Brandon Nowalk: I might need a better look at Emma’s “Wait, Am I Callous?” pamphlet, because I’m happy that’s over, and not entirely for the closure, although it’s nice to address the obvious, finally. First-time viewers several decades from now aren’t going to know why everyone’s so sad at the beginning, but Finn has died. Three weeks, prior, actually. (No word on where that leaves us, timeline-wise. Prom at my high school was two weeks before graduation, but let’s not think about it too much.) Now everyone’s back in Lima for a special memorial Mr. Schu is planning. It’s a recipe for an hour of ugly-crying, but the writers pull off something better. For Glee, “The Quarterback” is an honest-to-goodness triumph of restraint.
That’s what first strikes me looking back on “The Quarterback.” No real footage of the recently deceased Cory Monteith, which might have been too much considering the impact of those delicately bookended photos. The episode is peppered with funny jokes and light deliveries. The closest a song comes to milking the emotion is “Seasons Of Love,” and even that is so, well, produced that it doesn’t start draining until Finn’s picture appears. The producers even keep Rachel out of it, and she’s a one-woman stacked deck. In fact, Rachel doesn’t arrive until a good two-thirds of the way through the episode. That’s how calibrated “The Quarterback” is. That control helps the emotional eruptions stand out, which in turn gives weight to the catharsis. It’s always strange to see Glee governed with maturity, but here we are. Monteith’s passing resonates enough that Glee doesn’t need to go “Shooting Star” on us just to land. It’s always been obvious in Glee’s self-deprecating jokes that the producers are aware of criticism, but this is another level entirely. Glee has genuinely learned a lesson.
Sue, as always in times of crisis in this fucked-up universe, is the voice of reason. She immediately knows how to honor Finn: “By not making a self-serving spectacle of our own sadness.” Like every other line in “The Quarterback,” it’s a code that slips past the fourth wall. Glee is declaring its intentions upfront, and it’s awfully defensive. Kurt says it doesn’t matter how Finn died. “I care more about how he lived, and anyone who has a problem with that should remember that he was my brother.” Got that? No criticizing allowed. And even if you were to tease Glee a little, Kitty has already co-opted you. “This is sorta cheesy.” And that bit of cake-eating has nothing on Sue, who rejects Santana’s sage counsel that if she regrets being a bitch to Finn, she could learn a lesson for the future. “I don’t care about that. I don’t care about people,” she replies. “I care about Finn.” Forgive me, but lolwut? It took the first script by all three creators since the second episode of the series, but at last we have the Glee-est sentence that’s ever been uttered, a nonsense contradiction that’s meant to be meaningful in the moment and to justify future callousness.
Now, “The Quarterback” is explicitly about individual grief, and Sue is just one example. She refuses to see a lesson in this, whereas Puck is forced to grow from this experience. That rainbow approach is perfect, and if the individual stories sometimes see Puck and Beiste failing high-school theater together (“You don’t have to be scared to have feelings!”), the majority are in a huddle closer to the top as bench players Burt and Carole absolutely own the stage. I’ve probably gone on too long—I just really wanted to mention Burt and Carole before ceding the floor—so I’m happy to have you here, Todd, because I have a question. It’s been about 525,600 minutes since we’ve heard your thoughts on Glee, and I’m curious: Have you been keeping up? What do you make of “The Quarterback?” And most importantly, do you buy that this is a celebration of life, as Kurt (and the producers) are so insistent?
Todd VanDerWerff: Hey, Brandon. I’m glad to be back, even if it’s for such a sad occasion. I’ve mostly kept up with Glee, though not paying as close of attention as I should have because it fell into “something I have on while I do something else” territory. (That said, I still haven’t seen last week’s episode. I take it from your write-up that there’s no real build-up to Finn’s death in the show’s continuity. That’s an odd choice.) I thought “The Quarterback” was… fine. The scenes that were mostly like a memorial service, a chance for the cast and crew to memorialize Cory Monteith without pushing too far into being utterly maudlin were my favorite bits—well, favorite bits not involving Rachel, who’s used wonderfully here. But every time the show tried to shoehorn in a plot—everybody trying to get their hands on Finn’s jacket, Puck removing the tree from the memorial garden space, Sue being ballast—it felt clunky and unnecessary.
An episode about the death of a beloved cast member is never going to be great TV. The only show that really got close was Newsradio, and even that was interesting more as an examination of the cast’s raw emotions over the death of Phil Hartman than anything else. Yet doing such a thing, particularly in this media-saturated age, is absolutely necessary. A good TV show, particularly a good comedy series, invites the audience into its space every week and asks all of us to become virtual friends with the characters on the show. Thus, when an actor dies and their character must, necessarily, leave the show, too, it’s important to give the audience space to grieve alongside the characters. In my head, the ideal way for Glee to do this would have been a rolling, rotating hour of TV, where all of the characters gathered in the choir room and talked about just what Finn—and by extension, Monteith—meant to them, singing and laughing and crying. Even when it basically sucks, Glee possesses the power to tap into intense emotion via song, and I think something like that could have worked here.
But that wouldn’t have been TV so much as a musical, memorial-service version of Rachel Getting Married, and I suspect the Fox network wouldn’t have liked it. So there’s a plot, and the plot is, like most plots on Glee, pretty dumb. But the stupidity of it is just heightened by being placed up against the real, raw emotions emanating from Burt and Carole or from Rachel’s meek little cry of, “He was my person!” Plus, Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan make all sorts of weird choices. I like the restraint you talked about earlier, but they make the very odd decision to turn Santana into surrogate Rachel, when Will is right there. I get that Santana and Finn have a connection, too, and I get that these characters are forever a little self-serving in their emotions (which the show excellently mocked even within this episode), but her connection to him boils down to him being a considerate lover and taking care to make sure no one sees when she’s messed up her pants with some chocolate. It doesn’t really rise to the level of her need to have that jacket at all costs. Hell, I would have even bought Puck as the figure who missed Finn so much he couldn’t go on.