Episode Report Card Demian: B- | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT You Ain't Got No Kind of Feeling Inside
By Demian | Season 1 | Episode 21 | Aired on 06.01.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The episode opens with the shocking revelation that Jesse St. James has transferred back to Carmel High, and he and his Vocal Adrenaline compatriots commandeer the McKinley auditorium to lay a little "funkification" upon New Directions' collective behind -- and by "funkification," I do not mean that they tap their inner Bootsys to work that sucker to death. No, "funkification" for Vocal Adrenaline involves invading a rival team's space to show said rival team what Vocal Adrenaline intends to bring to the competition, thereby sending said rival team spiraling into a deep funk. It also, for whatever reason, involves TP-ing the rival team's rehearsal room, which so enrages the Puckasaurus that he and Frankenteen retaliate by slashing the tires on the 26 Range Rovers Vocal Adrenaline's extremely well-endowed booster club purchased for their kids after Carmel's victory at Sectionals.
Of course, not an instant goes by before wicked Idina Menzel's figured out who's responsible for the heinous acts of late-night gas-guzzler vandalism, and Puck and Finn are forced to pay for the damages by getting part-time jobs... at Sheets 'N' Things! Yes, tonight's episode marks the triumphant return to the small screen of the fabulously psychotic Terri Schuester and her perpetually whimpering peon, Howard Bamboo. Terri, of course, is most displeased with her new hires, but because they agreed to work "for less than immigrants," she had little choice but to add them to the Sheets 'N' Things sales force. However, because she's feeling a little vulnerable after finally signing her divorce papers, she soon warms to Frankenteen and decides to help him with this week's Glee Club assignment. And what does this week's assignment entail? Well, you know. Check the episode title.
Yep, after consulting with the much-missed Sandy Ryerson -- who insists that the deep, dirty grooves of the episode's titular music style are beyond the reach of Vocal Adrenaline's soulless automatons -- Mr. Schue has the kids present various funkadelic options for Regionals. Quinn, Puck, Finn, and Mercedes all give the assignment their best shot, though Quinn manages to come out ahead in the end thanks to that prancing posse of pregnant teens she brought in for backup. Meanwhile, Will himself offers us all his funkophonic interpretation of an early-'70s classic after he decides to seduce Miss Sue Sylvester in order to break her spirit right before the Cheerios head to Nationals, much like Jesse St. James did to Rachel. Will's devious plan works all too well, and Sue takes to her bed in the throes of a deep depression, thereby sending her suddenly directionless cheerleaders spinning into a variety of weepy and brain-addled tizzies through McKinley's halls until Will drops by Sue's trophy-laden lair to apologize for his caddish ways. The Cheerios regroup to win their sixth straight Nationals title (thanks to Kurt and his all-French Celine Dion medley), and great was the rejoicing across the land. I'm guessing.
And in the end, New Directions lays a little reverse-funkification upon Vocal Adrenaline's collective behind -- this complete with Soul Train Line, natch -- and Vocal Adrenaline heads into the season finale extremely rattled, even though the McKinley kids' presentation was hardly funkalicious. Then again, this is Ohio we're talking about, and the standards for funkaliciousness are perhaps a little different there.
Featuring performances of Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" by Vocal Adrenaline; Rufus's "Tell Me Something Good" by Mr. Schue; Beck's "Loser" by Puck and Finn; James Brown's "It's A Man's Man's Man's World" by Quinn and The June Taylor Dancers; Marky Mark's "Good Vibrations" by Puck, Finn, and Mercedes; Parliament's "Give Up The Funk" by New Directions; and frequent teases of En Vogue's "My Lovin'" by the anonymous a cappella group that does all of the incidental vocalizations for scene transitions.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on Pee-Wee's Playhouse: "Theatrical." Also, Jesse St. James took his mackable hair and his dangerous eyebrows and "left the Glee Club" off screen at some point during the last two weeks during a scene that apparently was left on the virtual cutting-room floor, which: 1. WHAT THE HELL? and 2. WHATEVER! and 3. I will shut my outraged mouth and accept this insulting bit of Major Plot Point Revealed During Casual Aside In The Previously Sequence as fact lest my brain explode long before we hit the episode proper.
School. Flanked by Kurt and Mercedes, Single-T Tina wheels Artie through the swarming halls as the quartet gabs about New Directions' vastly improved chances at Regionals now that "The Ohio Show Choir chat rooms" have decided Vocal Adrenaline's "lost a step." Kurt, who apparently missed certain vital bits of information during the Previouslies, gloats, "The judges know all their tricks, and now that we have Jesse, they've lost their best performer!" Cue Rachel, who darts in from points unknown at DEFCON 1 to blurt, "You guys have to come to the auditorium! It's an emergency!"
Cut to the auditorium, where the now heavily pregnant Quinn's cooling her sure-to-be-aching heels with Santana Lopez, Brit-Brit, the Puckasaurus, Gaylord, Finn, and Butt Lunch, and I swear to God, Quinn's fetus has gained thirty pounds in the last seven days. That kid is going to be a monster. I hope she opts for lots and lots of drugs. And a C-section. And then some more drugs. To hell with natural childbirth. In any event, the hallway gang arrives to join the Glee Clubbers already present, and their collective attention is immediately drawn to the stage, where Jesse St. James emerges from a black-and-blue clot of Vocal Adrenalines to announce, "I've transferred back to Carmel High." So, if he's telling everyone this now, why did Mister Wacky-Voice Of The Generally Unnecessary And Misleading Glee Previouslies feel the need to include that bit of information in his dizzy monologue at the top of the hour? I can't begin to pretend to care, so let's keep this moving. "I'm sorry that it's come to this," Jesse St. James continues, "but you guys were awful to me -- you never accepted me, and you never listened to my clearly superior ideas." Frankenteen lumbers forward from his slouch against the upper tier of seats to wonder why Vocal Adrenaline's chosen to invade McKinley High's performance space. "The blogs and chat rooms say that we're finished and that you guys are ripe to topple us," Jesse St. James offers rather snidely by way of explanation. "We just wanted to show you something we came up with a few days ago to see if you agree with that assessment."
And with that, Jesse and his Carmel compatriots take their positions for a severely truncated yet undeniably hot version of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." As far as Vocal Adrenaline numbers go, it's got absolutely nothing on "Rehab," which remains the gold standard, or "Mercy," which killed it dead with the choreography only to resurrect it so it could kill it dead with the choreography again some more, but it's miles above "Highway to Hell," which was just embarrassingly bad to watch. Speaking of "Rehab," Jesse St. James's partner for this number was heavily featured in that performance over a year ago, and after this "Giselle" person is done running her incredibly lucky hands all over his body for the minute or so the routine takes to play out, she flips her hair around and sasses, "Thanks for letting us borrow your auditorium, guys! It's quaint." And Lucky Giselle should know from quaint, I'm guessing, given the fact that she's forty-five years old. Regardless, she and the other Adrenalines snicker nastily and pirouette on out of there like the West Side Story badasses they are, leaving the dangerously sweaty Jesse St. James alone on the stage for a very long moment so he might exchange A Look Fraught With Significance with a visibly miserable Rachel. Woof.
Back in the hallway, a thoroughly dejected-looking Kurt takes point with his fellow Glee Clubbers trailing bleakly behind him as an all-knowing Artie explains, "It's a Carmel High tradition -- they psych out the competition a few weeks before the big show. They call it a 'funkification,' meaning they show us what they've got, and we spiral into a deep, black funk." Finn, spasmodically shrugging his shoulders around while uncontrollably blinking his eyes in order to indicate that this sort of hazing is no big deal, tries to lighten the mood by pointing out that the McKinley High football team does that sort of thing all the time, forcing Puck to point out, "Yeah, well, the difference was, our football team sucked -- those guys are golden!" Kurt pulls himself together to try to bright-side that it's going to take more than a brutally hacked-up sixty-second excerpt from one of Queen's greatest hits to toss New Directions upon the dark hill of depression, but the words die in his mouth when they arrive at the music room to discover it's been thoroughly defiled with immaculately clean toilet paper by Jesse St. James and his wicked Carmel High crew. Title card.
Music Room. Aftermath. Mr. Schue's joined the gang to stuff tremendous wads of immaculately clean toilet paper into various oversized garbage cans, all the while assuring the kids that Vocal Adrenaline's jus jellass. Or something like that. Incidentally, Artie's rather amusingly donned an industrial respirator to prevent contamination from the filthily clean toilet paper he's fussily tamping down into the trash with a broom handle. Hee. Anyway, Mercedes disagrees with Mr. Schue's amateurish assessment of Vocal Adrenaline's current frame of mind before wondering, "They had all that equipment -- how'd they even get in?" "I gave 'em all keys and helped 'em do a sound check over the weekend!" Sue Sylvester breezily admits as she strides in from the hall with a teeming school of drafting class flunkies caught up in her wake, one of whom totes a massive trophy. You see, the Cheerios are heading to Nationals this weekend, and as Sue expects to return "with a comically large first-place trophy" for which she no longer has room in her own office, she intends to have the drafting class flunkies convert the music room into her very own "trophy annex" the instant New Directions loses at Regionals. She then proceeds to flagrantly ignore Will and turns to her flunkies to instruct, "It has to look like Elvis's gold record room at Graceland, except I'll be wanting far fewer morbidly obese white women waddling around and crying." Sue Sylvester is love, people. Will sets a determined expression on his face and orders Sue out of the room, so she flagrantly ignores him yet again to address New Directions like so: "For those of you whose hearing has not been damaged by massive doses of Accutane, listen up: In a few weeks, Glee Club will be finished. Now, how do I know that? Well, I recently checked the odds with my Vegas bookie, who told me that you're forty-to-one underdogs at Regionals. You are going to lose, and your dreams will be crushed." Will too-casually asks to see Sue's trophy, which she gladly hands him, and which he just as gladly smashes against the wall, much to the startled shock of everyone else in the room. Well, everyone except, of course, Sue Sylvester, who doesn't even bat an eye at all of the mayhem and destruction and instead licks her lips in anticipation before turning to Will with a delicious smile on her face. "For me," she explains as she advances menacingly upon him, "trophies are like herpes: You can try to get rid of them, but they just keep coming." "You know why?" she rhetorically asks as she leans in close to his face. "Because Sue Sylvester has hourly flare-ups of burning, itchy, highly c