Headscratchers / Glee Season 5

Discuss all issues with Glee's fifth season here.

You may also be interested in...General, Characters, Season 1 by Episode, Season 2 by Episode, Season 3 by Episode, Season 4 by Episode, Season 5 by Episode.

Love Love Love

• A month's suspension? That's all that someone gets for bringing a gun to school, misfiring the gun, and then concealing their involvement? And the teacher involved in the coverup gets promoted to Principal?!?
  • Rule of Funny.
  • On a related note, shouldn't Becky be seeing a therapist or something. I mean, she was so scared of going to school that she felt she needed a gun.
• Didn't Ryder quit? Did I doze off and miss the scene where they explained what happened?
  • Also, why is Unique allowed to attend classes with him? Shouldn't Ryder have some kind of restraining order?
  • First question, no you didn't doze off and miss that. I wondered that too. Second question, Unique seems to have given up the creepy catfishing, so Ryder may not have deemed it necessary to ask for a restraining order.
• Two questions about the marriage; A)how old is Blaine because they've never stated and B)where is this marriage taking place, New York?
  • Blaine's a senior now, so seventeen at the youngest and nineteen at the oldest. And an engagement doesn't necessarily mean they're getting married right now. A lot of people wait for as long as a year to get married after getting engaged, so they're probably not worrying about that yet.
• I realize that this is Glee and that setting up for a musical number takes precedence over everything else, but how is it acceptable for Rachel to talk that way to two customers who just walked into her place of work? Even if you think it was wrong for them to say what they did about her (which is a big if, considering that wondering if a college-aged actress auditioning for her first professional role is too inexperienced is a fair concern), most places of business frown on their employees letting personal disagreements influence how they treat customers.
  • Obviously everything I say here can be disregarded by saying 'it's Glee', but you are quite right. Rachel was completely out of line talking to customers in that way. Her supervisor would be justified in reprimanding her for behaving in that way.
    • Though the supervisor would first have to reprimand her for skipping out in the middle of her shift on what was presumably one of her first days on the job, without so much as a "Sorry boss, we gotta go."
• So it appears that Rachel continues to harass anyone who dares turn her down for a gig. But what exactly is her plan here? The actor and producer weren't put off by her singing or acting during the audition, but rather her lack of experience in showbiz. How does singing a song to them address that at all?
  • Shows that even if she is inexperienced, she's still the best performer for the job. If people without experience didn't get parts on Broadway there'd just be the same few leading actors and nobody else.

Tina in the Sky with Diamonds

• Why didn't Kitty push Tina out of the way? Or pull her back so she could keep Tina from being slushied but still keep her dress clean. Or at least try?
  • She probably just froze up would be my guess.
  • We saw it in what was pretty much slow motion, but in real time it probably happened really fast. By the time Kitty was sure it was a bucket meant for Tina, it would have been too late.
  • I was thinking the same thing while watching the scene - I think Kitty was too far away to get there in time.
• How did Rachel's outburst get her the role? It had nothing to do with improving her chemistry or proving her experience, it showed her to be just as immature as Cassandra, and if she doesn't get her act together she'll end up the same way. Is that what RIB is trying to do?
  • IMHO, it wasn't necessarily the singing itself that did it. It was the fact that she was willing to take their advice to heart by actually getting a job and therefore some life experience, plus her desire to keep trying to achieve her goal, even in the face of (well-deserved) adversity. They realized she was actually trying to be Fanny Brice in her own life, so they gave her a shot.
• So now students are bullying other students with the explicit approval of (and under the direct orders of) the principal? Isn't that in violation of some state law as well as countless school codes? What happens if she takes it too far and a student attempts suicide, like Karofsky did? This is why you don't have sadists try to build someone else's character (see the military's Drill Instructor program as an example; also discussed in the Starship Troopers novel). Someone who's enough of a Jerkass to try and humiliate and torment others for their own enjoyment simply cannot be trusted to do it with some higher purpose. So while giving the Glee Club an enemy may seem like a good idea, that role should not be entrusted to a Alpha Bitch high-schooler who will probably take it too far and doesn't understand the ultimate goals behind it. Not to mention all the rules against that sort of behavior.
  • Not to mention that "I was trying to help toughen them up" is a go-to excuse for many, many bullies and abusers. See the stepfather character in Drillbit Taylor as an unrepentant Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up. Not to mention the countless number of parents who use physical and emotional abuse to "toughen up" their children. And now Sue is just adding to that problem, showing Bree that her bullying is a good thing.
  • Also, isn't this out of character for Sue? The last time Sue was principal she did everything she could to protect Kurt from Karofsky. She even resigned in protest when the School Board wouldn't do anything to help Kurt.
• Wait, Kurt won his Junior Prom... why do the Cheerios care about Junior Prom? Would it have been that hard to claim that an unnamed Cheerio won the 2011 Prom Queen title? Rachel and Senior Prom I get - but Junior?
• Bree's prank against Tina makes no sense. She emulates the "pigs blood" prank from Carrie except, if memory serves me correctly, without pre-arranging Tina's victory. This means that she set the whole thing up without knowing for sure that Tina would win. What was she planning to do if it was someone else? (Especially since she roped Dottie into helping with the specific promise that Tina would be the one pranked, not any of the other candidates).

The Quarterback

• Where does Santana, of all people, get off physically assaulting an authority figure (regardless of whether Sue was her authority figure or not) and then accusing Sue of "not having one good thing to say about Finn" when she has taunted and bullied him a number of times, and has just been a bitch to everyone since day one?
  • Because, like Sue, she was also assaulting herself. She was taking how she felt about herself for being mean to Finn out on Sue because she did the same thing.
  • The term is psychological projection, a person rejects her own unacceptable attributes by ascribing them to another object or person.
  • Also last time we saw them, they were on good terms and while her taunting and bullying was never okay, she wasn't doing it from a position of power like Sue was.
• I don't think there was an actual cause of Finn's death given, but does anyone have any idea what it could have been?
  • In the original script he OD'd, but someone (or more accurately, everyone) thought it would be too morbid.
  • I don't think that the point of the episode was necessarily Finn's death. I mean, it was, but like Kurt says at the beginning of the episode, it's not what matters. The episode was about examining how different people experience grief, and for once, I think that Glee pulled off this serious issue with aplomb.
• Okay, so Shue took Finn's jacket. Then why does he give Puck a speech about how he needs to return it? Hypocritical much?
  • Hypocrite yes. Wrong to take the jacket and let people think Puck took it? Yes. But he didn't tell Puck to return the jacket, he simply said he understood everyone wanted a piece of Finn
• So when Tina goes to Emma's office for counselling, she says something to the effect of "I don't want to wear black anymore. I've been done with that style for years." Emma gives her some pamphlets to the effect of 'Stop being self-centered' and sends her on her way and that's it. But did anyone else notice that Tina wore black much longer than it was necessary, in fact longer than any of the others did? Was there a deeper problem there that we missed?
  • Nope, that's just Tina, she even sang "or the way that she died" about her not being able to shine that week because of Finn.
    • Now that you bring it up, that's pretty interesting. On rewatching 'Seasons of Love', each person's line in that verse could have applied to them as well. ('Truths that she learned' for Santana, 'times that he cried' for Kurt, 'Bridges he burned' for Puck, and Tina's 'Way that she died'.) Considering both that thinking about your own death is natural for young people faced with the death of a peer, and Tina's whole complex about attention, maybe she's worrying that nobody will care when she dies?
  • Anyone else disappointed (or maybe not, given how packed the episode already was, but...) that this was just treated as a joke instead of having her wondering how long should anyone spend in mourning, when to start moving on? Seems like it would have been an appropriate subject to broach, at the least.

A Katy or a Gaga

• How could Marley wear that wig without a wig cap or putting her hair up at all?
  • Uh... Mother Monster wishes it?
• Why was Marley suspended? Because she didn't want to wear a bikini during a glee club performance? One that takes place at school, in front of her teacher? Marley, by the way, is FIFTEEN and has an eating disorder, for which she's in therapy (which her mother can't pay for).
  • Not only that, but if Will could suspend people, what the hell was he doing when Kurt was getting bullied, or when the slushies happened. At one point, he goes up to Kurt and asked him why he's not brushing off the constant demoralization he suffers at the hands of his bullies, meaning that WILL WITNESSES IT AND DOES NOTHING!
  • Not to mention the constant slushies - the only problems of this nature Will couldn't have solved are Jesse eating Rachel and The Warblers throwing salt in Blaine's eye. He could've stopped it at any time?
  • I'm pretty sure Will just suspended her from Glee club for the week. She was still shown at school after all, she just wasn't allowed in to the glee performances.
  • Also, it wasn't so much about her refusing to wear the bikini as it was about the fact that she allowed a personal hangup to interfere with the team. Imagine if this whole scenario were to repeat itself at Nationals. The judges could easily use the incongruity of their costumes as an excuse to mark them down, possibly costing them the championship. (Which in turn would give Sue a perfectly valid excuse to yank their funding). Will isn't in a position where he can allow someone to participate in the club if they aren't willing to be a team player.
    • Good points, but the costumes would have been planned long before the performance, so she could veto it at any time. Or not, considering they usually take about a week to prepare for their competitions.
    • In such a case, Will, the allegedly caring, responsible adult, should talk with his club ahead of time about what they are and are not comfortable with. An adult male essentially trying to force a female minor into wearing sexually provocative clothing that she's not comfortable wearing? Will's lucky he's not in prison after this episode.
  • I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it was no big deal for Artie to refuse to do the calender last season because he wasn't comfortable with it, but here it's a crime against humanity for Marley to be modest about her body. Sexism, thy name is Glee.
    • I'd like to point out, that it was Finn, and not Will, who was the teacher during that first point, and he's been shown pretty clearly to be a much better teacher than Will. It's one of the few times that Glee's character's continuity stayed consistent.
    • I must beg to differ. Will's relative position as good teacher/bad teacher varies like the wind... or as anyone or anything else on this show varies. In the Pilot prior to taking over glee he seems decent but dispassionate and then glee happens and he's reinvigorated and he starts standing up to Sue on behalf of the kids, culminating in To Sir With Love in "Journey". Then come Season 2 he won't defend Kurt from Karofsky and he's sort of using the kids and glee club to get in good with Emma and then by "The Substitute" he's fallen so far that he won't let the kids sing what they want even for just their regular weekly assignments until Holly intervenes and then he's back to cool Mr. Shue again. Then by "The Spanish Teacher" he's criminally incompetent at his job so he drops it to take another job he's not qualified for. Then by "Goodbye" he's Teacher of the Year. Now that may qualify as continuity on Glee but I don't grade on a curve.
  • She wasn't suspended for not wanting to dress provocatively, she was suspended for putting her own personal issues ahead of the group and ruining the aesthetic of the group number. Had she dressed more modestly but in a way that still matched the rest of the group then, if anything, the rest of the group probably would have gotten in trouble for trying to force her to wear something she wasn't comfortable in.
• Why are they trying to pass Katy Perry off as a girl next door type? Sure, she is more subtle than Gaga and has mellowed out recently, but her first big single was about lesbian experimentation. She has has music videos in which she wears a bra that shoots out whipped cream! Taylor Swift would have been a better choice.
  • Gaga and Katy lend themselves better to Technician Versus Performer anyway.
• This is minor, but why not use The One That Got Away instead of Wide Awake?
• So, they get suspended for wearing skimpy clothing... so they decide to perform Roar in even less? (The pretty people anyway.)
  • Well yeah, in protest.
• Bree's outfit was much more revealing; why did she receive no punishment? Sue using double standards just means the Glee Club's parents should be going to the school board.
• I realize that we can probably chalk this up to "It's Glee and they're not supposed to actually care," but the music video for Roar only came out this past September, and this episode is set before summer 2013.
  • Comic-Book Time?

The End Of Twerk

• Are you telling me that Will didn't realize that Blurred Lines was about (possibly non-consensual) sex? I'd ask if he'd heard the song, but he was the lead singer, so he clearly had.
• If I Were A Boy seems to be the exact WRONG song for Unique to sing, because a)its about a cheating boyfriend and b)its kind of misandric. Did they want Unique to sing it and planned an episode around it, or vice versa?
  • CoverChangestheMeaning It becomes a song about if Unique were born a boy instead of a girl in a boy's body, he could do all the jerk things boys do and get away with it
  • Which is still a horrible message and kinda makes Unique sound like she thinks that all men are horrible and thats why she wants to be a girl.
  • Actually, the song is about if Unique were born a boy, mind, body and soul, she'd be accepted, instead of having to deal with the cisgendered, heteronormative bullshit that she's used to.
    • What's with Ryder's Heel–Face Turn anyway? In Season 4, he told Unique to stay away from him after she catfished him as Katie. And he said he was no longer going to be involved with Glee after Regionals. Now he's standing up for Unique and going to kick jock ass? More lack of writing continuity, but still.
• So back in Season Two Sue left her post in protest of Kurt's crappy treatment, but she's fine with Unique? Why?
• So since Becky is now Sue's full-time secretary, how is she attending class? And if she's not attending classes, how is she eligible for the Cheerios? Eligibility is set by the district, not the Principal. And shouldn't her gun possession have interfered with any or all of those anyway? Pretty sure she just opened up the school to a lot of lawsuits.
  • Can't answer the lawsuits question, but there is no indication that Becky is Sue's "full time" secretary. There are sometimes programs for special needs kids to learn "life skills" (including work placement), as well as more regular co-op "jobs." (These are usually half a day and the kids work for school credit). We only see Becky working for Sue a few minutes per episode, so it's possible she works for Sue as a placement, which is probably a few hours a day.

Movin' Out

• Why was Sam taken by surprise when he was asked to lose weight? He's not overweight in any way, but the modeling world's unhealthy belief that "you are never skinny enough" is common knowledge. It's probably the single biggest criticism leveled against it. For someone who claims to have loved modeling since he was a kid, the request shouldn't have been that much of a shock.

Puppet Master

• How did Blaine know what Elliot looked like to make a puppet of him? And on another note, why didn't he create one for Dani?
  • He probaly met him offscreen or saw a picture. As for the second part, he probably did but Dani wasn't there.
• Who are the other members of Pamela Lansbury (seen in the back during Kurt's imaginary performance, next to Dani)? It answers the question of who is playing instruments in a band with four lead singers, but shouldn't they be considered full-fledged members as well? Why aren't they seen at any other time?
  • For none of the band members are named or considered part of New Directions, and none of the backup dancers are either.
    • That explanation may work for ND (and usually has an in-universe explanation), but this is a rock band. Though there often is one designated spokesperson, the other members don't typically get excluded from planning sessions and practices. The drummer has just as much stake as the singer.
• Wasn't Sue's hair that short because of an incident from when she was a child when she and her sisters attempted to dye it using household chemicals to try and be like Madonna?
  • Sue is constantly contradicting herself about her personal history. (As are most people on the show due to its terrible, terrible continuity, but Sue it would seem is actually doing it as a part of her character.) Take anything she says about herself with a very large grain of salt.
• This is more an overall question for the entire season but how can New Directions compete in Nationals when they only have nine out of twelve members (Tina, Sam, Marley, Blaine, Jake, Ryder, Unique, Kitty and Artie)? Even if Joe and Sugar pop out from wherever they seem to be hiding they are still one person down.
  • That was explained in the episode "100". Sam recruited three Cheerios to perform with them.

100

• So, all this time Will was drawing funds from that two million dollars April basically gave to them. There's a few problems with that:
  • Why would they have to keep resorting to desperate measures to come up with a measly few hundred bucks for the bus to sectionals / regionals if they had access to this kind of funding?
  • How the hell did Will manage to blow that amount of money in only a few years? We're talking at least half a million a year.
    • Well, The club has a tendency to do fairly elaborate shows for songs they're only rehearsing and not gonna use in any significant way, like the waterfall things in "Singing in the Rain/Umbrella" and the costumes they use in a weekly basis(Maybe even more). It's still a lot of money, but at least it does explain some of the props.
  • Judging by his reaction, he was not aware that this kind of spending could become a problem. Where did he think the money was coming from?
  • Being confronted with the reality that he frittered away the Glee Club's future, he proceeds to flip out at April, while not even acknowledging his own faults. And the episode wants us to agree with Will. Protagonist-Centered Morality much? (Not looking to bash Will here, just pointing out some seriously sloppy writing.)
• How exactly is Puck able to appear? He's in the Air Force. I'm not that big on knowledge of it but I understood that it had a system like the army where you can't just walk out whenever you feel like it. I understand that this had to happen for him to appear but is there any reasonable explanation for it? I know that sometimes you can get a special reason to leave but I highly doubt that going "hey, my high-school Glee Club is shutting down" would give you a free trip out of there.
  • Especially given the compressed timeframe of the first half of the season (all taking place somewhere between March and May 2013). Shouldn't he be right in the middle of Air Force Basic Training? It typically takes a death in the immediate family (reported by Red Cross; they don't just take your word for it) to get even a few days away. Puck appears to spend at least a week at McKinley.

New Directions

• Brittany seems to be pretty hypocritical, quite unlike herself, when she tells Santana: "I'm sure your girlfriend's great, but you can't recreate what you and I have", trying to have her consider the pair going out again, when a few seasons ago, after Santana had told her that "He's just a stupid boy", she insisted that it would be wrong, even though she was using him to make Santana jealous. Admittedly, what she said was a little less forceful and straightforward, and she's probably not so naïve now as to believe in Black-and-White Morality, but you think her offer would be less of "we're awesome, it'll be easy to ditch Dani because you're trying to imitate our relationship and she's not me" and more "I really like you still, please think about how we were and all that'll change, just because".