Glee: A Sue Hope

We begin in the glee club’s rehearsal and they’re not giving enough energy for Will to feel good about the upcoming sectionals (i.e., pre-regionals).  He laments the complacency to Emma while she stares at the mustard in his “cute Kirk Douglas chin dimple.”  Thankfully she has plastic baggie gloves to wipe it off.  Anyway, the club is complacent because their only competition at sectionals are a school of deaf children and a halfway house for those leaving juvenile detention facilities.  Sue overhears Will’s trouble and tells him that she kicks one Cheerio out every week to encourage competition, you see children need to be terrified like they need their mother’s milk . . . to make their bones grow.  Will is intrigued.

How is an above ground swimming pool in competition with lightning?  Neither Kurt nor Will know but it helps break the ice when Will breaks them into teams by sexes and gives them one week to each perform a “mash up” (i.e., taking two songs and mashing them together).  The winner–as determined by a “celebrity judge”–will get to pick the song for sectionals.

Meanwhile, Sue is journaling her thoughts on her struggles with the Cheerios, if they fail then she won’t get endorsements to buy her hovercraft.  She’s sacrificed everything “only to be shanghaied by the bi-curious machinations of a cabal of doughy misshapen teens,” but the problem is not her, it’s Will and his arrogant smirk and home-bought perm.  And Sue needs to destroy Will (and his kielbasa) if she’s to destroy glee club.

She turns this energy into a plan to bring down Will . . . by recruiting Terri to become the school nurse to keep an eye on Will and Emma, even though Terri’s pregnancy is just a sign of personal weakness.  It seems that Sue can get a nurse to leave her position (by tripping her down the stairs and into a coma) and she can get a U.S. passport (and run for public office twice) even if she was born in the Panama Canal.  So Principal Figgins hires Terri, after learning of her stellar nursing credentials . . . first aid training and she’s used a defibrillator.  It looks like Will could use a quick jolt when Terri walks into the faculty lounge and announces her new second job.

Finn is having his own issues–he’s falling asleep during football practice and glee club practice, plus he’s conflicted between his pregnant girlfriend Quinn and Rachel, who’s hot if you’re not into boobs.  So Finn’s rather aloof when the boys’ team tries to get him to rehearse their mash up of “It’s My Life” and “Confessions”.  In the girls’ rehearsal, they’re making fat jokes about Quinn and out voting Rachel on deciding to wing it against the boys.

But moving on, Finn goes to the new nurse about taking a nap.  Terri uses this opportunity to project her concerns about her husband Will onto Finn, and she tells him not to screw around and to start popping two pseudoephedrine every morning.  It’s how she survived high school, and it goes well over in rehearsal.  He shares his secret “vitamin” with the other guys and that takes us into the mash up, where Artie gets a solo on “Confessions.”  Will and the guys are super jazzed and the girls are noticeably concerned. (As am I.  Why did the girls get to see their competition before they performed?)  But not as concerned, it seems, as Rachel is for Quinn’s absence from glee.  She talks her back into glee because that cheerleading uniform isn’t going to fit for much longer.  It’s a nice moment between two lousy characters.

After Terri orders another case of pseudoephedrine from Howard, Coach Ken walks in to express concern that his girlfriend, Emma, has a thing for Will.  Terri confesses that she’s only working there to spy on Will.  Ken suggests he and Terri get together to “even things out.”  Terri rebuffs that advance as Ken breaks down into tears.  Terri tells Ken that he needs to get “that doe-eyed little harlot” to marry him, but only after a quick dose of pseudoephedrine.

As the girls struggle in their rehearsal, Kurt walks in to relay his true allegiance is to the girls, especially after the boys rejected his hair and costume ideas (i.e., cornrows and exotic bird feathers).  Anyway, he points out that they all took drugs.  Later that day, Rachel confronts Finn and they aren’t listening to each other–she’s too self-driven and he’s too wiped out from all the stress in his life.  So Rachel and her team get their doses of “medicine” from Nurse Terri.  And then Will gives Terri a dose of needing his space as they fight in the faculty lounge.  Terri uses this as a prompt to get Ken to propose to Emma, with cubic zirconia since she was so affected by Blood Diamond.

Let the girls and their very yellow outfits sing, “Hey Low” mashed with “Walking on Sunshine”–it’s stinky and the mash (mashes? mush?) doesn’t work just right.  For some reason, Will likes it and thinks the “celebrity judge” Emma will have a difficult choice to make.  While she ponders it all, Terri approaches her to “clear the air” and proceeds to tell Emma off–nails and hammers don’t compete, you know.  She thinks Emma should just marry Ken because he’s available (even though his fondue pot of nationalities will open their children up to all kinds of diseases).

Fresh off Terri’s meeting, Quinn approaches her about the offer to take the baby off of her hands.  She likes high school and even glee too much to give it all up right now.  Terri thinks it’s the right call but she won’t pony up the bills for nine months . . . after all she’s going to pay for it for 18 years.  But Terri’s going to keep it a secret, even from Will (natch).

Emma talks to Ken about their proposed proposal.  She wants a lot of clarification on it all but in short she wants a secret marriage where they don’t see each other after school and they don’t live together.  I’m not sure what this is but if one of them is not in the country legally, I’d think it were marriage fraud.  And in an even more awkward relationship, Rachel and Finn talk about how they should each disqualify their teams since they both cheated.

In the end, Terri and Will wind up in Figgins’s office, where they fight about Terri also ruining things for Will–this marriage is going places!  Anyway, Figgins fires Terri for giving the students the drugs, and he assigns Will a co-director to help reign in Will’s competitive streak: Sue!  And as a final kick in Will’s acafellas, Emma tells Will she’s marrying Ken.

Next week: Sue and Will battle for control of glee and I’m thrilled that a schedule issue allowed Jane Lynch to become a series regular.

Listen to The J Factor with J.B. and Jaimie here or on iTunes.

Season 1, Episode 6: Vitamin D (originally aired October 7, 2009)

For more on Glee, click here.

Wednesdays at 9pm on Fox

Photographs courtesy of Fox and IMDbPro