Glee: The Kids Are All Right

For this week at least, Glee rebounded from a recent string of increasingly silly plot maneuvers to focus on the reason it exists in the first place: the glee club. Having taken an unfortunate backseat to some truly ridiculous story lines involving the school faculty, the kids were once again in the spotlight in last night’s wonderful “Wheels” episode.

We didn’t have to sit through the nonsense that is Emma and Ken’s sham of a wedding or Will and Terri’s non-baby drama, and, most merciful of all, we weren’t subjected to another rap rendition by Matthew Morrison’s Will, who is growing more obnoxiously smug each week. (Did we really need to see him sing “Bust a Move” and “The Thong Song” in the last episode?) What we got instead was a terrific wheelchair-bound performance of “Proud Mary,” a worried Quinn (Dianna Agron) putting pressure on Finn (Cory Monteith) to help with her medical bills, and Sue Sylvester (the incomparable Jane Lynch) showing compassion for a student named Becky, who suffers from Down’s Syndrome. In a quiet but powerful revelation, we learn that Sue has a sister with Down’s, and the short scene the two shared during Sue’s visit to an assisted living facility was one of the surly cheerleading coach’s most human moments. This plot strand also provided Sue with the best line of the night, when Becky complained that Sue was pushing her too hard: “Try auditioning for Baywatch and being told they’re going in another direction. That’s hard.”

Sue didn’t provide the episode’s only heartfelt moment, though. There was some great stuff going on between freshly out Kurt (Chris Colfer) and his unexpectedly understanding dad Burt, played with such kindness by Mike O’Malley. Kurt’s sexuality isn’t Burt’s favorite thing, but that’s his kid, damn it, and nobody’s gonna keep him down. Burt sticks up for Kurt even when it means putting up with anonymous phone calls calling his son a fag. Colfer and O’Malley do a nice job of feeling each other out, a delicate father-son balancing act that produces some of Glee’s most touching scenes. If the show can keep delivering the way it did last night, the early potential that seemed destined to be squandered in desperate fits of absurdity may just be realized in all its glory.