Leave it to this show to underutilize their best idea all season. The club is preparing for Nationals, and Tina blows up about the way Rachel is always coddled and given anything she wants while Tina is expected to sway in the background. Nobody's supportive of her complaints, so she stomps out of the room. She eventually finds herself at the mall, where she trips and falls into a fountain, smacking her head on the hard bottom. Which, naturally, leads to an extended fantasy sequence in which everybody has switched bodies: Tina and Rachel; Puck and Blaine; Finn and Kurt; Artie and Santana; Brittany and Mercedes; Quinn and Sugar; Sam and the Leprechaun; Sue and Will; and Mike Chang and New Guy With Gross Hair Whose Name Demian Can't Be Bothered To Look Up. It's all very funny, until Tina as Rachel has a revelatory conversation with Rachel as Tina and the real Tina ends up happy to be a worker bee and wait for her own time to shine. And then they switch back to their boring selves. Bleh.
In other news, Rachel has decided not to give up on her dreams, notwithstanding all her whining last episode. So she's been harassing Carmen, the rep from the Fake New York Theater School, to try to get her to come to Nationals to see how amazing Rachel is. She is roundly ignored by said rep, until Tina informs her that Carmen is teaching a master class at Oberlin and convinces her that in-person harassment will be more effective. So they drive to Oberlin, where Carmen shoots Rachel down, but then appears to be impressed by Tina's impassioned plea on her behalf. Only time (and about an hour) will tell if she's been convinced to show up in Chicago.
Finally, Puck is still feeling the pain of failing and the non-graduation that's about to happen. Meanwhile, Coach Bieste is still feeling the pain from Cooter's abuse (which may be just verbal at this point, but I can't be sure). Puck's pain leads him to a serious fight with Hockey Hair, which Shannon breaks up, leading Puck to a tearful confession about how much he hates his life and feels like he's lived up to his own father's prediction that he's just garbage. His tears give Shannon the strength to leave Cooter. And in return, she convinces the geography teacher to let Puck retake his test. So maybe he will graduate.
Featuring: Céline Dion's "Because You Loved Me," performed by Tina (as Rachel); Irene Cara's "Flashdance What a Feeling," performed by Rachel and Tina as themselves; Jason Mraz's "I Won't Give Up, performed by Rachel (as Rachel); and Taylor Swift's "Mean," performed by Puck and Coach Bieste (as themselves).
Read the 'Nationals' recaplet.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
The show opens with the usual "Previously, on Glee..." guy, except that this week, in addition to reminding us about things we just saw in the last couple of episodes, he reminds us about the Constant Overlooking of Tina Cohen-Chang. You remember Tina, right? Original New Directions member, used to be T-T-T-Tina until she admitted the stutter was a fake and she became Single-T-Tina. Dated Artie before dating Mike Chang. Occasional vampire. Also recently known as "Asian Horror Movie." Yeah, her. Anyway, the show gets all meta by reminding us how much they've ignored this character.
Sue's office. She's called together Porcelain and Weezy (A.K.A. Kurt and Mercedes) to give them hell for encouraging that Vocal Adrenaline kid to perform as a woman, thereby creating a sensation in the show choir world. Mercedes reminds Sue that it was all her idea, but Sue's pregnancy hormones are causing a memory lapse because she has no recollection of that. Sue thinks Unique will lead Vocal Adrenaline to another national title, causing Sue to lose control of the Cheerios. So, in Sue's words, "It's time to fight fire with the flaming flames of additional flaming gay fire." By which she means she wants Kurt to do a solo in drag, under the name Porcelina Hummel. Kurt points out that being gay doesn't mean being into drag. Mercedes reminds him of his Halloween costume, which leads to a flashback to Kurt and Blaine trick-or-treating as Snooki and the Situation. I love that they spent hours of makeup and wardrobe and filming time to get that five second cutaway. Anyway, Kurt refuses to perform in drag, so Sue tells him to prepare for a New Directions loss. Title card.
Remember how last week was all about Rachel accepting the fact that her dream of attending the Fake New York Theater School was dead and that she would never be a Broadway star? Yeah, well forget about it. We see her writing in her journal that "[FNYTS] IS MY DESTINY." And then she sings Jason Mraz's "I Won't Give Up." It's one of those songs that she sings as she's going about her day, except that this time, she's in a spotlight, while everyone else stumbles around in the dark. Even her fantasies are selfish. She finishes the song on the auditorium stage (with nobody else present), and then immediately calls Carmen Thibodeaux to leave a fourteenth message begging Carmen to come to Nationals in Chicago to see Rachel perform.
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