Glee Throwdown Review

Glee continually is reminding us that one can never get enough Jane Lynch in their entertainment, and wow did this episode deliver in that regard. With Sue now the co-chair of the Glee-club, there was no avoiding her – to Will's horror and our great amusement.

Sue Sylvester has already turned into a truly inspired comic creation – so wonderfully smug and sure of herself that she compares herself to the Greek god Ajax. And then there's the ignorance (she calls a piano a "black, shiny thing") and the casual racism… You need a comic actress like Lynch to pull it off, and to make her someone we love spending time watching on TV (even if we'd hate her in real life), but kudos to Ryan Murphy and his writing team for giving us such a great television character.

Sue's plan to destroy the Glee club from within involved splitting the group into two, and blatantly making it the minorities versus the white (non-gay, non wheelchair bound) kids. An hysterical, jaw-dropping moment had her do her form of role call by calling, "Santana. Wheels. Gay Kid. Asian. Other Asian. Aretha. And Shaft." And while it was of course ludicrous, it was great as she, with Quinn's help, pushed it even further by making the Jewish Puck and the Dutch Britney also feel slighted and marginalized.



I also loved the sequence that began the episode, showing Sue and Will yelling at each other in slow motion, complete with slow-mo roars – and there was even some pseudo fourth wall breaking, as Will bemoaned that they were "Even fighting in our voiceovers."

There were several moments in this episode that were a reminder of how unrealistic Glee is. Terri's sister blackmailed an obstetrician into faking an ultrasound, in a scene that pointed out that it was pretty much impossible for Will not to have figured out Terri is not pregnant at this point; Puck feels like he's being pushed aside due to his Judaism, even though Rachel, also a Jew, is the star of the club. And I found myself chuckling over the fact that every time we see these kids handed a new song, they all are instantly able to perform it, knowing every single lyric and harmony, without looking at lyrics or rehearsing. And the thing is… It's all fine. The show is operating at a bigger than life level, in the manner plenty of musicals do. Taking it seriously isn't really necessary – which is probably why the only thing that tends to bug me are some of the more overly earnest, saccharine moments.

Most of the time though, Glee is just being damn funny, as this episode was a great example of. When Will complained that most of Sue's cheerleaders were doing terribly in Spanish, her amazing response -- "We all know about your devotion to that dying language!" -- was one of the funniest things I'd heard on TV all week. From Finn noting that his baby has, "No mutations or anything, not even any cool ones," to Will, being told the baby he thought was a boy is actually a girl, exclaiming, "Oh my god, did something happen to his...", this is just really funny stuff.