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OK, OK, we give up. We know we keep promising to never watch Glee again, but we can't help ourselves. Grim curiosity continually gets the better of us. Last week's episode, all about Valentine's Day or something, we were happy to skip, but this week's was something of a must-watch. Why? Because it was the show's inevitable gay bullying/suicide/It Gets Better episode. And, oof. It got worse.
The problem with a show like Glee trying to tackle such a serious real-world problem is that in no way does Glee ever remotely resemble the real world. So when they try to pull us down to Earth and teach us a tangible life lesson about something important it all winds up feeling bizarrely out of tune. (Music! Get it?) Their Very Special Episodes are forced to briefly humanize a cartoon character like Sue and it never makes sense. They have to make everyone love each other for an episode only to go right back to all the feuds and rivalries the next week. It's almost as if the serious episodes are happening on some alternate dimension show that we only occasionally visit, one in which a bunch of flat character types have sudden depth. It's always jarring and disjointed, and perhaps never more so than last night.