyond words to see the splendid world that you at Autostraddle and in the fandom are creating, beyond Glee and surpassing meta. I hope there will be more and more room for all of us eccentrics and queers, more justice, more challenging of even the new normal, and more love: always more love. Proudly so.
I stopped watching Glee at some point during the third or fourth season. . . but I kept reading these recaps. I think I’m actually going to miss them even though I haven’t cared about the show for awhile.
I know this is several days old and probably no one will see this comment but I wanted to post my thoughts, Firstly thank you for all the recaps over the years, and especially thank you for the 3rd page. I feel like I need to share my story of how Glee changed my life, saved my life, not by what it showed on screen but by how it affected the rest of the world.
I am a transgender woman who’s always been timid and afraid of who I am, that’s my deal and that’s my mistake. I felt like I could stay in this shell and pretend to be a man and I could survive. So I got into an unhappy relationship with a straight woman and just went along. But see, I never really passed as a man, not in movement, behavior, mannerisms. So the world saw me as a gay man, and I got attacked and harassed about that as if I was, dating a woman didn’t help. So I avoided any implication of gay things, so when my sister tried to get me to watch a season 1 episode of Glee with Kurt being very flamboyant, I rejected it as a defense. But I secretly watched it. And when Santana and Brittany became real, I became obsessed. And I started reading fan fiction, and I read This fan story Taking the Long Way among others. and When I got to the story-line of Britanna having a baby, it all came crashing over me how unhappy I was in my life and how much my unhappy relationship was killing me and how I needed things to change.
Wow holy run on sentence.
Anyways I wanted to get that out there and also say We are Young is my favorite ending group song too.
Hey, you’re strong and cool and brave, and I hope things keep looking up for you. :)
Hi Riese,
It’s weird that I’m feeling emotional right now about your last recap/riesecap especially because of how emotionally divorced I feel from the show at this point. Tuning into this last season was mostly an experience of complete numbness punctuated by brief moments of horror. Seriously, they pulled some really nutso plot stunts and gut-punching offensive one liners this season, even for Glee. Last night I saw that you had posted your last recap and realized that I had totally forgotten the show was still happening after Brittany and Santana’s wedding. I had nothing better to do and Kip is currently in Mexico so I got ridiculously stoned and powered through the rest of the season. A big part of me wanted to just skip to the finale, but I made it this fucking far. In some weird way I owed it to myself to watch the rest of the episodes. I needed to see exactly how it turned out. I needed to know all the things that happened that I didn’t like.
I’m not a Brittana fan. Glee in no way helped me come to terms with my sexuality. While I am thrilled to see two hot ladies singing at each other and talking about sweet lady kisses on network television, Santana and Brittany’s relationship always felt too divorced from reality and their kisses were too chaste to ever rouse any support or excitement in me. If you asked me why I watched almost every episode, I’d have trouble explaining the reason to you. I came into the show liking Leah Michele from Spring Awakening, and I was enough of a broadway fan to be endlessly thrilled every time a musical theatre number was on the show (Leah’s Don’t Rain on My Parade still makes me burst into ecstatic, gasping sobs if I listen to it all the way through). I liked some of the other music, but I never bought a single on itunes or anything. But this isn’t enough for a person to hold on to if they’re gonna make it through the ringer of 5 seasons of literal insanity that is Glee. People talk about the good ol’ days of Glee, but I remember watching the pilot with my choir friends and even then thinking, “Really? This show is so sloppy.” So why did I stick around?
I think it is because I’m jealous. Like, really jealous of Ryan Murphy. Because, are you kidding me? I would have LOVED to get my hands on Glee. I could have made so many ridiculous, glorious, and campy things happen on that show. I watched week after week, aghast as Glee squandered opportunity after opportunity. Or, in many cases, I watched them show bold, radical, wonderful things on television, only to undermine them almost immediately, sometimes even before we reached the next commercial break. I watched Glee evolve into a show that genuinely impacted the lives of it’s fans and I watched Glee become something irreversibly steeped in Ryan Murphy’s own disdain, bitterness, and bullish behavior. I watched week after week, letting myself be emotionally jolted around by this insane rollercoaster. This show’s wonderful achievements were constantly flanked by some of the worst writing I have ever seen. Not even just on a “this is bad politics” level. Just a “this is really, really bad writing” level. The worst part is that as the show wore on and Glee continued to make a huge impact in the lives of it’s audience and ridiculous strides in LGBT representation (in part no doubt thanks to cast sprawl), all Ryan Murphy did was lean into the worst aspects of Glee out of some sort of inexplicable, misplaced resentment for the show’s success. The show went from having loose plot consistency to having basically zero disregard for any sort of consistency. The Glee writer’s room must look like a fucking Lamps Plus from all the lampshade hanging they did. ZERO accountability. For their characters, their show, or their audience.
It was like watching a trainwreck week after week after week after week. Set to music! And they would always find such new, inventive ways of fucking things up! I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t watch the damn thing if I wasn’t stoned, either. Your recap was the first thing I ever read on Autostraddle. The captions totally slayed me… and then I was like, “oh, what is this? A website for queer women that sounds like how my brain sounds? Let me read EVERYTHING”. And then reading Autostraddle led to me coming to A Camp and meeting some of the most incredible people in the world and having my whole life flipped upside down and shaken around until things fell into what seems like the natural, gay order of things. So thank you for that. But also thank you for writing all of these recaps. By the time I discovered them, all of my old choir friends had stopped watching the show. I was the only one left, and I couldn’t quite explain why I was still watching, but then I found you here, on the internet, a kindred soul as equally interested in holding Ryan Murphy accountable for his bullshit as you were in rolling your eyes at the stupid plot inconsistencies and making up subplots about characters giving each other sex toy advice just to get through the whole thing. Having you out there was a sense of comfort every time something next-level dumb happened on the show. I could watch Finn pull some ridiculous holier than thou bullshit and instead of just raging by myself I could think, “Oh I can’t wait to hear what Riese has to say about potatoface this week”. Also, it was really nice to be able to just read the recap if I didn’t think I’d be able to drag myself through the week’s episode. * Insert poignant anecdote about two sets of footprints in the sand and you carrying me through the tough times here *. I have enjoyed making this journey with you, even during the times I hated it. Thanks for giving us your countless hours, and thanks to Fox for cancelling this show so you can get back to writing about better things. Good riddance.
However, if in 20 years you’re interesting in co-writing the series revival and trying to actually make it good this time around, hit me up.
xoxox,
Monique
Riese! I’ve only just read this recap (and realise I’m a bit late here), but just wanted to say thank you. Your recaps of Glee (and of the Real L Word) have made me laugh more times than I can count.
Glee – for better or worse (probably worse) – will always be a show I think of fondly, even though I could barely stomach it at times. When Santana told Brittany she loved her, I was in love with a very close friend and could barely believe a TV character was speaking words so honestly. For that, Glee will always matter to me.
I’ll miss your recaps, but hopefully something equally as bad will come along for us all to watch ;)