Glee: Guilty Pleasures (#4.17)

It's been a rough life in the real world (when it rains, it pours, and it's been a monsoon lately), so I needed someone to step up to the plate.  I noticed that The Office, one of my favorite comfort shows, was in a rerun tonight, and so the task to cheer me up fell to Glee, a show I have a complicated love/hate relationship with which meant it needed to take a serious turn into the love direction, particularly considering that there have been so few stories for me to latch onto this year.  I was even willing to watch it live-that's how much I required my show to turn out right.  Thankfully, Ryan Murphy and gang must have been psychic, as this has to be one of my favorite episodes in eons.

Seriously, from start-to-finish, I can't remember anything that I didn't love about it.  It included almost every single one of my Glee checklist items: Fondue for Two!  Blaine and Sam, together!  Santana and Kurt, together!  Songs from Broadway musicals!  No Matthew Morrison!

I will start out with someone who is becoming my guilty pleasure: Kitty.  Listen, I'm aware that her character is a bevy of contradictions, and she's like the love child that Santana and Quinn's tryst a few weeks ago produced.  But she's also quick with the wit, and if she becomes the eye-rolling, voice-of-the-audience that we need on this show (we all were thinking Tina had taken the guilty pleasure thing to an extreme by dressing as that robot chick, and if that was a real show, I'd never heard of it, no), I think everyone can appreciate that.  Her comments about Lord Tubbington, her slow embrace of her fellow NDers, are all signs of solid character growth.  I'd love it if she started making fun of the other students more because she's fighting her natural instincts than out of true bullying-it'd be a solid, Santana-like improvement.

Speaking of Santana, she was on fire tonight, wasn't she?  I love the idea, again, of them getting along in that apartment.  They have known each other as friends for so long-we don't need to constantly have them regress.  Santana had told Kurt, but not Rachel, about Brody's expensive side dalliances, and while Kurt was trying to spare Rachel's feelings, I think Santana interjecting that Brody was a hooker was important if Rachel was thinking about getting back together with him-I mean, presumably she's having safe sex, but sleeping with a prostitute carries risks aside from just pregnancy, if you know what I mean (and you do).  Rachel seems done with Brody for good, and hopefully she'll focus more on that upcoming Funny Girl tryout instead of finding her next hunky boyfriend.  I want ambitious Rachel Berry back please, not just the one who needs a man to feel complete.  Remember the treadmill and the Tony Award?  You don't get a Tony Award singing in the shower.

Of course, let's not entirely rule out men, though, as then you'll start dating a fake arm.  Listen, I love that Kurt named his new "boyfriend" Bruce (kudos to that writer), but the fake arm was just a teensy bit creepy.  This goes from guilty pleasure to something you should actually feel guilty about, but Kurt sells it.  Though, did he break up with the cute British guy (did I miss that?)?  Because if not, there's a proper set of arms you could be utilizing there.

The Spice Girls tribute has been a long time in coming, and while it was probably a number we had dreamed once upon a time would be performed by Quinn, Brittany, Rachel, Mercedes, and Tina, every single one of the new girls sold it, especially Kitty (inspired putting her as Ginger Spice, even with the blonde hair).  And while the Bobby Brown thing could be a little bit in bad taste, they did it in a way that included the (admittedly classic) "My Prerogative" without condoning his rocky status in pop culture.  And boy, did Chris Brown (whom I detest) get it from the Glee writers tonight-dump his ass, Rihanna!

And finally, I have to end with one of the sweetest plots that the show has given us all season-the emerging friendship and crush of Blaine on Sam has been brought back and forth all season, but tonight it came full force, as Blaine, after teaming up to sing Wham! with Sam, was clearly singing about the blond adonis when he took on Phil Collins.  While I've been in roughly this exact situation before (every gay guy has-it's kind of a rite of passage having a crush on one of your straight guy friends), the result was roughly what you'd expect.  Sam, after joking about how good-looking he was, said he didn't have a problem with the situation, and that their friendship would just get deeper as a result.  Now, in real life this would eventually end slightly badly if the crush didn't actually go away, but I feel like this was a solid resolution to this story, and we got to see both Chord Overstreet and Darren Criss hit a bevy of excellent notes and show their range as actors.

All-in-all, this was a home run (I didn't even mind that we basically skipped the catfish story, though that better be resolved soon-could it be someone from a competing school, perhaps?).  What are your thoughts?  Are you disappointed that Blam didn't turn into a legit couple?  Do you love the Santana addition to the NYC stories?  And are you as proud as I am that I did the recap the same night as the episode instead of a week later?