Episode 3.06: “Mash Off”

(Spoilers lurk below.)

This episode addressed several things that needed to be addressed, and did it in an adequately artful way. Shelby and Puck’s kiss was addressed, as Shelby attempts to write it off as a mistake and Puck (who thinks he’s in love) tries to convince her that he’s cut out to be a family man. They address the nuts and bolts of Sue’s campaign against Burt, as Sue slings mud while Burt and Will take action by… getting mad about it? They address the continued existence of two glee clubs at WMHS (who are apparently going to compete at sectionals), as Will and Shelby try to make their kids not hate each other. They even address Kurt and Rachel’s falling out, which has essentially not been alluded to at all since “I am Unicorn,” unless you count the fact that Rachel and Kurt haven’t really shared any scenes since then. Finally, the end of the episode hints at addressing Quinn’s continued spiral downward and Santana’s fear of coming out of the closet.

Before I go on, I want to say something about how season three as a whole has been progressing. From day one, they sold this season as one of continuing plot arcs rather than one of self-contained episodes, and I simply don’t think it’s been working that well. In some cases, plot arcs come and go with little rhyme or reason. For example, Santana was banned from the glee club in “The Purple Piano Project” for doing Sue’s bidding on glee club time, an extremely valid reason. That set up a great possible followup in which we explore Santana’s dual loyalties, and a good chance to see some character development as she struggles to figure out what she wants for herself. Instead, what we got was Santana rejoining the club in “Asian F” without telling Sue (why would Will even allow that?) with the banning never being mentioned again. And of course, she quit the club voluntarily the very next episode. We’ve also had several episodes establish that Finn feels insecure about Blaine’s place in the club because he sees Blaine as competition for the position of leader. This comes and goes, but has never been even slightly developed and just gets in the way when it does crop up. The “West Side Story” plot arc felt aborted, as the character fallout between Mercedes and Rachel (which was the most important thing to happen in that arc because of the way it fragmented the club) was not addressed before showtime. The play instead served as the backdrop for Rachel, Kurt, and Blaine losing their virginity, which, in retrospect, is just a bizarre thing to do with the resolution of a five-episode plot arc when those two subjects had nothing to do with each other beforehand.

Meanwhile, the plot arcs that are working and continuous feel fragmented and choppy because they keep being interrupted. We go entire episodes without addressing something like Sue’s campaign for Congress or Quinn’s growing insanity or the Troubletones and it feels jarring to come back to it all of the sudden. I’m not saying that every plot arc should have development in every episode, but I think there should be evidence that it exists. Right now, despite the fact that there are more ongoing plot arcs than in either other season of the show, it actually feels more discontinuous than ever because of the way the pieces just don’t quite fit together.

Anyway, about “Mash Off.” I actually like the way they set up the mash-up contest, with Shelby and Will coming together to try to figure out a way to clear the air. There’s absolutely no animosity between these two people, which is refreshing in a situation like this. A lot of TV shows would go the route of making them enemies, but with Sue around we really don’t need another enemy. And Will even admits that the defections were his own fault (“They left because of me”). That’s a level of self-awareness we haven’t seen in Will for a while. So we have this situation where the coaches like each other, but the kids don’t. The New Directions kids see the Troubletones as traitors, while Mercedes sees the New Directions kids as enablers to drama-queen Rachel. And Santana is actually just plain mean.

Thing is, the mash ups were very cool, the dodgeball game was surprisingly a lot of fun to watch, and seeing the individual battles going on between Santana and Finn/Mercedes was nice… but the writers apparently forgot to resolve anything. Everything is still the same between the two clubs after this episode. The bit with Santana’s sexuality coming out looked like a resolution, because it was tacked on to the end of the arc, but it was just the beginning of another arc to be continued later. So the A story of this episode did not have a real resolution. They actually masked that so well that I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this review.

You could argue that the resolution there was in the way individual characters made up with each other, but the only characters that really did that were Rachel and Kurt. I liked seeing that happen, and it felt real and earned, but their falling out had nothing to do with the fragmentation of the club. What we needed here was Rachel and Mercedes making amends. I’m going to keep harping on this forever, because it is so completely necessary before any further progress can be made in this season. And putting that in this episode would have (if handled the right way) felt like a real resolution to the A story even if the clubs did not merge back together. The perfect place to put Rachel’s making amends with Mercedes would have been in “The First Time” but “Mash Off” is a close second. That’s strike two, Glee writers.

What actually worked better, surprisingly, were the interactions between Puck and Shelby. Puck comes across as incredibly sincere, almost duplicating his performance in season one when he pursued Quinn to try to be with their daughter. Ironically, Quinn has gotten worse since Beth and Shelby came back to town while Puck has matured. That said, Puck should realize how poor an idea it is to pursue a relationship with Shelby while he’s in school. She could end up in serious trouble, which would not be good for anyone involved, least of all Beth.

Quinn didn’t have a big part in this episode, but what she did have left an impact. Puck spills the beans to Shelby about Quinn’s plan to get Beth back, and Shelby really lets Quinn have it, refusing to let her join the Troubletones and essentially refusing to let Quinn have anything more to do with Beth. Shelby correctly points out that there’s more to turning your life around than dying your hair blond and wearing conventional clothes. Quinn is still a wreck and getting worse, as evidenced by her plan to get Shelby in hot water with child protective services. As Shelby kicks Quinn out of her house, she tells Quinn “I hope you see this as a wake-up call.” Quinn desperately needs one, but she’s shown little evidence that she’s going to be willing to accept it. There was a subtle hint that Quinn is wise to Shelby’s relationship with Puck, which opens the door for another cruel thing Quinn might try to separate Shelby from Beth. We’ll see if that happens.

The stuff with Sue’s campaign worked as comic relief, because Sue’s ads were genuinely funny. I wish we had actually gotten to see some of Burt’s real response to it though, aside from hand-wringing and bitching. I also note that they’ve apparently chosen to drop Sue’s platform of increasing funding for special education, I assume because it’s not funny. Sue even enumerates her position within this episode and doesn’t mention special education. That makes her much less interesting of a villain since she is once again reduced to moustache-twirling evil schemes. I will say that it worked in this particular episode because it was played mostly for comedy rather than for drama. When they tried for a dramatic scene at the end when Sue realizes the human cost of her mudslinging campaign, it worked as far as Santana went, but fell flat with Sue (mainly because we’ve seen her apologize so many times for so many things, there’s just no impact to it anymore, even aside from the fact that her ads were cartoonishly ludicrous).

Speaking of Santana, the most effective scenes in this episode didn’t even have anything to do with the main plots. Finn’s calling out of Santana for staying in the closet really hit Santana where she lives, and it’s probably the most vulnerable we’ve seen her outside of when she was rejected by Brittany last season. Likewise, her tearful reaction to the ad from another one of Sue’s competitors that will out her as a lesbian was effective, and her paranoid slapping of Finn when she thought he was gossiping about her was shocking enough to give us an idea of what an emotional wreck Santana is at the moment. All of that worked really well, but it mainly made me wish I was watching the followup episode that will deal with all this.

The songs were all good. While “Rumour Has It/Someone Like You” was objectively the best song of the episode, I have to admit that I got the most enjoyment out of “Hit Me with Your Best Shot/One Way or Another” and the dodgeball scene. That scene was set up in a lame, unbelievable way, the song choices were obvious and could easily have been boring, and yet… it was just a lot of fun to watch.

This was not a bad episode, but in retrospect it’s almost depressingly average.