Glee: Bad Reputation
November 14th 2010 23:56
In the choir room, Kurt (Chris Colfer), Mercedes (Amber Riley), Artie (Kevin McHale), Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz), Finn (Cory Monteith), Rachel (Lea Michele), and Jesse St. James (Jonathan Groff) are gathered around a computer, dying laughing an Olivia Newton John video. A “Physical” music video that features the jazzercise routine of none other than Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch). Kurt stole it from her office, and they decide to get back at Sue for humiliating them all the time by leaking the video on youtube.
Furious when she finds out about the video leak, Sue takes it to Principal Figgins (Iqbal Theba), bringing Will (Matthew Morrison) along with her because she’s positive it was his kids that did it. She hands over some of the comments she’s printed out from the video. Figgins looks at the paper and reads, “The man in this video looks like champion cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester.” “That was particularly hurtful,” Sue spats, and Will clears his throat, trying not to laugh. “You know Sue, there are a lot of people in this school who dislike you,” he offers. “My kids don’t do stuff like this.” “Is that so?” she asks, handing over another paper. “Exhibit B.” Will is confused when he looks at the list. “What’s a Glist?” Sue informs him that it’s a “weekly ranking of your Glee club based on a hotness quotient of sexual promiscuity.” Figgins is a little worried to. He’s had this happen before when a list appeared ranking the “ten ugliest gingers” and the perpetrator would have been expelled, “had it not turned out to be a member of the FACULTY,” he finishes, shooting Sue a look. She shrugs it off. “I stand by that list.” Figgins tells Will that he can’t have an environment that damages children’s self-esteem. He needs to find out who made the Glist and suspend them, or else he’s holding the entire Glee Club responsible. “Are you serious?” Will asks, and when Figgins tells him, “I cannot have these shenanigans at this school,” Sue reiterates, “He cannot have THESE shenanigans at THIS school.”
Holding up the Glist in front of his kids, Will asks who did it. Rachel accuses Puck, but he denies it. Will points out that between the Glist and Miss Sylvester’s video, they’re getting a pretty bad reputation. The kids don’t see that as a bad thing. Maybe if they’re seen as more dangerous, the other kids at school will stop picking on them. Mr. Schue tells him that he gets how they feel, “but becoming what you despise is not the answer.” He hands out the new song, but the kids just roll their eyes. “This song is whack,” Mercedes grumbles, but he tells them that it’s not. It’s a great song, but over time it’s just garnered a reputation as a joke. Their assignment for the week? “Find songs like this, mine them for what works, and make them great again.” Hopefully they can apply the lesson to their own lives.
“This song should be arrested for the crime of sucking,” Jesse says, looking doubtfully at the sheet music, and to prove them wrong, Will asks, “You wanna bet?” and tells the band to “hit it”. He sings “Ice, Ice, Baby”, and his dancing pulls Mike (Harry Shum Jr.) and Matt (Dijon Talton) in. Soon he’s got the entire room singing and dancing, and by the end even Jesse admits that Mr. Schue has successfully paroled a song they all thought was awful.
Walking into the teacher’s lounge, Sue notices an alarming fact. “This is not happening,” she thinks watching the other teachers point at her. “The cruel slow motion laughter is just your imagination. You’re Sue Sylvester, legend. They’re not laughing at you because of your Physical video. Just calmly pour yourself a cup of Joe,” she says, heading for the coffee maker, “and focus.” Suddenly another horrible realization hits her. “What’s that smell? Dear God, It’s coffee! It’s usually masked by the smell of fear!” This IS happening! “You’re being laughed at in slow motion by a room full of inferiors whom you used to terrify!” As this is all sinking in, Brenda Castle (Molly Shannon), a new teachers, comes over and tells her she’s an embarrassment. “And that’s ME talking!” She bursts out laughing at Sue and leaves.
Determined to get the worst reputation in the school, Rachel enlists the help of Artie on a film project that will be sure to do the job. “Hold onto your hats,” she tells him. “Because Rachel Berry is about to get musically promiscuous!”
Kurt calls an emergency meeting about their falling reps, and he, Artie, Mercedes, Tina, and Brittnay (who took all her antibiotics at once and now can’t remember how to get out of the choir room), come up with a fantastically bad plan. They’re gonna get their Glee on in the stacks. As in, they’re going to disrupt the library! Gasp! What a wonderfully awful idea! They’ll be legends!
Visiting her sister, Sue tells her, “I never realized how hard it is to be laughed at. Particularly in slow motion.” She apologizes for not protecting her sister more when they were growing up, and her sister reminds her that when she was feeling down, they always used to go help out at the animal shelter. Why? “Because there’s always someone who’s got it worse than you do,” Sue remembers. Okay, new plan. Sue’s going to try and be nice! She’s going to help out someone who’s got it worse-off than her. That someone?
“I’m a little confused,” Emma tells Sue when she shows up in her office, and Sue understands. “You’re probably wondering what exactly Sue Sylvester means when she says, “I’m your new therapist”?” She tells Emma that the video event has caused her to decide she wants to give back. When she volunteered her services as a counselor, they gave her Emma’s name. “I’d really like to help.” Emma looks suspiciously at Sue. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this.” “Ellen,” Sue answers, never getting Emma’s name right, “You’re crippled by mental illness. Your compulsions have estranged you from your own feelings. You nearly married a gym teacher who’s more gravy than man. And you’re content to be repeatedly lied to by the man you purport to love.” “I’m sorry?” Emma asks, confused, and Sue tells her that she bribed Will’s landlord to slip baby monitors under his couch and bed. “Turns out he’s been having make-out sessions with that coach from Vocal Adrenaline, and sleep-overs with that world-class banana magnet April Rhodes.” Emma is shocked.
“You suck,” Sue says, getting up and leaning over the desk to insult her. “You take weird little strides when you walk as if you were raised in Imperial Japan and someone bound your feet.”
“You make a valid point.”
“Grow a pair!” Sue answers, “I’m insulting you! You refuse to stand up for yourself you’re so afraid of confrontation.” Emma realizes she’s right, and Sue convinces her that if she wants to get better, she’s going to have to start communicating her feelings. “You need to let Will Schuester know how he’s made you feel,” Sue tells her, working in her plan to destroy Will yet again. “And in a public setting so he can’t escape and he won’t manipulate you. Trust me. You need to let him have it.”
Rachel talks Puck into helping her with her Glee assignment, “I might be the last chance you have to salvage what you have left of your reputation and stay in Glee.” The song she’s chosen? The fantastically bad 70s hit, “Run, Joey Run.” It’s a story song, so they get to play parts. Puck sighs and asks if she really thinks he made the Glist. She says that it does sound like something he’d do, and Puck woefully talks about how every day he goes to school planning on being nice, but it never ends that way. She understands. She can’t help criticizing people when they don’t sing perfectly.
Psyching herself up, Emma garners her courage and, with Sue at her back, approaches Will in the teacher’s lounge. (Sue has to wait outside because there’s too much slow-motion laughter going on in there). Emma finds will earnestly talking to another teacher, patting her hand gently, and when she asks to talk to him and he asks for a second, she answers, “Actually no, I can’t give you a sec. You’re just gonna have to reschedule your heavy petting session with Mrs. Carlisle for another time.” Shocked by her out of character outburst, Will stands up. “Emma!” “I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Carlisle says tearfully. “I was just telling Mr. Schuester how my husband recently died.”
“Wow,” Emma answers dryly, “gettin’ ‘em fresh off the rebound now aren’t you?” she asks Will, telling the room, “Nobody is safe, nobody’s safe!”
“Emma,” Will asks, totally confused, “can I talk to you in private?” Nope. She tells him they’re going to talk about it right here and now because she has absolutely nothing to hide. She tells him in front of everyone that she’s been seeing a therapist and that she knows about Shelby Corcoran and April Rhodes. Still unsure what’s going on here, and forgetting to tell her that nothing happened with either of those women, Will asks, “How did you find out about that?”
“You’re not denying it, okay wow.” She tells him that she thought they were trying to work through this thing together, and she’s finally putting her foot down and sticking up for herself. “You’re a slut Will,” she tells him, thoroughly caught up in her emotions now that she’s on a roll. “You’re a slut. You’re a slut, you’re a slut, you’re a slut, everybody should know that!” she shouts to all the teachers. “And you should know that I’m through with you.” Looking around him, she tells poor Mrs. Carlisle that she’s sorry for her lost, then storms out. Poor Will spends the rest of the week with Sue calling him “slut” and “man-whore” and Principal Figgins telling him that he’s praying for him. “But nothing happened!” he says exasperatedly, and Ken (Patrick Gallagher) suddenly appears to tell him that maybe that’s not the point. He tells Will that he broke the heart of someone who doesn’t let herself get close to anyone, and that he’s hurt him too. Now Ken’s eating 6,000 calories a day in his misery. Ken walks off. Will is just as miserable.
Writing in her journal that she doesn’t know how much more humiliation she can take, Sue suddenly gets a call from Olivia Newton John. Yes, THAT Olivia Newton John, and after being convinced that it really is her after hanging up on her once, Sue drops the phone and listens to Olivia ask her if she’d like to redeem both herself and Olivia’s original Physical video. Sue is shocked, and accepts the musical icon’s invitation to be in the new and improved video. Sue goes from being mocked to being a star, and order is once again restored to its fear-masked-coffee state.
When their disrupt the library plan fails miserably (the librarian liked their “Can’t Touch This” number so much she wants them to perform it in her church), the Glee kids realize they’re going to have to do what they’ve been dreading. They’re going to have to tell Sue that they’re the ones who leaked her video. She’ll probably kill them, but it’s worth it. Frozen in fear, they watch as Kurt approaches Miss Sylvester in the hallway. He forces himself to tell her and awaits their punishment. They’re all shocked when Sue thanks them instead and happily walks off. What?! Running to their computers to see if maybe the comments on her video have just gotten so bad Sue’s starting to get some sympathy. They search for the video and end up finding the new one with Olivia Newton John. Their jaws drop. The video is great. “Again, again, again again!” Mercedes claps, and they watch it again.
In the choir room Will tries unsuccessfully to get the person who made the Glist fess up (his previous interrogation one-on-one didn’t work either), and finally with a sign, accepts that they’re going to accept Figgins’s punishment. He pulls up the screen and has Rachel introduce her “Run, Joey Run” video. Rachel’s excited. As the cub watches the leading man in the video change from Puck to Jesse to Finn, Rachel beams.
The boys, however, are not impressed at all. They’re furious that she’d do this to them, Jesse’s mad that she cast him opposite two other guys (wasn’t he enough for her?), and Finn flat out tells her it’s not about artistic choices, it’s about her wanting not to be seen like an outcast, but as “some hot, slutty, girl singer.” How could she do that to them? Is her reputation really that important to her? Finn walks out. Jesse follows him. Rachel’s lost them both now.
So happy, Sue goes back to visit her sister and tells her that she realizes there’s only one person she ever really wanted to impress, and when Jean asks who, she answers, “You, silly!” She tells her sister that she calmly went back into the teacher’s lounge and told them all that she didn’t care what they thought about her. (flash to what really happened: Sue pulling out some charts and shouting, “What’s that? Oh look, Sue Sylvester’s a top 700 recording artist, people! Who’s laughing now, huh?” They all shrink back, once again afraid of her.) Sue tells Jean that she’s decided she’s going to give her money from the video to Jean’s nursing home. Maybe it’ll be enough for a garden out back. Jean thinks that’ll be nice. Sue wonders how all this time “how is it that you still know so much more about everything than I do?” “I’m the smart one,” Jean tells her and Sue laughs endearingly. “You got the looks too, how’s that fair?” Sue brings out another book about two little bears, just like them. “What does that say?” she asks, pointing to the page. “I will always love you,” Jean reads, and Sue tells her sister, “And I, will always love you.”
Will takes Emma flowers, apologizing. In all this discovering who he is business, he took a couple of wrong turns. “And I get how those detours might have hurt you. But now I know that that’s not who I am, or who I want to be.” She tells him that she knows what’s supposed to happen now, she’s supposed to smile and be impressed with how in touch he is with his feelings, but she can’t. “But Emma, this is killing me,” he says earnestly. “I just…I want you to look at me the way you used to.” She tells him she can’t, but that’s a good thing. If this relationship is going to work, they’re going to need to see each other for who they really are. She thanks him for the flowers. Grimly, Will leaves. He pauses when he notices Quinn walking down the hallway getting bumped by everyone.
“I know you’re behind the Glist,” he tells Quinn later on, and she argues that he has no proof. She rants on about how everything else has been taken away from her, why not her education too? She’ll get expelled if this is pinned on her. Not getting mad, Will gently tells her, “You know when I knew it was you? The moment I felt what it was like to walk in your shoes. I mean, it takes years to build a good reputation, but only seconds to destroy it. A couple bad choices and you go from the top to the bottom.” He kneels down in front of her. “You have lost so much, Quinn. Which means you had the most to gain from the Glist.”
Tearfully, Quinn finally admits, “I never meant to hurt anybody.”
“I know.”
She tells him that people used to part like the Red Sea when she walked through. Now she’s just invisible.
“And you think being seen as a cheap tramp is better?”
“A bad reputation is better than no reputation at all.”
Will tells her that he knows like high school feels like her whole life right now, but “it’s going to end. You’re gonna give that baby to a family that really loves it, who’s gonna love it, and you going to go on to do amazing things.”
“You really think I can get it all back one day?” she asks tearfully, and he stands up with a sigh. “No.” Her face falls. “I think you can get something even better,” he finishes with a smile. “I mean, come on, you’re Quinn Fabray, right?” He tells her that those people didn’t part because of her, she made them part with her attitude.
“Thanks Mr. Schue,” she tells him, standing up and feeling a lot better. “You’re a really good teacher. Even if everybody is calling you a man-whore.”
“You wanted to see me, William?” Principal Figgins says, arriving in the choir room, and Will steps in front of Quinn as she wipes her tears away. He tells Figgins that he grilled every one of his students, but no one copped to making the Glist. Quinn looks up. He’s not going to turn her in? “They closed ranks and wouldn’t rat out who did it.” Figgins doesn’t believe him, but Will tells him his point has been made, the Glists have stopped. He thinks they should just move on. Figgins pauses a moment, glances at Quinn then back at Will, and finally answers, “Fine.” He leans forward. “I’m still praying for you Will.” He leaves. Will looks at Quinn, who mouths, “Thank you.”
Jesse finds Rachel at her locker and tells her before he transferred here to be her boyfriend, he asked around about her. The most interesting thing he found out was that, although most people either didn’t know who she was or didn’t like her, they all said she was a person who could be trusted. She insists that she still is, but he doesn’t believe her. She tells him she always knew he’d break her heart. He points out the funny thing about reputations. The fact of the matter is, “you broke mine first.” Jesse tells her not to speak to him in ballet club, then walks off.
Rachel sings “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in Glee and ballet club. She’s left alone at the end as everyone leaves, including Finn and Jesse.
1. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby
2. David Geddes - Run Joey Run
3. MC Hammer - U Can't Touch This
4. Olivia Newton John - Physical
5. Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart
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