['Glee' - 'New York']

It's been very difficult for me to write about the second season of 'Glee' without sounding like a humorless grouch. There has been a lot to take in this year, from the event episodes to the Super Bowl spectacular to needing a scorecard to keep track of the different romances to the trifecta of Gwyneth Paltrow episodes to Sue Sylvester flying off the rails.


I could have made it easy on myself and just judged each episode by the songs, which it seems a lot of the readers would have preferred I do. After all, that's the most fun part of the show, right? But I couldn't do that, and I couldn't do that this week. I'm still too interested in the actual story about the kids in New Directions and their underdog plight to just gloss over the plots of each episode.

It's why tonight's New York-based season finale left me a little cold. Sure, the location shots were great. But, aside from yet another iteration of the Finn-Rachel story, there wasn't much in the way of story here. At least not enough to make sense of whatever's happened this season up until now.

We've talked about this before in this space, almost ad nauseum, but I'll state it again: I long ago stopped caring about who Finn, Rachel and Quinn date. There has just been so much swapping of mates within this glee club that it makes a person's head spin (even Brittany acknowledged all the date-swapping in her year-end speech to Santana). Sure, there's an element of "that's high school" in all that, but at least as far as the show is concerned, no couple has been together long enough for me or most of the audience to really get attached to them pairing.

Because most of this episode concerned how the New Directions would perform at nationals, and how they react to being in the Big Apple for the first time, the only plot we really had to hang our hat on was the Finn/Rachel drama. And, for the most part, it felt like a place we've been before, many times, just with a New York backdrop.

Finn tells Rachel he loves her. They go on a hard-to-fathom date at Sardi's -- hope Burt and Finn's mom like paying for that meal -- where Rachel just happens to meet Patti LuPone. Then, as they walk around the Village, the rest of the guys in the group serenades the two of them while Finn makes his move, but Rachel recoils and walks away.

Sound familiar? The only part of this that is remotely new is that Rachel now has another lover, one that takes precedence over Finn: that lover is the Broadway stage. As soon as she and Kurt sneaked onto the stage at the Gershwin Theatre and sang a song from 'Wicked,' you knew it was over for Finn.

Even "The Kiss That Screwed Up Nationals" didn't have as much impact as it should have had, mainly because it felt like old news. Let's just forgive the fact that it didn't seem like the kids had any time to write, much less rehearse, a song like 'Pretending,' given all the side trips they took to explore. But, the moment might have had more oomph if they covered a song with a known heavy romantic hook.

The performance was good, don't get me wrong, but when they kissed, it didn't feel like some big-time, show-defining moment, even if the producers showed us in no uncertain terms that the world melted away for the two of them. "It was the Superman of kisses," said Finn, even as Jesse St. James tells the two of them that it was unprofessional. Uh, I guess so. Maybe it was just the Aquaman of kisses; still in the Justice League, but not quite as big a deal.



The rest of the plot threads that were set up last week either fizzled out or went nowhere. What was that big nefarious plan Quinn had for the trip to New York? She threatened to quit, she said she might sabotage the performance, but all she did was cry to Santana and Brittany about not having someone to love, and she got her hair cut. Will got far enough in his dream to work on Broadway to sing a Matthew Morrison original on stage and have a guard tell him he's "got it," mainly because Kristin Chenoweth wasn't available. But, after Goolsby tells the kids about it, and they encouraged him anyway, he broke down and said he wasn't leaving. So much for that.

And, despite the inspired performance of another original, 'Light Up The World,' you almost knew that, as soon as we found out that nationals were three rounds, that New Directions weren't going to make it out of the first. They can't win; that's not the name of the game on this show. Still, except for Santana -- who screamed to Rachel about her pride for being from Lima Heights Adjacent -- most of the kids were philosophical about it. After all, they got to go to New York and dance around it, mostly without anyone throwing things at them or exposing themselves. So just for that, it was a pretty good experience for all involved.

At the end of the episode, we got a tiny hint of what we might see in season3, which, if Ryan Murphy is to be believed, is the last season for most of the current cast. We've got Kurt and Blaine saying "I love you" to each other, Sam and Mercedes trying to keep their burgeoning, out-of-nowhere relationship quiet, and Finn and Rachel smooching in the library stacks. Rachel still reiterates that she's going to New York after graduation and is never coming back, but Finn is using the "we've still got all of senior year" card to see if he can change her mind. Will he? Who knows? They'll probably break up and get together three or four times by the time they walk for graduation.

It's a big weakness that might hamper it in season 3. Murphy promises that the coming season will only have one big "event" episode that revolves around one artist, but I have my doubts that they'll be able to resist if, say, Katy Perry decides to come on as a guest star. But if that's the case, then the three producers and their new writers are going to actually have to start and maintain story threads that make sense. Right now, they're not doing that.

Then again, most of the fans might not care, and the number that do (like me) aren't significant enough that the show will suffer significantly if they drop off. For the most part, the show's gone from a campy, fun show about a bunch of underdog kids to a musical show with some dialogue. It's not the show that I enjoyed at the beginning of its run in 2009, and it's a show that I'm pretty sure I'm done with if it continues in this direction.

More fun stuff:

-- The part about the mash-up of Madonna's 'I Love New York' and 'New York, New York' (the song from 'On the Town,' not the Liza Minnelli song from the Scorsese film that Sinatra made famous... though, come to think of it, Sinatra made the other one famous, too) that was the most fun was the locations: Lincoln Center, Washington Square Park, Central Park, and the TKTS booth in Times Square, among others.

-- Of course, with Vocal Adrenaline in the competition, we revisit Charice as Sunshine Corazon. She knocked the third original, 'As Long As You're There,' out of the park. And Rachel finally decided to "make it right" after sending her to that crack house. At this point, with her future firmly in front of her, she doesn't seem threatened by people like Sunshine anymore.

-- Kurt is going to spend his summer writing a musical about Pippa Middleton. Kate's so boring; I want to hear more about Pippa, don't you?

-- It is interesting that the supposedly less-popular girls in glee have love, while the three former Cheerios -- Britt, Quinn and Santana -- are alone.

-- Speaking of Santana, you can just see that she wants to grab Britt Britt and just plant a big ol' kiss on her. Brittany wants her to -- "I love you more than anyone I've ever known" -- but Santana just can't do it, at least not within the confines of the school. What I want to know is, if the two of them are both single and both know how they feel about each other, why can't they get together outside of school?

-- I did enjoy Kurt and Rachel literally having breakfast at Tiffany's, complete with those blue Greek coffee cart cups. Though, if you really want to be accurate about New York these days, the cups would more likely be from Starbucks.

-- Being from the NYC area, I'm always amazed at how people who aren't from around here look at the city with wonder and curiosity. It's heartening, even if I'm one of those cranks who walks around Times Square so he can avoid all the tourists clogging the streets. Anyway, that part of the glee club's New York experience came through loud and clear, which is all you can hope for. They may have had more relationships than most adults, but at least they're not jaded.

'Glee' airs Tuesdays at 8PM ET on Fox.

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