Gleeks

What fascinates me about “Original Song,” which was overall a pretty solid episode, was how transparent it was. It positioned songwriting as a way for characters to express their emotion, but their fairly impressive songwriting skills mixed with the on-the-nose characterization made the behind-the-scenes machinations painfully clear. It exposes the central irony of the big Regionals performance: as the Glee club kids take to the stage to perform original songs that communicate their feelings about love and tyrannical educators, they perform pop songs written by famous songwriters for the purpose of selling iTunes downloads.

Like we keep saying, Rachel only works when she wants something really bad and can't have it. This was the do-or-die moment for the whole original songs concept and we think they nailed it. It's not really our taste, this song, but it's an almost perfectly (some might say cynically) realized musical version of teen-girl angst and likely to sell very well to that market.

We also want to make a sideways shoutout to the scene between Rachel and Quinn, where the writers deftly made the latter seem like a real person with insecurities and fears and disappointments rather than just a bitch cheerleader. Her rather - dare we say it? - cynical view of the life she and Finn will have vs. the life Rachel will was, sadly, probably very accurate.

Of all of the many, many criticisms the Glee haters level at Glee, the one that’s always made the least sense to me is the idea that the show is somehow a failure for using covers of big hit songs, rather than coming up with its own songs or at least fascinating arrangements of those big hit songs. For starters, this wouldn’t fit within the show’s own reality—just how many high school show choir do YOU know that constantly come up with cool arrangements or write their own music?—but it also would probably make for a terrible show.