Glee requires such a herculean suspension of disbelief that to retain your sanity it's essential to take each episode as an individually contained universe. Glee demands that we care about characters we haven’t seen in months, that we believe a glee club could perform a competition routine (and win) with just a day’s preparation, that we treat the defending national champions as underdogs.
Glee’s fourth season finale, "All or Nothing," had a built-in advantage. The show is at its most memorable when it’s competition time. For better or for worse, Regionals swallowed the story lines of Rachel’s audition for Funny Girl (prediction number one: she’ll fall short in order to prepare for the season five redemption arc) and Ryder quitting glee after getting catfished by Unique (prediction number two: he’ll be back in time for Nationals).
So it's ironic that in Glee’s annual high-school showcase episode, it's McKinley High graduate Rachel who stole the show with her rendition of Celine Dion’s "To Love You More." It's my song of the week:
Aside from making 30-year-old Cory Monteith famous for playing a high school student, Glee’s true achievement is its discovery that former Beyoncé back-up dancer Heather Morris is a legitimate one-liner-dropping dynamo. But Morris’s recruitment to MIT as a dimwitted smoke and idiot savant poses a problem for the future of Glee. The absurdity of her character has always let the audience know that the show-runners are in on the utter joke of a program into which Glee has devolved. But Morris’s impending real-life pregnancy and future jobs elsewhere suggest we won’t be splitting time between Lima, New York, and Boston.
Therefore, out of respect for the conclusion of "Fondue for Two," and apologies to Barstool Sports, Brittany S. Pierce is my "Smokeshow of the Week."
