ENSEMBLE CAST POWERS ACTIVATE!!!!!
Twilight Fever causes all sorts of kerfuffle this week as Tina is banned from wearing Goth clothes. Finn's Mom gets her longest set of lines yet as she and Kurt and Kurt's Dad all surprise Finn and move in together. And Quinn continues to point out to Puck that as long as he acts like the cock of the walk and makes a joke of their unborn child, she's not interested in his participation in the process... THEATRICALITY rears its head on Glee this week.
"My mom says she thinks Kristen Stewart looks like a bitch," and therefore Tina can't watch Twilight.
This, much like other things you might not expect from the whole endeavor is the name of the game with theatricality. Adornment, Spectacle and Theatricality are all fantastic tools in the arsenal of artistic expression, both describing, masking and clarifying visually everything that is hidden beneath.
"And Ladies, I don't want to hear about chafing just because you're wearing metal underwear, not my problem"
"You see the world with the same fierce theatricality that I do, even the way we're sitting right now is so dramatic that I'm almost uncomfortable with it"
Ok Rachel, you win. I felt concerned that your story might be clumped into 2 episodes and I would feel cheated and you would be less a character for it. I was wrong, you are lumped into 2 episodes with your mother, but you two WORKED. Listen to the song readers, onscreen it was magic. They put so much into this interaction with one another it was beautiful.
What this episode really drove home is that it would be SO WEIRD to meet your mother/daughter at 16. It wouldn't necessarily be a loving huge joyous moment, it might feel wrong, and weird, and truly, unflinchingly real. Neither woman got what they expected, but they can appreciate one another from afar, and bring it.
Thank you, Glee, for not making it into a soap opera cliché... or at least doing something interesting with this.
"We're supposed to have some sort of slow motion run into one another's arms,
this is all wrong."
On another front:
"I always feel like we're always doing whatever the girls want to do."
Really Finn, Really? I recognize that you're always doing what Kurt wants this week and that's caused a lot of friction, but let's table the "we're always doing what the girls want to do" discussion for another week. It's there next to the disappearing Mrs. Schuster who you may be banging next week.
"What is your problem, Finn? It's just a moist towelette!!!?!"
"We're not Gaga for Gaga"
"It's the same thing you do when you go to school inyour football uniform, you're expressing yourself"
Maybe I love this episode because it speaks my language, got my degree in production design (costume specialty):
“I have great respect for Lady Gaga,” (Costumer, Lou Eyrich) told (InStyle). “This episode is a tribute to her genius. The costumes are not replicas; we wanted it look like the kids made them.‘”
So that’s exactly what they did: “Rachel (Lea Michele) wears two outfits. The first inspired by Gaga’s Kermit the Frog dress: She goes through her stuffed animals at home and staples all of them to her dress. The second is like the dress Gaga wore with the big silver mirrored triangle.” Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz) was hand-picked by creator Ryan Murphy to wear the famous bubble dress. “It was really heavy,” Eyrich reported, “and it made a lot of noise. We turned it into a vest so that it would be easier to take on and off, because there was no sitting down in it.” from InStyle
For me, seeing all these lovingly crafted details onscreen really made the whole of these characters stories pop out tonight. The same way, the explosive fights and big situations really served the emotional subtleties that were more grounded than they have been in earlier episodes.
Also, Check out Mike Chang, the mysteriously dialogue-less “Other Asian” on Glee, dialogless no more!
The actor Harry Shum Jr is interviewed over on Vulture and is adorable in the best possible way.
From Vulture:
... Harry, we are beside ourselves with joy that you have a line this week!
Aw, thank you. And yeah, it’s happenin’! Usually we get the script like a week before and you just take a look at it, but then you look at it and say, “Hey, I get to talk today! Or … this week!” It’s happening slowly and surely a little more for me, so it’s very exciting to be a little more involved.
So why is this week the special week?
Um, I think it just felt right for the writers to involve me and Dijon [Talton].
Whoa, so he talks too?!
Yeah, I’m givin’ away stuff! It’ll be sort of boys versus girls as far as costuming and music go, this week. We’ll be in Kiss getups: the crazy costumes, the makeup, and the really, really, almost-too-tight pants. But it looked okay on us, so it’s cool. And the boots are nuts! They’re so heavy, I don’t know how they wore them all those years. We did a lot more dancing than Kiss would have.
I thought the 'all we do is what the girls want to do' thing was merely a ploy to bring out the fact that theatricality is not a feminine attribute, so possibly poorly done but disassociated from the character. I say this because the episode angered me in how they treated the morality of the situation between him and Kurt and his father. Partially because I never felt Finn got due process, partially because I felt as if Kurt is being given a free ride and not held accountable like any other person should in some of these situations, and partially because one of my personal beliefs is that words, no matter how offensive, if truly apologized for, should never have a zero-tolerance policy. This is of course in reference anything not protected by free speech.
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