Glee: Throwdown
November 9th 2010 21:59
Sue’s (Jane Lynch) latest attempt to destroy Will (Matthew Morrison) and his Glee Club, finds the two shouting at each other in slo-mo, him unable to believe that she could turn him into someone like that, her believing herself regal even in the heat of battle. “Look at us,” he says, “We’re even fighting in voice-over.” So, when did this all start? Well, about a week ago with Principal Figgins (Iqbal Theba) called them into his office to make sure their co-captainness was going alright. They both plaster on the face smiles and assure him it is. No trying to gain favors with the kids, right? Of course not. (Flash: Mr. Schue asking the kids what kind of songs they want to sing. Mercedes (Amber Riley) wants to try something “a little more black”, Kurt (Chris Colfer) agrees, they do sing a lot of showtunes, and Mike (Harry Shum Jr.) raises his hand. “I can pop-and-lock." Noted.) Figgins continues. No pitting the kids against each other (Flash : Sue: “I want to pit these kids against one another, am I clear? Quinn, go.” Quinn tells her the minority students feel like they’re not getting recognized. This gives Sue a great idea).
Sectionals are coming up, Figgins says, he wants to know their plans. They’re each going to do their own numbers and flip to see who goes first. Great! “Now, let’s hug it out!”
They both stare at him. Will forces a laugh.“I’d rather not do that.”
Sue agrees. “I really don’t see that happening.”
“This meeting doesn’t end until I see your bodies touching! It’s a technique I learned last week at my leadership seminar.” They stare at him. He waits.
Regrettably, Will and Sue stand up. They hug.
“I will destroy you,” Will mutters into her ear, to which she mutters back, “I am about to vomit down your back.” “It’s on.” They part and turn towards Figgins.
As Quinn (Dianna Agron) and Finn (Cory Monteith) are in the doctor’s office finding out that the baby is a girl, Will sits out in the waiting room reading a parenting magazine. He watches a man lean over lay his head against his wife’s pregnant stomach, and realizes he’s never been to a doctor’s appointment with Terri. Just then the door opens and Finn comes out to report the baby’s fine, no mutations or anything, “not even cool ones.” Will laughs, then studies Finn a second, asking if he’s okay. Finn takes a deep breath and admits that he’s not. How’s he supposed to take care of a real person? “My mom won’t even let me have a fish.” Finn thanks Mr. Schue for bringing them.
Jacob (Josh Sussman) catches Rachel (Lea Michele) to confront her about the Quinn rumors. Rachel asks him what it’ll take for him not to run the story.
Back in the choir room, Sue and her double-headed coin win the coin toss, and she calls out, “Santana! Wheels! Gay Kid! Asian! Other Asian! Aretha! And Shaft!” to her side of the room. Will stares at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Sue insists that she’s not going to be part of a club that ignores the minority students. “And that’s how Sue,” Santana (Naya Rivera) says happily. “Sees it.” Sue spins to her cheerleader. “Outstanding.” Will can only watch as half his club is taken away.
Back at home, Terri and her sister are talking on the phone while her sister’s kids scream in the background and Will tries to have dinner with his wife. Finally, he takes and hangs up the phone, bringing up the fact that he’s never been to the doctor with Terri when she’s gone for a checkup. Terri doesn’t see the point. “My point,” Will says, “Is that I am the father of that baby.” He gets up from the dinner table. “And I am coming with you to your next doctor’s appointment.”
At school the next day, Finn asks Rachel what it took to silence Jacob, and she just says her dads will probably have to pay for intense therapy. “Whoa,” he says, “hard core.” Rachel doesn’t mind, it’s to protect him. And Quinn, right? Right. Finn tells her he’s awesome.
Jacob pulls out a new pair of underwear with the tags still on them and tells Rachel that she better get him some real ones of hers, otherwise he’s breaking the story about Quinn.
Sue’s half of the club sit around waiting for her to arrive, terrified, and Mercedes is optimistic. “Did you catch Sue’s Corner last night?” Flash to “Sue’s Corner” on that night’s News segment, where Sue is talking about how she can be so sensitive to minorities because she’s 1/16 Comanche Indian. “In fact,” she tells the camera with a smile, “I like minorities so much, I’m thinking of moving to California to become one!”
Sue arrives in the choir room with the jazz band and hands out the new music: Hate on Me. Mercedes is happy to have an R&B song and Sue’s ready for Mike’s dancing. They have a lot of fun singing the song, playing right into Sue’s dastardly plans. Will watches from outside the classroom door, and catches Sue on the way out.
“Sue.” She doesn’t answer. “Sylvester, I’m talkin’ to you.”
“Oh hey buddy,” she says, still walking hastily. “I thought I smelled failure.”
He asks why she took his piano when it was his time with his kids, and she says she sent it off to get properly steamed and cleaned. Oh, and she also burned all his sheet music, claiming she was worried for the kids’ health from all that old moldy paper. Will is exasperated. “You are undermining me in front of these students!” She ignores him and continues down the stairs. “That is it, Sue, this ends right here.”
She turns around, takes off her glasses. “A cock fight. Fantastic.”
“No, we are here for these students,” he argues, “So whatever problems we have with one another, we need to get them out in the open right now.”
Fine. “You’re right Will, I have been trying to destroy your club with a conviction I can only call religious,” Sue tells him. “You know why? Because I don’t trust a man with curly hair,” she says pointedly, running her glasses through his and continuing, “I can’t help picturing small birds laying sulfurous eggs in there and I find it disgusting.”
“You are a terrible influence on these kids,” Will answers angrily, following her as Sue starts to leave again. “You’re dangerous and I think you teach them all the wrong lessons!”
“I don’t care what you think,” she says half-heartedly, turning around to face him. “I have a legacy to protect William, and Glee Club is part of that legacy, and I will win. And if it means I have to get you fired to do it, so be it.” She puts her sunglasses back on, stomps off down the hallway, and shoves a kid’s slushie to the ground, shouting, “Those drinks are crap!” Will sighs.
At home that night, Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) comes over to sit on the couch as Will checks papers. She tells him she feels bad for being such a crummy wife, and when he tells her about Sue, she tells him he’s got to get down and dirty.
The next day as Sue’s being interviewed for a cover story for some magazine or another, she tells the reporter that she empowers her Cheerios to live in fear by creating an environment of irrational, random terror. “Speaking of which, Q! Here. Now.” Quinn comes over, and when Sue asks her where all her cheerleaders all, Quinn tells her that they’re not academically eligible because, “Mr. Schuester flunked them.” For the first time, Sue freezes, taking off her sunglasses in total shock. This will not do!
Taking it to Principal Figgins, Sue is furious. “This is a travesty of international proportions!” Will holds up a test, telling her that one of her Cheerios misspelled her own name and answered every question with a drawing of a sombrero! Figgins’s head swing back and forth as the fight continues with Sue arguing that Will can’t stand to see a woman in a position of power, even though it has nothing to do with anything, and finally Figgins cuts in. “Sue, will did a little research and according to our test records, most of your cheerleaders are functionally illiterate!”
“Oh so what,” Sue shrugs it off, and Figgins tells her that, “Last Friday at the football game, they tried to spell out GO TEAM and ended up with,” he glances at Will. “TO GAME.”
“To game,” Will echoes, leaning forward and letting Sue know that since 1992, “95% of your Cheerios should have flunked Spanish, and I for one am not going to stand for it anymore—“
“Oh Will,” Sue interrupts over dramatically, “We all know about your devotion to that DYING language—“
“Dying language?!“
“Let me break it down for you,” she talks over him, sitting down on the couch next to him. “I empower my Cheerios to be champions, do they go onto college? I don’t know. Should they learn Spanish? Sure, if they want to become dishwashers and gardeners.” Both Principal Figgins and Will can’t get a word in edgewise as she rushes on, “But if they want to be bankers, and lawyers, and captains of industry, the most important thing they can learn is how to do a round-off.”
“She is deranged!” Will tells Figgins, reminding him that, “This all happened on your watch.”
Caught between the two of them, Figgins is flustered, he gestures helplessly, stuttering for an answer, and Sue finally yells, “SAY SOMETHING!”
“Oh-Okay,” he finally gets out. “Sue? Will is correct, you’re wrong. From now on, no free passes, that’ it.”
It’s not what Sue was hoping for. Will thanks him and leaves with Sue shouting that she’ll sue him. Sue turns to Principal Figgins, leaning in and asking if she’ll be uploading a certain video to youtube…Figgins makes a face, telling her that he put it up himself, and you know what? “It only got two hits!” Sue swears silently and he adds, “Let me break it down for you. Nobody cares!” Without a word, Sue spins around and heads out. She grabs a pile of stuff off the secretary’s desk, throws it across the room and lets out a furious scream, adjusting her track suit.
“No!” Figgins shouts. “Not the children!”
In Spanish class, Finn fakes a yawn and passes a note to Quinn. It’s the name he came up for their baby: Drizzle. Quinn stares at him. “Drizzle. Are you a moron?” They’re not naming their baby Drizzle, “we’re not naming it anything.” After class she yells at him, telling him that it’s not his problem, he’s not the one who’s parents will burn her like a witch when they find out. Finn lets slip that he wishes she were more like Rachel. Quinn tells him she knows sometimes guys cheat on their pregnant wives or girlfriends, “just don’t do it with her.” Slamming her locker, she walks off.
Back together for the first time in a while, the whole club rocks out on their own together, then Sue’s kids have to leave. “Bye white people,” Artie (Kevin McHale) says with a wave, as Will comes in. He’s glad to see them too, and wishes they could all be together. With his half of the group, he announces, “Sue’s kids are singing about hate. Literally. So I thought we could take a kinder approach.” He pulls out the new song, which Rachel loves (“No Air”), and tells her and Finn that they’re going to have to practice really hard on it. Quinn glares at them all, muttering, “So much for togetherness.”
At the end of their performance, Will congratulates them on how amazing they sound, and Quinn steps up angrily. “What about us?” she asks, “you expect us to just sway back here like props?” (Cut to: Sue telling her to say it again, word for word. “What about us?” Quinn says the line. “You expect us to just sway back here like props?”) Taking her instructions from Sue, Quinn convinces Puck (Mark Salling) and Brittany (Heather Morris), even though she’s white, that they’re not being heard as minorities, and they go to Sue, who will gladly “welcome you to Sue’s rainbow tent.”
Will goes home that night and tells Terri that he made an appointment for them at the doctor’s. He’s finally going to get to see his son! Terri can only smile nervously. What now?
The next day at school, Will approaches Sue in the teacher’s lounge. He can’t do a number with three kids! “Not with that attitude,” she answers, telling him she’ll make a deal: Her Cheerios back in exchange for his little club. Will defiantly tells her she’ll “have to pry those F’s from my cold dead hands”. Sue’s fine with that.
Terri and her sister ambush Dr. Wu (Kenneth Choi) and threatening him with an outrageous lawsuit if he doesn’t do what they want. And what do they want?
At school, Quinn orders Rachel to leave Finn alone, and Rachel admits she did have ulterior motives, but it’s Quinn who’s cheating. “If I was you, I’d recognize who my true friends are.” She warns Quinn that when Sue finds out, she’ll probably try to rip her uniform off with her bare hands. Angry, Quinn sings it out.
As most of the club sits in the audience, Will’s last three kids stand on stage as Rachel introduces their new song. “Get on with it!” Sue shouts. “Enough with the jibba-jabba!”
“Sue,” Will chastises, “you can’t talk to kids that way.”
“Tell me how I’m supposed to breathe with no air—“
It’s as far as Rachel gets before Sue interrupts her, saying it’s bad enough that her kids have to life in squalor and off food stamps (Mercedes is confused. “My dad’s a dentist…”) “But for you to stand here and bore them to death? I won’t stand for it.” Sue orders her kids out, and Will has had enough.
“That’s it.” He stands up. “You know what Sue? You’ve been pretty honest about your feelings for me, so let me return the favor. You’re RUDE, Sue. You have no class, and you are a TERRIBLE teacher.”
“I’ll let you know I have my PhD.”
“You got it online, Sue!”
“You are a failed performer, Will” she cuts back. “You weren’t good enough to make it in the real world, you’re even good enough to run this stupid little club that nobody cares about!” The kids’ faces fall as Sue continues, “Time after time, Will, YOU FAIL!”
“You spend every waking moment of your life figuring out ways to terrify children to try to make you feel better about yourself and the fact that you’re probably gonna spend the rest of your life alone!” Will argues back, completely fed up with Sue Sylvester.
“How dare you talk to me like that!”
They continue to fight as the kids watch, and it’s back to the slo-mo, all out, fighting again until Finn finally shouts, “Enough!” Both teachers stop. “I’m sorry Mr. Schue, Miss Sylvester,” he continues, “but if we wanted to hear mom and dad fight, those of us who still have two parents would just stay home on pay day.”
Mercedes agrees. “Glee Club is supposed to be fun. And furthermore, I don’t like this minority business. I may be a strong, proud black woman, but I’m a lot more than that. I’m out.” Everyone agrees. The kids walk out, the boys carrying Artie’s wheelchair. Sue looks sharply from them to Will then leaves too. Will sighs, ashamed of his behavior.
Will finally accompanies Terri to the doctor, where Dr. Wu puts up a barrier so he can’t see that he’s just faking the ultrasound. He plays Quinn’s ultrasound DVD, waving the instruments around in the air. Will watches the monitor in awe. “Wow,” he breathes. “That’s him.” Terri clears her throat and the doctor grimly announces that it is, in fact, a girl they’re having, not a boy. They must have read the first one wrong.
Will continues to watch the monitor, a tear sliding down his cheek. Terri is alarmed. “Honey, I didn’t know having a boy was so important to you.”
“It isn’t,” he says softly. “I don’t care what she is, she’s all ours.” Tearfully, he tells her, “I’m just so happy.”
Pulling him down towards her, she says, “No matter what happens, I won’t you to remember that this moment, that we love each other…okay?”
He lets out an emotional breath and kisses her. Will looks back at the screen, at what he believes is his baby girl.
At school the next day, Will goes to Sue in her office to talk about what happened in the auditorium, and she says she was going to come talk to him, “But I have no idea where your office is.” She doesn’t want to be co-captain anymore, because she says she can’t stand the sight of kids getting emotional unless it’s because of physical exertion, but she’d still like to stay on as a sort of consultant. She might not like Glee so much (“Too fruity”), but she does like teaching, and she certainly likes winning. He agrees to show her the set lists, and admits, “Who’s to say everything I do is 100% on the ball?”
“No one would say that,” she answers frankly and he nods. “You’re probably right. But uh, in hindsight?” he says, “You were right to shine the spotlight on the fact that those kids are minorities…”
“Because you’re all minorities,” he tells his kids. “Because you’re in the Glee Club.” As he continue to cheer them up, Sue suddenly shows up to announce to everyone that Quinn is pregnant and off the Cheerios. Quinn is too shocked to speak. Nobody knows what to say.
Rachel confronts Jacob in the hall, how could he do that?, and he tells her that Sue made him do it. Finn comforts a crying Quinn at her locker.
“You’re not alone, together we stand, I’ll be by your side, you know I’ll take your hand…” They sing in the last number. “Keep holdin’ on, ‘cause you know we’ll make it through, we’ll make it through…”
1. Jill Scott - Hate on Me
2. Jordin Sparks - No Air
3. The Supremes - You Keep Me Hangin' On
4. Avril Lavigne - Keep Holding On
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