Glee: Dream On

This week on Glee! Neil Patrick Harris does magic and sings magically!

Boy, am I STARVING for some Glee this week! Hmm, let’s see, l’d like to start with the usual Glee Club Chop salad, hold the Sue Sylvester dressing though please, and sub Bryan Ryan. Yeeah, that sounds good. Let’s have Neil Patrick Harris try to take down Glee instead of Jane Lynch this week. And did somebody order a pizza or is that Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Jeff Spicoli? Oh, oops, wrong decade. No, that’s the early 90s braces and zits version of Will Shuester. Which was DOPE.

I like to shing shongs.

As I was saying/ordering, Bryan Ryan, the newest member of the school board, is for some reason in charge of auditing McKinley’s curriculum and is threatening to cut glee. Shue’s baffled though cause Bryan was Shue’s biggest competition in glee when THEY were in school. (LOVED the magic trick!) Turns out he’s bitter for not making it big and he even runs a glee conversion support group, that Brenda Castle, and I forget his character’s name but John Michael Higgins, is a part of! (I’m sure JMH will end up coming back somehow cause they sure as heck wouldn’t use him for one line that was only kinda funny…)

In glee, Figgins forces Shue to let Ryan speak to the glang. Ryan gives them a “your dreams are never gonna happen” speech. Shue gets in Ryan’s face as a result and Ryan says he’s gonna cut glee.

Tina goes searching through the trash for her own story line but finds one for Artie instead… Artie’s dream is to be a dancer and since Shue forgot to give them their weekly homework, Tina is gonna help Artie work on a “dance” number. (Don’t hate me for the quotes.)

Jesse is back from his trip to San Diego and finds a slightly disheartened Rachel working on a dream ballet routine number cause of Ryan’s dream crushing visit. Jesse tells her that her showbiz dreams are inevitable and asks what other dreams may come. Rachel confesses that she wants to know who her mom is and the minute she said that I KNEW that we were gonna see the Vocal Adrenaline coach later. But we’ll BirschTalk about THAT later…

Artie and Jenna are working on their tap routine with Artie’s really cool tap wheels but Artie’s just not feelin’ it, so he tries to use crutches and falls on his face. (Ew, what’s up with the bad editing? When he falls his glasses fly off, but in the next shot he’s laying there with his glasses on!) Anyway, he gets mad at Jenna for falling and makes Statler and Waldorf Muppet faces. You know, a lot of the down turn of the mouth happening. (Don’t ask me which one is which just look at the screenshots.)

Rachel finds ways to justify various Broadway stars as being her mother and Jesse steers her toward reality AND her basement where her fathers’ keep a Rachel Berry museum…HEY, by the way, why haven’t we gotten to know Rachel’s dads yet? We did once in I believe Ep 1 but only in a quickie CUT TO. And HEEEEY, we haven’t heard one song yet and it’s 13 minutes into the episode!

Oh wait, here comes one. Shue and Bry Ry are at a bar having a beer to catch up on old times, but really it’s so Shue can convince Bry Ry not to cut glee… Will makes a heck of a play and puts “Piano Man” on the jukebox. It’s not long before he has Bry Ry singing his heart out.

GLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAL!

AND, even though it was a sing along, they sang a whole song live on camera!!! Birschy likey… Bry Ry is vocally pumped and has a glee relapse. Shue even gets him to audition with him for Les Miserables. And boy howdy did those boys sound grrrreat together!

On a roll and talk, Jenna tells Artie not to give up his dream and then talks about all the potential wonderful things that might happen because of stem cell research. (Psssst, hey writers, love the stem cell research plug, you clever little liberals, you.)

At Rachel’s place, her and Jesse go through her boxes of memories, find a sonogram and make a musical reference joke that goes WAY over my dumb head. Then they find a tape from her mom that Jesse sneaks into one of the boxes. Rachel isn’t ready to listen though.

At the Les Miz audition Shue and Bry Ry just happen to be auditioning for the same role AND with, get this, the SAME song so the director has them sing a dueling duet. Of course they sing Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”

Stand off scene from The Gay, The Bad, The Ugly.

This sounded AWESOME and Will did a lot of squatting to make the scene as manly as possible.

“Dream on, dream oooon, dream—oops, I pooped!”

Oh, and if NPH’s sing scream at the end wasn’t auto-tuned, then he is my HERO!

At the mall, Jenna is about to go off and by Artie a pretzel when he gives her a, “Wait, I need to tell you something…” I seriously thought he was about to thank her and tell her he loves her or something of the like, but instead he miraculously gets up out of his chair and sings “Safety Dance.” At the end of the number we find out it was all just a DREAM though… Bah! Can’t take it anymore! This is the only story line that doesn’t feel genuine. The guy that plays Artie is decent actor and the boy can SING but is it me or does he always seems like he’s on tranquilizers? Even the dialogue they give him seems disingenuous, and despite the lovely little bit of timber happening in his voice, he’s my least favorite character on the show. Maybe it’s because I know he’s not really wheelchair bound. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll come around. (No pun intended.) And what’s with everyone watching the dance number? Are those real people? Did I miss something during the commercial break? Anyway, I’ll calm down and talk about the next scene.

Did you know Sue Sylvester has two offices? One for work, and the other for angry sex. (If I had a sex office it would have an ice cream machine cause that’s ol’ BIRSCHY likes to make love to… ) Anyway, Bry Ry gets to visit BOTH of Sue’s offices even despite Bry’s decision to cut the Cheerio budget in half. Oh, and I gotta say, taking their real life sexuality into account, I actually almost believed they were attracted to each other. Take THAT, guy who wrote that mean Newsweek article!

Jesse gets into the car of Vocal Adrenaline coach, Shelby Corcoran. A little so so acting reveals that she is, indeed, Rachel’s mom. Can a BirschTalk get a little love for totally calling that a while ago? No, you say? It was pretty obvious? Fine… Two peeps that we thought were actually out to get Rachel Berry actually had good intentions. Jesse even tells Shelby he’s kinda falling for her. I think someone ELSE called that one too and I can’t remember who it was but good for you.

Emma Pillsbury pops up fresh in a scene with Artie and tells him not to get his hopes up about walking again cause it will take far to long for those types of medical advancements. Then Artie does a roll and mope.

In glee, Kurt tramples Rachel for a bedazzled jean jacket that Bry Ry has purchased for the glee club, along with a whole bunch of other stuff.

Outta my way bitch! Ain’t nobody coming between me and my denim… Except for Finn.

But, Bryan “Dances With Tights” Ryan (Get it? Cause he’s an Indian giver. Which by the way, I hope is not a derogatory term, is it?) takes all that stuff back though when Sue busts in and tells them Will got the lead role. And guess what else Bry Ry is gonna do! Do I even have to say it? Good.

Cause in the next scene, at rehearsals Shue offers his role to Bry in exchange for not cutting the glee club after a cheesy but pretty durn sweet speech about stars. I thought the “Yes, most of these kids wont be stars but they shine like them,” was adorable… He lost me though, somewhere around black holes…

NOW. Here’s the scene we’ve all been waiting for! Jesse kisses Rachel into listening to the tape her mother made and she hears “I Dreamed a Dream,” from Les Miserables. Although, I’m not entirely sure how that particular song “says it all” to Rachel, the duet was lovely. (At least they replaced the “he” in the original with the “she.”) Also, did anyone notice Rachel never looks at her mom? Nice touch. The whole thing felt too good to be true. It was like having two Babs at once. A younger Bab and an older Bab singing together about how much they love each other. The only thing better than one Bab? Two Babs…

The episode finishes with a “Dream A Little Dream” tap and sing and we’re supposed to feel sorry for Artie… OKAY fine, I did feel bad. A little… Who knew Tina could tap. You go Tappin’ Tina. You go…

Okay my gleeloveds, thanks for stickin’ with me.

Yours and everyone else’s,

BirschTalk

Glines O’ the Week

• “What’s the matter, Shuester? Cat got your talent?” – Bryan Ryan

• “Should I lock your door? Bry Ry “No, I got a secret room upstairs. Like Lettermen.” Sue

Oh! And thanks to my pal, Mary Forrest for pointing out THIS gem! For the record, I LOVE Chris Klein and when I was first introduced to Finn on Glee I totally thought they looked like each other! Maybe Klein can play his long lost older brother! Except they’ll have to auto tune the guy…Check out the vid here.