Season 5 Wrap-Up
With Season 5 complete and canon officially on the books (and over for the next eight months OH THE HUMANITY), I wanted to step back and write up my thoughts on the season as a whole.
And on the whole? There was a lot for me to like in Season 5. In large part, that’s because the show was a lot more focused on the characters that I like (the graduating seniors/NYC crew), and generally a lot less on the ones I don’t care about one way or another (the not-so-new-anymore kids, Schuester, etc.).
And, come on, you guys know full well that I watch this show with Klaine goggles. OH GOODNESS, there was so much to see, so much going on, so much real-couple stuff. It was such a gift after the long dark times of the break-up, I can hardly stand it.
But the one, gigantic, glaring problem I had with Season 5 was its pacing.
Look, I fully acknowledge that they were in a really, really difficult situation. The sudden loss of Cory Monteith last summer was a terrible, terrible tragedy in that so many of them lost a personal friend. And professionally, it put the show in a terrible place for storytelling. Whether you thought it was a good idea or not, clearly a major focus of the final two seasons was going to be Finn finding his way in Ohio. The entire reason for New New Directions was Finn. Plot arcs, sets, and season-regular contracts were set up around Finn. Having to suddenly reimagine your biggest, longest, endgame arc is an enormous adjustment.
In a lot of ways, I think they did the best they could with what they had. But the fact remains that the pacing of the season really suffered, even while the majority of the individual episodes were really, really solid.
Glee and its relationship with time made me absolutely bonkers. I practically had to meditate and go to my zen happy place to try not to dwell on it. But when looking at the season as a whole, I simply HAVE to talk about it.
Spring 2013 in Glee canon seemed like it would never, EVER end. Compared to real-life time, it started somewhere around April 2013 (even in “Shooting Star,” Brittany was still wearing her winter Cheerios jacket), and Blaine and company did not graduate until MARCH 2014. Glee canon Spring lasted ELEVEN MONTHS of real time. It lasted EIGHTEEN EPISODES.
Just thinking about this again makes my head want to explode.
Look, it’s not that I require documentary-style realism from my television shows in general, much less Glee. I don’t need every air-date to correspond exactly with canon-time. But Glee, come ON, you set yourself up for this. It is the very structure of your show: the school year more-or-less lines up with your airing season. And you have nearly always held that to be generally true. Less so in Season 1, perhaps, but CERTAINLY it was true in seasons 2 and 3. And then ⅔ of the way through Season 4, things fell apart.
The worst part is that I can’t understand why. I understand why New New Directions existed, even if I didn’t always like it. I can accept things that I don’t agree with. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why they started to mess with the timeline like that. And when Season 5 happened, it only got worse.
So. Yes. Pacing. It took us nearly five months and 13 episodes of Season 5 to bid farewell to Spring 2013 and McKinley High. No surprise that the whole thing just ended up feeling incredibly bloated. So much was drawn out ages and ages longer than it needed to be, so much was added that didn’t need to be there.
Which brings me to my renewed rage about “Previously Unaired Christmas,” the episode that about 50% of fandom (myself included) would like to pretend never happened. I was thinking about this in the shower the other day, as I was starting to mentally gather notes for this post, and I literally felt my blood pressure rising as I got mad about it all over again.
Because even if I ignore the fact that “let’s see just how intentionally offensive we can be” is never my favorite style of comedy, if I ignore the fact that it kind of felt like much of the episode was flipping fandom the bird, what makes me MOST angry about that episode is simply the space it needlessly took up.
They didn’t need to do a Christmas episode this season. Not only was it nowhere near the holidays in canon time, but it even aired a full three weeks before Christmas in real time. They could have easily skipped that tradition altogether and been fine. It would have made MORE sense for them to skip it.
And in a season where we were already noticeably slow-moving, the LAST thing on earth that we needed was an episode that was explicitly outside of canon. Oh sure, holiday-themed episodes tend to be pretty light on the season-long plot arcs, anyways. But this was explicitly NOT moving the narrative forward.
Yeah, I get really mad.
BUT WAIT, the madness does not end when we finally, finally leave Ohio behind in “New New York.” Because if the last ⅓ of Season 4 and the first ⅔ of Season 5 were in slow motion, the final seven episodes of Season 5 were in insane fast-forward.
“New New York” gave us something like a six-month time jump, bringing us to (presumably) somewhere around December 2013, which is at least a little closer to real-life time of April 2014. Three episodes later, “Opening Night” actually has caught us up to late-April 2014, but apparently “The Back Up Plan” jumps us ahead another month.
And, lo, we end up with “The Untitled Rachel Berry Project” putting us at something close to June 2014 - THE FUTURE!
Again, it’s not that I require that exactly one week of canon time passes between each week of real-life show-time. Especially now that they aren’t as closely tied to an academic calendar as they were in Ohio, I’m willing to cut that one even more slack. But those seven (glorious) episodes we got in New York felt rushed, leaving so much wanting to be filled in, in extreme contrast to the slow-moving bloat of Spring 2013.
ARGH.
Truly, if you ask me to list the down-sides of Season 5, almost everything I might complain about can come back to pacing. Anything else is nitpicking details.
There was so much that I LOVED about Season 5, though. So much of the music was fantastic. So many of the characters I cared about did interesting things. So much of the headcanon I had around Kurt and Blaine and how their heads and hearts tick and how they work together and where they stumble CAME TRUE. RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES. I didn’t have to pick out little details from the backgrounds that some eagle-eyed fan caught in a screen-shot. I didn’t have to tentatively make connections that I thought might be true but maybe weren’t there at all.
There was so much that was THERE.
And yeah, maybe I’d feel differently about this season if I wasn’t such a Kurt/Blaine/Klaine fan, but whatever. I am, and there it is. They got to be such a real COUPLE. There was affection and chemistry and heat, there was conflict and drama and real-life fights. I’m with the actors in that I like it when they get to do dramatic things. It’s not only compelling to watch, but it means their stories are kept front and center (where I want them to be). But the absolute cherry on top is that the conflicts they had came from the characters themselves. It didn’t feel manufactured, as though some outside force literally threw something at their heads just to see what would happen. I believed, with everything that I have come to know and understand about these characters, that they would struggle in those exact ways. It was AMAZING to see. (And even better, that we ultimately got to see it resolve.)
And god, NEW YORK. Would that we could have spent more time with that whole crew in New York. I wanted to know more about why the shine came off of Rachel’s Broadway dream so quickly. I wanted to see more of what it was like at Casa Blamcedes. I wanted more development of Sam and Mercedes’s relationship overall. I wanted to SEE more of those “long talks” Kurt and Blaine apparently had about honesty and their relationship. I so keenly felt the absence of episodes 21 and 22. I think two more episodes would have given just enough time to flesh out some of those things. But alas, it was not meant to be.
I am grateful for what we got. I am. There was SO MUCH that I loved in that last third of the season, to the point that all of the time we spent in Lima feels like a lifetime ago.
And now, onto my least and most favorite episodes. Bad news first, because I’d rather end on a happy note.
Least-Favorite Episodes
1. Previously Unaired Christmas. FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE. That’s how I feel about that.
2. 100. Speaking of unnecessary, should we talk about Holly Holiday and April Rhodes? Though honestly, in a season this slow and bloated, I shouldn’t be surprised that they dragged out the Irish wake for New Directions into TWO episodes.
3. The End of Twerk. Just very meh to me.
Most-Favorite Episodes
1. Love, Love, Love. I mean, are you KIDDING? I re-watched it about a million times. It was sheer joy from start to finish. And I still marvel at the fact that I was brought so completely on board with the proposal - something that had been sitting wrong in my stomach all summer long, but had me in tears of joy by the time it happened on my screen.
2. New New York. No kidding, I think this might take the spot for my all-time favorite episode. The stories all worked together, the cast was dramatically paired down, the music was great, and I can’t even express my gratitude for the multi-faceted Klaine of it all.
3. Tested. Lots of great stuff in that episode.
Honorable Mention
The Quarterback. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for the cast and crew to film that episode, but I am so, so impressed with what they did. More than anything, I thought it was so smart to make it about grief and loss, not about how he died. It was an incredible tribute that could have become an after-school special cautionary tale. But it didn’t.
And, finally, my personal top 10 11 musical performances of the season:
1. Got to Get You Into My Life
2. All You Need is Love
3. Seasons of Love
4. Make You Feel My Love
5. Just the Way You Are
6. You Make Me Feel So Young
7. Best Day of My Life
8. Rockstar
9. I’m Still Here
10. Love is a Battlefield
11. All of Me
And with that, I close the book (for now) on Season 5. I’m incredibly bummed about the length of hiatus that stretches out in front of us, and already a little melancholy about Season 6 being the end. But I will always be glad I watched this crazy show.
In the meantime, because I have a thing for completeness and plenty of time to kill, I plan to do a fully-recapped re-watch of Seasons 1 and 2. So I won’t be disappearing any time soon!
And on the whole? There was a lot for me to like in Season 5. In large part, that’s because the show was a lot more focused on the characters that I like (the graduating seniors/NYC crew), and generally a lot less on the ones I don’t care about one way or another (the not-so-new-anymore kids, Schuester, etc.).
And, come on, you guys know full well that I watch this show with Klaine goggles. OH GOODNESS, there was so much to see, so much going on, so much real-couple stuff. It was such a gift after the long dark times of the break-up, I can hardly stand it.
But the one, gigantic, glaring problem I had with Season 5 was its pacing.
Look, I fully acknowledge that they were in a really, really difficult situation. The sudden loss of Cory Monteith last summer was a terrible, terrible tragedy in that so many of them lost a personal friend. And professionally, it put the show in a terrible place for storytelling. Whether you thought it was a good idea or not, clearly a major focus of the final two seasons was going to be Finn finding his way in Ohio. The entire reason for New New Directions was Finn. Plot arcs, sets, and season-regular contracts were set up around Finn. Having to suddenly reimagine your biggest, longest, endgame arc is an enormous adjustment.
In a lot of ways, I think they did the best they could with what they had. But the fact remains that the pacing of the season really suffered, even while the majority of the individual episodes were really, really solid.
Glee and its relationship with time made me absolutely bonkers. I practically had to meditate and go to my zen happy place to try not to dwell on it. But when looking at the season as a whole, I simply HAVE to talk about it.
Spring 2013 in Glee canon seemed like it would never, EVER end. Compared to real-life time, it started somewhere around April 2013 (even in “Shooting Star,” Brittany was still wearing her winter Cheerios jacket), and Blaine and company did not graduate until MARCH 2014. Glee canon Spring lasted ELEVEN MONTHS of real time. It lasted EIGHTEEN EPISODES.
Just thinking about this again makes my head want to explode.
Look, it’s not that I require documentary-style realism from my television shows in general, much less Glee. I don’t need every air-date to correspond exactly with canon-time. But Glee, come ON, you set yourself up for this. It is the very structure of your show: the school year more-or-less lines up with your airing season. And you have nearly always held that to be generally true. Less so in Season 1, perhaps, but CERTAINLY it was true in seasons 2 and 3. And then ⅔ of the way through Season 4, things fell apart.
The worst part is that I can’t understand why. I understand why New New Directions existed, even if I didn’t always like it. I can accept things that I don’t agree with. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why they started to mess with the timeline like that. And when Season 5 happened, it only got worse.
So. Yes. Pacing. It took us nearly five months and 13 episodes of Season 5 to bid farewell to Spring 2013 and McKinley High. No surprise that the whole thing just ended up feeling incredibly bloated. So much was drawn out ages and ages longer than it needed to be, so much was added that didn’t need to be there.
Which brings me to my renewed rage about “Previously Unaired Christmas,” the episode that about 50% of fandom (myself included) would like to pretend never happened. I was thinking about this in the shower the other day, as I was starting to mentally gather notes for this post, and I literally felt my blood pressure rising as I got mad about it all over again.
Because even if I ignore the fact that “let’s see just how intentionally offensive we can be” is never my favorite style of comedy, if I ignore the fact that it kind of felt like much of the episode was flipping fandom the bird, what makes me MOST angry about that episode is simply the space it needlessly took up.
They didn’t need to do a Christmas episode this season. Not only was it nowhere near the holidays in canon time, but it even aired a full three weeks before Christmas in real time. They could have easily skipped that tradition altogether and been fine. It would have made MORE sense for them to skip it.
And in a season where we were already noticeably slow-moving, the LAST thing on earth that we needed was an episode that was explicitly outside of canon. Oh sure, holiday-themed episodes tend to be pretty light on the season-long plot arcs, anyways. But this was explicitly NOT moving the narrative forward.
Yeah, I get really mad.
BUT WAIT, the madness does not end when we finally, finally leave Ohio behind in “New New York.” Because if the last ⅓ of Season 4 and the first ⅔ of Season 5 were in slow motion, the final seven episodes of Season 5 were in insane fast-forward.
“New New York” gave us something like a six-month time jump, bringing us to (presumably) somewhere around December 2013, which is at least a little closer to real-life time of April 2014. Three episodes later, “Opening Night” actually has caught us up to late-April 2014, but apparently “The Back Up Plan” jumps us ahead another month.
And, lo, we end up with “The Untitled Rachel Berry Project” putting us at something close to June 2014 - THE FUTURE!
Again, it’s not that I require that exactly one week of canon time passes between each week of real-life show-time. Especially now that they aren’t as closely tied to an academic calendar as they were in Ohio, I’m willing to cut that one even more slack. But those seven (glorious) episodes we got in New York felt rushed, leaving so much wanting to be filled in, in extreme contrast to the slow-moving bloat of Spring 2013.
ARGH.
Truly, if you ask me to list the down-sides of Season 5, almost everything I might complain about can come back to pacing. Anything else is nitpicking details.
There was so much that I LOVED about Season 5, though. So much of the music was fantastic. So many of the characters I cared about did interesting things. So much of the headcanon I had around Kurt and Blaine and how their heads and hearts tick and how they work together and where they stumble CAME TRUE. RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES. I didn’t have to pick out little details from the backgrounds that some eagle-eyed fan caught in a screen-shot. I didn’t have to tentatively make connections that I thought might be true but maybe weren’t there at all.
There was so much that was THERE.
And yeah, maybe I’d feel differently about this season if I wasn’t such a Kurt/Blaine/Klaine fan, but whatever. I am, and there it is. They got to be such a real COUPLE. There was affection and chemistry and heat, there was conflict and drama and real-life fights. I’m with the actors in that I like it when they get to do dramatic things. It’s not only compelling to watch, but it means their stories are kept front and center (where I want them to be). But the absolute cherry on top is that the conflicts they had came from the characters themselves. It didn’t feel manufactured, as though some outside force literally threw something at their heads just to see what would happen. I believed, with everything that I have come to know and understand about these characters, that they would struggle in those exact ways. It was AMAZING to see. (And even better, that we ultimately got to see it resolve.)
And god, NEW YORK. Would that we could have spent more time with that whole crew in New York. I wanted to know more about why the shine came off of Rachel’s Broadway dream so quickly. I wanted to see more of what it was like at Casa Blamcedes. I wanted more development of Sam and Mercedes’s relationship overall. I wanted to SEE more of those “long talks” Kurt and Blaine apparently had about honesty and their relationship. I so keenly felt the absence of episodes 21 and 22. I think two more episodes would have given just enough time to flesh out some of those things. But alas, it was not meant to be.
I am grateful for what we got. I am. There was SO MUCH that I loved in that last third of the season, to the point that all of the time we spent in Lima feels like a lifetime ago.
And now, onto my least and most favorite episodes. Bad news first, because I’d rather end on a happy note.
Least-Favorite Episodes
1. Previously Unaired Christmas. FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE. That’s how I feel about that.
2. 100. Speaking of unnecessary, should we talk about Holly Holiday and April Rhodes? Though honestly, in a season this slow and bloated, I shouldn’t be surprised that they dragged out the Irish wake for New Directions into TWO episodes.
3. The End of Twerk. Just very meh to me.
Most-Favorite Episodes
1. Love, Love, Love. I mean, are you KIDDING? I re-watched it about a million times. It was sheer joy from start to finish. And I still marvel at the fact that I was brought so completely on board with the proposal - something that had been sitting wrong in my stomach all summer long, but had me in tears of joy by the time it happened on my screen.
2. New New York. No kidding, I think this might take the spot for my all-time favorite episode. The stories all worked together, the cast was dramatically paired down, the music was great, and I can’t even express my gratitude for the multi-faceted Klaine of it all.
3. Tested. Lots of great stuff in that episode.
Honorable Mention
The Quarterback. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for the cast and crew to film that episode, but I am so, so impressed with what they did. More than anything, I thought it was so smart to make it about grief and loss, not about how he died. It was an incredible tribute that could have become an after-school special cautionary tale. But it didn’t.
And, finally, my personal top 10 11 musical performances of the season:
1. Got to Get You Into My Life
2. All You Need is Love
3. Seasons of Love
4. Make You Feel My Love
5. Just the Way You Are
6. You Make Me Feel So Young
7. Best Day of My Life
8. Rockstar
9. I’m Still Here
10. Love is a Battlefield
11. All of Me
And with that, I close the book (for now) on Season 5. I’m incredibly bummed about the length of hiatus that stretches out in front of us, and already a little melancholy about Season 6 being the end. But I will always be glad I watched this crazy show.
In the meantime, because I have a thing for completeness and plenty of time to kill, I plan to do a fully-recapped re-watch of Seasons 1 and 2. So I won’t be disappearing any time soon!