Episode Report Card Demian: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Don't Think You Ready For This Jelly
By Demian | Season 1 | Episode 11 | Aired on 11.25.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So, our little love triangle (Quinn, Finn and Rachel) has morphed into some freakish love sextagon. (Yes, yes, I know -- it's a hexagon. But a hexagon doesn't have "sex" in it, and a sextagon does. So bite me, ancient Greek.) Puck steals a baby book for Quinn, causing her to think that maybe he could be good father and boyfriend material. In order to free herself up to spend a little time with him to test her theory, she decides to wave Rachel in front of Finn as a distraction. Said waving of Rachel involves recruiting Kurt to give Rachel a make-over. During the course of the make-over, Kurt learns that Rachel is in love with Finn. Since he's also in love with Finn, he uses the make-over to turn Rachel into exactly the kind of girl Finn doesn't like -- the sexy, dirty type of girl. Quinn takes Puck on a babysitting gig, and is impressed with his ability to charm the little snots. It looks like she's leaning towards keeping the baby and raising it with Puck. Until she learns that while they were babysitting, he was sexting with Santana. Which drives her right back to Finn, leaving Rachel and Kurt both feeling forlorn.
In our weekly dose of baby drama, Quinn (as mentioned above) is thinking of keeping her baby. This freaks out Terri and Kendra (who is now involved in the baby-swap plot). Their plan is to expose Quinn to the little demons that are Kendra's three kids, thereby causing her to abandon all desires to raise a child. But Quinn (and Puck) turn out to be far better caregivers than Kendra or her husband. It's only after Quinn learns that Puck is incapable of being faithful that she returns to the plan of giving the baby to Terri. (Which is good, because Terri and Kendra's back-up plan seemed to involve some kind of spring break kidnapping.)
And then there's the actual Glee Club, which is the reason we're all watching the show. Will suspects that Sue is leaking the club's competitive set list to the other schools that will be at sectionals. He goes to confront the director of the show choir at the reform school for bad girls, who shames him into playing Lady Bountiful by letting her choir (which has to rehearse outdoors) come use the McKinley auditorium. Their performance is pretty good, and very flashy, freaking Will out. He decides that New Directions needs to get flashy, which involves performing a number in ridiculous wigs. It's only after the director of the choir at the school for the deaf shames Will into inviting his choir to practice at McKinley that Will realizes that Will realizes the true power of a simple, heartfelt performance. At the end of the episode, we see that Sue is in fact trying to get the other two choirs to cheat at sectionals. Will they give in to temptation? We'll know sometime in the next two episodes.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Pointless previously sequence. And when it's done, Sue Sylvester's signature drum-line cue marches across the soundtrack as the Sue-POV camera stalks the ever-hapless Will Schuester down in the teacher's lounge, where he's grading sombrero-bedecked Spanish tests, or something. Sue tosses a magazine onto the table right beneath his face and cheerily opens, "Hey, fella! So, unless my recent write-up here in Splits! Magazine naming me Cheerleading Coach Of The Decade has me driven completely insane, I'm pretty sure you and I had an agreement that you were going to show me your Glee Club set list for Sectionals!" Will, looking puzzled, replies that he was under the impression she'd lost interest in the whole thing, but Sue strenuously begs to differ and notes that she'd hate to have to go to Principal Figgins about all of this, so Will promises to get her a copy of the list as soon as possible. And after a bit of business with Splits! that isn't half as amusing as that sassy little exclamation point in the magazine's title, Will voice-overs, "Here's the problem with Sue Sylvester: You never quite know where you stand." No shit, Schue. It's called "inconsistent characterization." You might want to have the show's writing staff look that one up. In the meantime, though, we'll follow along as you lead us through a series of flashbacks that demonstrate how devious Sue's been since last we saw her sweetly reading Little Red Riding Hood to her differently abled elder sister two weeks ago. In the first, Will leads the Glee Club through a dance routine until he notices Brittney filming the entire rehearsal on her iPhone, and when he asks for an explanation, Brittney goes all deer-in-the-headlights for a moment before whispering, "Coach Sylvester? Didn't tell me to do this?" Heh. In the next, Sue herself sidles up to Will in the hall and too-casually wonders whom the Glee Club will be competing against in Sectionals -- Jane Addams Academy and Haverbrook School For The Deaf, in case you've forgotten -- before too-pointedly asking if Will remembers those schools' ZIP Codes. D'oh!
Will, to his credit, swiftly connects the set list demand to the non-surreptitious taping to the ZIP Code request, and the next thing we know, he's ranting at Emma, "She's leaking our competitive set list to the other schools -- if the other glee clubs get set lists and videos, they'll know exactly how to beat us at Sectionals!" Okay. We'll go with that. For now. Emma counsels against allowing Sue to become a distraction again, some more, then mangles a cliché thusly: "If you can't take Mohammed to the mountain, then you gotta get Mohammed to bring the mountain down. To his house. Mohammed's house, wherever he's staying." Hee. Will's furrows are deep and strong, so Emma rephrases, "You should drive over to Jane Addams Academy and ask the director point-blank -- if something's going on, you'll know." "Hmmm!" Will hmmms, right before he gets whacked out of the frame by the title card.
Jane Addams Academy. As you'll no doubt recall, Jane Addams Academy is little more than "a halfway house for girls just getting out of juvie," and the elaborate network of security procedures Will must negotiate just to gain entrance to the main hall certainly backs Mercedes's assertion up, what with the multiple buzz-entry doors and the sign-ins and the temporary IDs and the enormous guard who wands him down before letting him go on his way. Meanwhile, International Recording Star Eve and her scraggedy-ass blonde wig sit behind a desk somewhere wondering, "You're a good kid, Aphasia -- why did you try to rob a bank?" Aphasia -- sassy, naturally, and just a tiny bit wonk-eyed -- of course replies, "Because, Miss Hitchens, that's where they keep the money." International Recording Star Eve And Her Scraggedy-Ass Blonde Wig order Aphasia back to class just as Will arrives for his appointment, and Aphasia rather obviously bumps into him, leading Miss Hitchens to chide, "Aphasia! Give Mis-tah Schue-stah his wallet back!" Aphasia complies with some perfectly timed head flips, and then we finally enter the scene proper, in which Will explains the reason for his visit, and Miss Hitchens instantly takes offense. "What kind of messed-up school are you people running?" she demands. "You think that because our students are thieves and arsonists, that we're cheaters, too?" Well, it seems a reasonable assumption, yes, but my opinion matters little at this moment, because Miss Hitchens continues to steamroll right over Will and his spluttering explanations with, "Do you know that we don't have costumes, or even an auditorium? Our show choir has to practice out in the rec yard." "This is Ohio," she reminds him. "We have wea-thah!" Will blathers something about underfunding for the arts until Miss Hitchens states, "Look: All I know is that our choir seems to be the only thing that keeps my girls from recidivism -- it makes them feel good about themselves, and I'm not gonna cheat and risk that just so we can get a leg up on your school of privileged misfits." Will apologizes profusely for offending her, and offers to make it up to her by gifting the Jane Addams girls with use of McKinley's auditorium. "Let's have a little scrimmage at our place!" he smiles. International Recording Star Eve And Her Scraggedy-Ass Blonde Wig Plus Her Odd Enunciation Patterns fold their arms and toss him The Eye, but the next thing we know...
...the McKinley kids squirm uncomfortably in the McKinley auditorium's seats -- with Kurt sneaking a glance at Finn's package, by the way -- as Mr. Schuester welcomes The Jane Addams Show Choir to Lima before scampering off stage to allow the juvenile felons a chance to strut their stuff, which they proceed to do to the tune of "Bootylicious" by Destiny's Child. And it's...wildly inappropriate. Enthusiastically so, I must note, especially when they manage to jiggle their derrieres while performing handstands and singing at the same time, but still. They also seem to be quite fond of flipping their hair around as well, and that's...pretty much all I have to say about that, I suppose. Well, save for the fact that their lead singer "Shatonda" is chola-fabulous and could give Mercedes a run for her money as far as her vocals go, but I find my heart drifting towards the bit of backup jailbait whose got an afro out to Jesus. Just because. And when it's all over, the Jane Addams girls hoot and holler their way out of the auditorium while Will allows his instantly depressed head to drop into his hands. "You seem concerned," Rachel astutely notes. Mr. Schue weakly denies this, but it's clear to everyone he now thinks Jane Addams is going to trounce their privileged misfit asses at Sectionals, so Rachel attempts to reassure him -- in her typically unbearable know-it-all tone of voice, of course -- with, "What they were doing was all smoke and mirrors -- it's called 'hairography.'" Mr. Schue goes, "Whaaaaa?" so Rachel elaborates, "All of the whizzing of their hair around just to distract from the fact that they're not really good dancers and their vocals were just so-so? Trust me -- we have nothing to be afraid of." Mr. Schue remains unconvinced, so...
...he shows up at next afternoon's rehearsal session with yet another new song for Sectionals, which happens to be the title song to the musical Hair, which I most certainly will not be linking to, thank you very much, because hippies suck. Finn, in a rare moment of lucidity, wonders, "If we're going to do a song about hair, shouldn't we have mo