Third Verse, Same As The First

S03E01

Welcome back, fellow Gleeks! It's a brand-new year at McKinley High, bringing lots of changes. Trouty Mouth, a.k.a. Sam, has left the school. Lauren Tuna, a.k.a. Lauren Zizes, has quit the glee club because it was damaging her coolness factor. And Quinn, a.k.a. Christian Barbie, has turned into Rizzo from Grease, complete with pink hair and nose ring. However, unlike Rizzo, she has no interest in singing, and quits New Directions. And even Santana's pleas of Cheerio solidarity can't get her to change her mind. Oh, and Will and Emma have apparently moved in together.

In terms of actual plot, there are four stories. First, and as always, New Directions has to recruit more members. Unfortunately, Will's harebrained scheme of placing purple pianos around school only attracts one auditioner, who turns out to have the musical sensibility of a howler monkey. and because she can't dance as well as Mike Chang, Will is forced to give her the boot.

In addition, Sue is running for Congress in a special election. She decides that her main platform will be opposition to public funding for the arts in schools. Since she's decided to declare war on the arts, Will decides he has no choice but to declare war on her, and he turns into a gay activist, glitter-bombing her at Cheerios tryouts. This causes Sue to renew her attempts to obliterate the glee club, and she orders Santana to destroy the purple pianos. After Santana lights one piano on fire, Will demonstrates his testicular fortitude for the third time in the episode by ejecting Santana from New Directions.

Meanwhile, Kurt has spent the summer trying to convince Blaine to transfer to McKinley. Blaine does spend the first few days of school at Dalton, but he eventually succumbs to Kurt's charms, transfers to McKinley, and joins New Directions. I sure hope his parents don't mind losing that nonrefundable first semester tuition.

Finally, Rachel and Kurt tell Emma, in her role as guidance counselor, that they plan to attend an arts school in New York City after they graduate. She sends them to a mixer for potential applicants to a highly selective performing arts program in the city. They head to the mixer fully confident that they will be able to intimidate other students out of applying, but are themselves highly intimidated when confronted with a showstopping production number. But in the end, they pull themselves together, and swear that they will both get into that school.

Featuring Tom Jones' "It's So Unusual," sung by Blaine, The Go-Go's' "We Got the Beat," sung by New Directions, an arrangement of "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead," most famously performed by Barbra Streisand, performed here by (who else?) Rachel and Kurt, "You Can't Stop the Beat," from Hairspray, performed by New Directions, and a mash-up of "Anything Goes" and "Anything You Can Do," performed by an army of Rachel and Kurt clones, featuring The Glee Project's Lindsay.

Watch a video recap of this episode, courtesy of The Morning After:

"Shalom, blogosphere!" Uh, shalom to you, Jewfro. Because that's who is speaking to us as he makes his traditional back to school video report. Apparently, the McKinley blogoverse is obsessed with the plans people are making for their post-McKinley futures. So, kind of like the regular blogosphere. Jewfro asks Finn, the "mediocre quarterback [and] mediocre glee club lead," about his plans, and Finn not-so-confidently insists that he's totally got plans. But you wouldn't know them, because they live in Canada. Cut to Mike Chang, whose mother can't decide between Stanford and Harvard for him. Jewfro asks Tina what schools she's applying to, and she reminds him that she's a junior. I mean, come on Jewfro! Everybody knows that. And Artie is also a junior. Because Ryan Murphy says so, that's why! Jewfro finds Kurt and Rachel warming up in the music room. They are super happy, which means they are super annoying. They've got their future Juilliard-attending, Manhattan-living, Tony-winning futures completely planned out. I do love how Kurt can't stop making love to the camera with his eyes during this entire interview. That boy was born to be a reality-show famewhore.

Jewfro moves on to Mercedes, asking her about the Twitter gossip that she's been dating Sam, "a.k.a., Hobo McBieber." Mercedes was dating Sam, but his father got a new job and they moved away. (Which is code for "Ryan Murphy has the attention span of a coked-out chihuahua and couldn't think of anything to do with Chord Overstreet.") But now Mercedes is dating some mountain of a football player, who plans to make cocoa babies with her after she wins her first Grammy. Jewfro finds Santana in the cafeteria. She tells him, "Senior year is all about being the Cheerios' top 'ho, and modeling my fierceness after my numero uno Latina, Paula Abdul." Jewfro knows, as do we, that Paula Abdul is half-Syrian, not Latina, but I think that being confused about the ethnic origin of your role model is kind of a good way of following in Paula Abdul's footsteps. Santana is joined by Brit-Brit. Jewfro asks her what her plans are for the future. Brit-Brit stops and whispers, "Wait, are you working on a time machine too?"

We cut back to the end of Finn's interview. He tells Jewfro that he's very excited about the year. But as he walks away, Finn's voice-over tells us that he actually has no idea what he's doing with his life and can't even remember who he is anymore. And then some jocks remind him who he is with some synchronized slushy-ing. Mullet-haired jock: "Taste the rainbow, glee-yotch!" Finn: "Now I remember." Title card.

By LTG

Cut to an alarm clock. Will and his excessively clipped chest hair turn it off and then he rolls over and says, "Rise and shine, sleepyhead. Guess who woke up right before I did?" I really do not need to be thinking about Will's morning wood. He's talking to Emma, who is in bed with him. She runs off to brush her teeth, leaving Will and his morning wood alone and unsatisfied. Hey, Emma, do you have any brain bleach in that bathroom? Because I'd really like to scrub the beginning of this scene out of my brain. We see the rest of their cute but excessively boring morning routine, which includes packing each other's lunches.

Music room. New Directions' tiny twelfth-place trophy from Nationals sits on the floor between the giant trophies they received for winning Sectionals and Regionals. Will's trying to make a point that losing sucks, and he plans to push the kids harder than they've ever been pushed. (A line to which Santana has a very skeeved out reaction.) He also apologizes, claiming that he let Broadway dreams cause him to lose his focus last year. We also learn that the guy who replaced him in April's musical won the Tony. The first problem is that the club is down to nine members. Not only did Sam move away, but Lauren Tuna decided her coolness was incompatible with glee club, and nobody's seen Quinn all summer. But Will has an idea, which I'm certain is just as clever and ingenious as all of his ideas. He has some kids wheel three purple pianos into the room, announcing that they are repossessed pianos donated by Al Motta of Motta's Pianos. Will repaired them and painted them purple, and will randomly place them around the school. His assignment to the kids is to start singing whenever they find a piano and keep an eye out for the kids who just can't help but sing alone. See, this is exactly as clever and ingenious as all of Will's ideas.

Emma's office. Rachel and Kurt are there, clutching each other's hand and preparing to make an important announcement. Emma's way ahead of them, and hands them each a pamphlet entitled "Me and My Hag." But the announcement is not that Kurt and Rachel have started a sexless, miserable, co-dependent relationship. It's that they're both planning on auditioning to attend Juilliard. Emma reminds them that Juilliard doesn't have a musical theater program (or even a musical theatre program). For someone so obsessed with planning out her musical theater future, Rachel is profoundly bad at this. After suggesting Kent State (both for its musical theater program and macabre backstory) and having that suggesting flung back in her face, Emma hands them brochures from NYADA, the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Unfortunately, the school only accepts around 20 students a year. Fortunately, they're having a mixer for prospective students that very week at a nearby DoubleTree Inn.

By LTG

Sue's office. Becky runs in with the latest poll numbers for the election to replace the dead Congressman. The election is two months away and Sue's in 9th place, "well behind undecided, that rapist running from prison, and 'I don't know, please don't call me at dinner.'" Sue thought the voters wanted someone who was for something, so she decided to run a positive campaign by being in favor of deportation. But now she sees that she needs to be against something. Becky has a suggestion: "What about toast? Bread's already been baked. I don't get why you need to cook it again." But Sue needs to find something that everyone hates, and she's afraid to take on the toast lobby. And then her train of though is interrupted by the distant plunking of a purple piano.

Cut to Sue in the hallway, where Tina and Mike Chang are tunelessly plunking around on the keyboard. Sue flings open the top of the piano, reaches in, and pulls out its guts. It's very dramatic. Because she was grateful to the glee club for singing at her sister's funeral, she's been nice to the gleeks for the entire school year (which, as Tina points out, has been less than two days), but she draws the line at music that might interrupt people studying. As Mike and Tina scurry away, Sue is thanked by a mysterious stranger who turns out to be the school's long-standing geometry teacher. She's over artsy kids and their entitled attitude, and tells Sue she can count on her vote. Hmmm, that gives Sue an idea.

Cut to the Lima Bean, where Kurt and Blaine are sharing coffee and awkward silence. The silence is because Kurt is passive-aggressively wondering why Blaine has yet to make a decision about whether to transfer to McKinley. I would think that the fact that he's wearing his Dalton uniform is a clue that he's made a choice. Blaine doesn't want to just ditch his Warbler friends. Kurt makes one last pitch, noting that he's worried that their young relationship won't be able to handle the fact that Kurt and Blaine will be competitors if they're singing at different schools. But the real reason is that Kurt wants his senior year to be special, which means he wants to see his boyfriend all the time and not just after school and on weekends. You know what else is special, Kurt? Seeing the guy you painfully broke up with all the time. Especially if he sits there in class, quietly sobbing. That made my senior year... I mean, that'll make your senior year really special.

Quinn strides down the hall. As her voice-over tells us, she's cut and dyed her hair (a pinkish red) and gotten a nose ring and a Ryan Seacrest tramp stamp. Her voice-over tells us that this change is permanent. She strides right up from under the bleachers to the side of the football field, where Santana and Brit make a plea for her to rejoin the Cheerios. But Quinn doesn't care that she's breaking up the Unholy Trinity. She doesn't want to deal with all of that old pressure, so she's going to stick with her new friends.

And then we meet Quinn's new friends. They're called the Skanks, and they hang out and smoke under the bleachers. The Skanks all look like skankified versions of girls from New Directions. The Skank-Mercedes is Sheila. Skank-Tina is Ronnie. And I'll let Skank-Rachel introduce herself: "They call me the Mack 'cause I like to make out with truckers at the rest stop. It's kind of a double meaning thing." And then Rachel enters their under-bleacher lair to make a plea for Quinn to join the glee club, based on their tenuous friendship. She also appeals to the upcoming tribute to The Go-Go's: "Who doesn't love The Go-Go's?" Sheila, that's who: "I prefer The Bangles." Come on, no love for Bananarama? The Mack offers Quinn $10 for the right to beat Rachel up. Rachel finishes her begging and leaves.

It's the Channel 8 news! Rod's co-anchor: "...making it the zoo's bloodiest weekend in over six years." Rod: "That's what I call panda-monium." They throw it over to Sue for Sue's Corner, which she uses to make a campaign speech promising to eliminate funding for the arts in public schools if she's elected. Will, watching at home, is outraged. Outraged, I tell you! Commercials.

Will's outrage has lasted right until the day, when he marches into Maharishi Figgins' office and yells at Sue for vandalizing the piano and trying to defund the arts. Does Will realize that even if Sue wins, she'll only have one vote in Congress and won't actually have any personal authority to cut off funding to the glee club? Yeah, I didn't think so. Somehow, this fight turns into a revelation from Will that he's not getting any real sexual action from Emma. That's enough to send Sue running from the room in terror. Or maybe it was just me. Sue does declare a truce with him, while also threatening to destroy him if he gets in her way.

Sue's office. She's brought together Santana and Becky to tell them that she's making them co-captains of the Cheerios. Neither one of them is happy about the idea. Sue cuts off their squabbling to tell them that she wants them to destroy the purple pianos. Before sending them off to do her dastardly will, she makes Santana swear fealty to Team Sue.

By LTG

Cafeteria, where it's spaghetti-and-meatballs day. Rachel walks up to the glee club table and asks why they're ignoring the purple piano that Will so thoughtlessly left sitting in the room. They don't want to sing in front of everyone, but she pushes them until Finn agrees with her. It looks like Will also stationed a band in the cafeteria, because they start playing and New Directions start performing The Go-Go's "We Got the Beat." And there's one blond guitar player who is clearly angling for a speaking part, the way he's dancing all over the tables. I do like that Mercedes' new man is grooving to the music. They end the song to utter silence from the crowd, and then Becky runs up to Rachel and throws... something on her. Is that a cup of salad? Let's say it's a cup of salad. Anyway, that triggers an all-out food fight, with varying reactions from the gleeks. Commercials.

It's after the food fight, and Will is cleaning food off the purple piano in the music room. Artie wheels in and complains about the sting of spaghetti sauce in the eye. But he doesn't seem interested in removing the half pound of spaghetti that's piled on top of his head. Brit: "I have pepperoni in my bra." Santana: "Those are your nipples." Everyone has finally realized that Will's idea was utterly stupid, as not one kid in the crowd was inspired to join glee club. A voice from the doorway tells them that they really did suck ass. That voice belongs to Sugar Motta, who introduces herself thusly: "I have self-diagnosed Asperger's, so I can pretty much say whatever I want. I'm like a diplomat's daughter." I love how Asperger's has gone from something we diagnose forum posters with because we don't like them to something Sugar would diagnose herself with as an excuse to be rude. She's there because she wants to join, now that she's realized that she's so much better than everybody else. In case you didn't realize it, she's the daughter of the guy that donated the pianos. Sugar tells Tinkles (who she calls "hottie") to hit it, and he starts playing "Hey, Big Spender." A song that Sugar proceeds to absolutely murder. And not in the "she killed it" way. More in the "she chopped it into little pieces and stuffed it down a well" way. She's so bad that even Tinkles is left gob-smacked. Sugar asks them to text the rehearsal times to her and then heads out. Rachel speaks for everyone when she says that they've clearly got to reject Sugar. But Will doesn't know what to do, because in the past they've always taken every student who's tried out.

Teachers' lounge. Will is whining to Coach Beiste about his dilemma. She asks how bad Sugar really was. Will: "I've never seen someone with so little musical talent. But that shouldn't have anything to do with being part of a club." Um, maybe it should if it's a musical club. Just saying. Beiste doesn't see the problem. She cuts kids from her team all the time, and if they're really hard-luck cases, she makes them waterboy or mascot. Will thinks doing that would eat at his soul, but Beiste reminds him that their job is to put the kids they take into the best possible position to win. Emma joins them, newspaper in hand: "Curveball. Sue just passed 'undecided' and 'anyone white' in the polls." Coach Beiste offers to rough Sue up a little, but Will decides that it's his fight: "Sue wants to declare war on the arts? Well, General Schuester is about to launch a counter-offensive." If Will's a general, I'm really glad being gay kept me out of the army. As he strides out of the room, Emma looks after him with desire: "So this is what being turned on feels like."

Auditorium. Rachel is already there when Kurt walks in. She talks about how provincial the place feels after having sung in a Broadway theater. Kurt's called her there so they can work on a song for the NYADA mixer. He does know what a mixer is, right? His goal is to intimidate the other potential students into never wanting to audition against them. And then they perform the arrangement of "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" that was most famously performed by Barbra Streisand in that their video I linked to. Commercials.

Cheerios' tryouts. Sue, joined by co-captains Santana and Becky, are preparing to see some potential recruits. Of course, it's all for show as Sue has no intention of bringing in any new cheerleaders: "I basically just want to see people cry." Um, didn't some seniors maybe graduate last year? Wouldn't you need to replace them? We see a few horrible auditions, and then Will and Emma arrive. Will is there to tell Sue she's a horrible person for opposing the arts. And then he glitter-bombs her while Emma tapes it. Being Will, his glitter bomb involves him dumping a bucket of glitter right on top of her head. I blame the lack of a good arts education for Will's lack of style and panache.

Hey, it's Blaine, walking down the hallway at McKinley. And he's not wearing his Dalton uniform. He approaches Kurt at his locker, and Kurt starts whining about what a crappy week he's having. Kurt is so completely self-centered that he doesn't notice Blaine's wardrobe until Blaine points it out. Kurt is at least smart enough to realize that this means Blaine is transferring to McKinley. And he's also self-aware enough to ask for reassurance that Blaine is not doing this just to make Kurt happy, because he knows that the resentment that would be sure to develop would doom their love. But Blaine says he's doing it for himself, because he wants to be close to his boyfriend. Kurt says they'll have to think of a way to ease Blaine into the New Directions. But Blaine's already got that covered.

Cut to the improbable open-air student lunch area, with the concrete steps. Blaine is there to sing "It's Not Unusual." By the way, Blaine is wearing bright red pants, a white belt, a black shirt, and yellow sunglasses. He looks like the sole survivor of an explosion at the Lego factory. He also knows how to shake his moneymaker in those pants, so I suppose I should stop complaining. As he makes his way down the steps, Santana gives him an appraising, almost lustful, look, and signals towards him to approach. I was going to point out how very far up the wrong tree she's barking when I realized she's actually signaling to the Cheerios, who start dancing backup for Blaine. As he continues to sing and dance, the Cheerios all run around the purple piano and pour lighter fluid on it. And just as the song finishes, Quinn walks down the stairs and flings a cigarette at the piano, causing it to burst into flames. That kind of kills the mood. Commercials.

Kurt and Rachel are arriving at the DoubleTree for the NYADA mixer. As they enter the hotel, they're making their plans to make it into their own personal performance space. I kind of wish they would accidentally wander into the gun show that's listed on the hotel's activities board. But instead they find the NYADA mixer. The room is filled with a veritable army of Kurt and Rachel clones, all of whom seem to have raided our heroes' closets. I haven't seen so many neckerchiefs since I was in the Boy Scouts. As Kurt and Rachel take in the scene, they're welcomed by the head Rachel clone, played by The Glee Project's Lindsay: "Hiiiii! I'm Harmony. What's your name, where are you from, and what are your credits?" Before they can answer, they're interrupted by more clones: Pendleton (a girl), Canada (a boy), and Gavroche (a boy). I think at least two of those names were self-selected. Harmony is quick to tell them that she was the Gerber Baby and has been acting since she was a fetus: "An ultra-sound of me was featured on Murder, She Wrote." And then everybody starts talking about their various stage and screen credits. Gavroche and Harmony lead them to a couple of chairs, and Harmony tells them that the group of them has been getting together every month since they were freshmen. Rachel and Kurt are trying to hide their growing panic behind big smiles, but they are definitely freaked out to find out that they're not the only theater freaks in Ohio. And then Harmony tells them to sit there and enjoy it, because they're just in time for a big production number. It's a mash-up of "Anything Goes" and "Anything You Can Do," and Harmony is belting out the lead vocals. Every remotely aggressive line in either song is punctuated by Harmony pointing at Kurt and Rachel. She's like a musical theater shark. And the song finishes with a tiny pyrotechnic display right in front of Kurt and Rachel.

Cut to Rachel's product-placed Chevy in the parking lot. Kurt and Rachel are both humiliated and both crying. Now that they see that other people know how to tap dance and that there's at least one other big-voiced belter in the state of Ohio, they're certain that they have no musical theater futures at all. It's all typical big fish in a little pond syndrome until Kurt ends the pity party and tells Rachel that she's unique and that he won't let her give up: "You are getting into that school." Rachel: "You're making me want to be your boyfriend." Then Rachel gives him a pep talk, reminding him that there's still time to build up his extracurriculars. Commercials.

It's morning at Will and Emma's. Hey, they switched sides of the bed. Either Emma's made a lot of progress, or the continuity person should be fired. As they go through their routine, Will is depressed because he doesn't want to go to school and crush Sugar Motta's dream. Emma cheers him up by telling him that when he glitter-bombed Sue, he became a man of action and it was super-hot. So what Emma needed all this time was a Queer Nation activist?

McKinley Hallway. Will, with all of his usual brilliance, has apparently just told Sugar that she didn't make it while standing at her locker. She's refusing to accept the news: "Obviously, you're ears are busted because I worked that song like a hooker pole." On her knees and for fifty bucks? She offers to audition again, and Will breaks it to her that she just can't sing, although he does offer to work with her one-on-one to help her improve. She responds by calling him "a washed-up Broadway wannabe who's stuck in Lima and has lead the glee club to how many national wins? Oh, I'm sorry, zero. Not Asperger's!" And with that she flounces off. It turns out that Sue saw the entire scene. She praises the "stink of man marbles" wafting off of Will. She also tells him that his "little pixie-dust hate crime" has made her look like a victim, causing her to rise even further in the polls.

Blaine joins New Directions in the music room for the first time. Everybody is excited to have him, except for Finn, who thinks he destroyed the purple piano on purpose. Santana corrects him, telling Finn that the fire was "an act of political protest." And then Will throws Santana out of the glee club until she can learn to be loyal to the team. Santana's not the only one who's shocked to see some actual consequences for bad behavior. Mercedes congratulates Will for showing some guts, but there's a lot of awkward tension in the room. And then Rachel announces that she's secured the rights to West Side Story for the school musical. There's some more tension between Rachel and Mercedes about who might play the lead. And then Kurt announces that he's running for senior class president. And then Tina dutifully trots out the episode's metaphor, pointing out that the glee club, like the pianos, has had their guts pulled out and been burnt up. Tina, you're a junior -- you're already going to be around year. There's no need to suck up to anybody. Will tells them that, like the pianos, they can still make beautiful music. And then Rachel leads them in a performance of "You Can't Stop the Beat," from Hairspray. The performance transitions from the music room to the auditorium, and we can see a jealous Quinn watching from the wings.

By LTG

LTG lives in Boston, where he's a full-time pension and benefits attorney and part-time one-handed juggler. You can reach him at ltg.jon@gmail.com.

What are people saying about your favorite shows and stars right now? Find out with Join the conversation now!