"Child Star" Recaps and Reviews
AV Club by Brandon Nowalk (D)
Ironically, what distinguishes “Child Star” is that it’s so forgettable. Even the addition of the two new Directions isn’t going to stick. Next week we’re all going to be surprised to see eight students in the choir room, and then after a moment we’ll remember. Oh yeah, that little kid’s a rich boy with some school board swing who made the New Directions perform at his bar mitzvah. And that longhair (do people still say longhair?) is some boy Spencer has a crush on. He’s also friends with Roderick, the loner. Wonders never cease.
The reconstruction of the glee club has been admirably and uncharacteristically patient this season. I had just assumed New Directions would compete with five members, and then Kitty showed up and I assumed they’d compete with six. Now we have eight and a race. Can New Directions get to the quota in time for sectionals? Is there even a quota? Kitty’s a telling addition as the oldest character in the current club. Whereas all seven of the other New Directions are types of characters Glee hasn’t really used before, Kitty is a holdover from the second generation, when the new students were just reboots of old ones. She’s Quinn 2.0 with the Santana levels turned all the way up. But what’s interesting is she hasn’t overshadowed the new members this season. Granted the main stories have been about Rachel and Kurt and Sue and Will, but even though we know Kitty better, the focus of the New Directions plots has been on the newbies. So we’re spared a season four situation where the new kids are flailing about trying to compete for attention with the old ones.
But both of those last two sentences are wrong. Although we should, we don’t know Kitty better than Roderick or Spencer. They’re not exactly Tony Sopranos themselves, but they’re no thinner than she is. That’s a consequence of season four, too. Kitty never got developed the way Quinn or Santana did-and maybe “developed” is the wrong word; experimented on?-because her group had to split time with the originals, and when they couldn’t compete, they got written out in favor of focusing on the old Directions exclusively, a development that was itself reversed for season six. The reboot cycle gets shorter and shorter. The characters have always been malleable enough to fit whatever alleged themes an episode foists on them. The problem is we don’t know them, not really. And in season six, that means every time the focus narrows to McKinley, meaning the new characters and a skeleton staff of old ones, the episode can’t help but feel like it’s not tied down. So that’s the other wrong sentence. We are in a season four situation. It’s just that there aren’t many episodes like “Child Star” that stick with the new kids, which itself perpetuates the problem.
The content doesn’t have to float off into the atmosphere. It’s just disadvantaged by focusing on new characters. Unfortunately, the performances aren’t remotely good enough to rescue it. Roderick’s gift for barely acting is perfect for the character as originally written, the shy kid who comes alive in song. (And credit where it’s due, Roderick sure does light up a stage.) But here he’s meant to be social to some extent, and it’s less credible than Sue’s hurt locker. That’s nothing compared to Myron, the Jewish bar mitzvah brat. It’s a Becky role, and one that clarifies how valuable Becky is. Diminishing returns-that’s the Glee touch: Each iteration reveals how much better the previous one is, even when you never thought much of it to begin with. Myron doesn’t yet have the physical control to sell his rage, so he looks like a cartoon character, tiny and mugging like crazy. When they’re performing, the New Directions don’t have a weak link. Myron doesn’t nail his choreography, but he can sing. Jane blows the roof off the joint. Mason’s rendition of “I Want To Break Free” is an episode highlight. But Glee’s running low on double threats these days.
The New Directions plots tend toward the DeGrassier end of the high school drama spectrum in “Child Star.” It’s Glee, so it’s all predicated on coupling up, but those relationships spark quite a bouquet of teen angst: Madison freaking out at her brother for liking a(nother?) girl; Roderick suddenly feeling picked on for his weight and just as suddenly completely turning his life around after basically no on-screen help from Spencer; Spencer trying to parlay his physical connection with Alistair into an intellectually and emotionally engaging relationship. At one point it looks like the episode’s going to be about Roderick teaching Spencer to date (and not just hook up) in exchange for Spencer teaching Roderick to climb a rope to pass his physical fitness test. Instead Roderick gives Spencer no advice and vice versa, but both heroes wind up successful in their pursuits. Glee!
That’s because the real plot is a monthlong bar mitzvah, which goes from a performance to a backstage heart-to-heart to dance rehearsals to a backstage malfunction to another performance to a backstage kiss-between Spencer and Alistair, who just happens to be watching the bar mitzvah, the way an interested party might attend a trial-to the final number. Sue gets in a fight with Will and vows once more to destroy the glee club. I lose track of my yawns. The really funny one is that Roderick gets physically fit, learns to climb a rope, and starts eating better regularly enough to report results. Like all bad episodes of Glee, “Child Star” never ends.
Stray observations:
- Mason brags to Jane about eating pizza, which is off the diet his sister has imposed on him: “Well, I won’t tell if you won’t. I’m kind of a badass.”
- Sue gets all the good jokes this week, including her veiled threat to Will: “In the words of a former vice presidential candidate and my personal Lamaze coach, ‘I do not retreat. I reload.’”
- Sue: “I had a plan. Make this school the best in the state, cement my reputation as the greatest educator since Mao, and then ride off into the sunset on the back of one of the five remaining black rhinos on the planet.”
Vulture by Lauren Hoffman
Last night's Glee suffered from a touch of the Ruby Problem, a syndrome I invented while watching a particularly unfortunate storyline unfold in the final season of Parenthood. Like Glee, Parenthood had a short final season with (presumably) a reduced budget. To compensate, Parenthood gave one of its secondary characters a troubled teenage daughter and a beleaguered ex-wife, and then spent an awful lot of the season exploring their story. It's not that Ruby's story was bad, or that the performers involved in it weren't talented (on the contrary, Ray Romano and Jeanne Tripplehorn were both incredible). It's just not what Parenthood's viewers had tuned into its final season hoping or expecting to see.
I'd imagine that's how Glee fans felt about last night's newbie-centric episode - although as soon as I typed that sentence, I clicked over to Twitter and found at least three, "Yay! Newbie stories!" tweets, so what, if anything do I know? Before last night's episode aired, there were only 210 minutes of Glee left; seeing 42 of them dedicated to a bunch of new kids felt odd. I understand an episode like this was necessary, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
Plot twist: after I set that semi-disappointment aside, I DID like a lot of the things about the episode. In part, that's due to how much more compelling this group of newbies is than the crop of newbies we met in season four. Those new kids were set up as little more than replacements for the graduating seniors - Marley was Rachel, Ryder was Finn, Jake was Puck. But the kids we've met this season are total weirdos, in the best possible sense; in that way, they're much easier (and more fun) to connect with as a viewer. And there's something particularly compelling about the "building up the glee club" episodes of Glee - it's not quite the rounding up of the Avengers, but it's fun to watch that sustained process of, "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" and the ensuing coltish performances.
This week, Sue offers to help throw the school district superintendent throw a bar mitzvah for his nephew Myron, a spastic, hyper-talented kid whose tyranny and tantrum-throwing rival Sue's. I'm not particularly fond of storylines where children behave terribly and it's played for laughs, but it's still pretty entertaining to see Sue meet her tiny little match. And Myron's incredibly talented - he opens the show with Destiny's Child's "Lose My Breath" and holds his own with a squad of adult backup dancers. By the end of the episode, Myron's transferred from his middle school to McKinley in order to join the glee club, which makes about as much sense as the time Finn kidnapped Sam from his male stripper job to shore up the New Directions' chances at Regionals.
The bulk of the episode is taken up with planning the bar mitzvah, and Rachel's sort of at a loss for songs to suggest to the New Directions - she frets to Mr. Schue that the kids are all just so quiet, and he asks whether they're quiet because she's always talking, which is the most hypocritical question ever posed on Glee. In true Mr. Schue fashion, Rachel decides to leave the kids up to their own devices to plan their performances, and when she announces this, Kitty skeptically asks, "Are we actually going to sing, or are you going to announce an alumnus walking through the door??" Truth be told, I think when you lay out all of season six's performances, you're going to find a pretty equal balance of new kids and alumni, but I understand why Kitty asked, and her Greek chorus-grade delivery was perfect.
The performances themselves are a weird little hodgepodge - Mason sings "I Want to Break Free," mostly out of his desire to get away from his twincestuous sibling relationship so he can go on a date to Breadstix with Jane. (The things you make me type, Glee.) For reasons I can't quite remember now, Sheldon and Sue get involved as backup singers/dancers as the whole gang sings Ariana Grande's "Break Free," which is one of the first numbers to really FEEL like an old school New Directions performance all season long. Jane, Roderick, and Spencer sing "Uptown Funk" and make it feel fresh, which is kind of amazing after an NFL season that used its "don't believe me, just watch!" lyric to kick to every single commercial break.
And Spencer sings "Friday I'm in Love" to new kid Alistair (gonna need you to disambiguate that spelling, Glee). I love their blossoming romance, especially because it's not framed at all as a Special Gay Relationship - it's just two boys who like each other and who kiss for the first time over a ukulele. Alistair joins Myron and the rest of the New Directions in the episode's closing number, a traditional "We're a real club now!" performance that feels an awful lot like "Don't Stop Believin'" in season one or "Some Nights" in season four, although that might just be the denim and solid color shirts talking. At any rate, it's the first time I've looked at that particular configuration of performers and said, "Oh. The New Directions. I remember you guys."
Meanwhile, Roderick and Spencer get into a shoving match because Spencer is mean to Roderick while teaching him how to climb a rope in the gymnasium. Later, Roderick is able to climb a rope backstage in the auditorium to save the bar mitzvah performance and he and Spencer are, as a result, bros for life. Toward the end of the episode, Spencer encourages Roderick to eat more organic chicken after Roderick somberly admits to occasionally sneaking night Cheetos. Shockingly, nothing in this paragraph is a euphemism.
Because Sue has reopened her glee club hurt locker (again, not a euphemism), next week's episode will likely be all about her. This season has induced pretty severe whiplash as Sue has gone from kind to indifferent to evil and back again so quickly, but still, she's been an awful lot of fun to watch. Apparently she installs a massive pipe organ in the McKinley auditorium, so even by Glee standards, it's shaping up to be a pretty epic sendoff.
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