Turns out Sue stashed all of the Cheerios' million-dollar budget in an off-shore account right before she got the boot after her spectacular failure at Nationals, so New Directions must somehow scrounge up the $5000 needed to travel to New York City for the next phase of their own competition. Mr. Schue (dare I say it?) gleefully suggests selling saltwater taffy to raise the necessary funds, sparking a spirited rebellion from the club's "neglected" members -- Artie, Single-T Tina, Gaylord Wiener and Brit-Brit -- because they're short a mere $250 to hit a Brainiacs competition in Detroit, and nobody's so much as offering to lift a musically inclined finger in their aid. What's that? You didn't know McKinley had a Brainiacs team? That's okay -- no one on this show knew McKinley had a Brainiacs team, either, until Ian Brennan horked it into existence all over this week's script.
Anyway, Will feels guilty about the whole situation -- of course -- so he consults current flame Gwyneth Paltrow, who suggests holding a fundraising concert for the forsaken Brainiacs. Naturally, Sue gets wind of this and summons a slapdash League/Legion Of Doom/Evil consisting of Sandy Ryerson (a.k.a. "The Pink Dagger"), Dustin Goolsby ("Sergeant Handsome"), and Crazy Terri ("The Honey Badger") to her lair, where she quickly assigns specific nefarious tasks to each of her new minions so that she might destroy -- once again -- the Glee Club.
Well, Sue quickly assigns specific nefarious tasks to The Pink Dagger and Sergeant Handsome, because giving Crazy Terri something entertaining to do was apparently far beyond anyone's abilities this evening. In any event, Dustin's to break up Will and Gwyneth while Sandy calls together a Heckling Club made up of Becky, Jewfro and Kloset-Kase Karofsky's African-American Partner In Crime Whose Name Continually Eludes Me, the former to sap Mr. Schue's spirit, or something, and the latter to mock the Glee Clubbers in general until they all run into a corner and cry. Alas for poor Sue, only one of these devious ploys works, and even then Sandy's Heckling Club fizzles out once those particular kiddies receive a grotesquely condescending lecture from precious, precious Gwynnie about how You Should Never Say Anything Mean About Anyone, Ever. Shove it up your recently redesigned ass, GOOP.
That Charice person from the season premiere does drop by from Carmel to offer up her six hundred Twitter followers as Benefit Audience Bait in exchange for a spot on the lineup, but that all falls to shit when Sergeant Handsome yanks his protégé at the last minute, and New Directions ends up performing for an audience of Kurt, Blaine, and absolutely no one else. Doesn't matter, though, because after a series of remarkable contrivances, Sandy Ryerson forks over the $250 the Brainiacs need to go get themselves slaughtered in a drive-by, anyway. Like Santana Lopez couldn't have asked her father for the cash in the first place. Hell, like the Glee Club couldn't have asked Santana Lopez herself for the cash in the first place.
And in the end, Precious Precious Gwynnie breaks up with Will and saunters off into the sunset because even Glee can't afford to keep paying her fee. Bye, bye, Gwynnie! Make sure you drop yourself off a cliff on your way out.
Featuring that Charice person murdering Eric Carmen's "All By Myself," a song that was a hell of a lot funnier when Emma did it way back during Season One; "I Follow Rivers" by wicked Swedish changeling Lykke Li, as more-or-less performed by Single-T Tina; Gaylord Wiener dancing to Jack Johnson's "Bubble Toes"with a mop dressed up like Cardinal Ratzinger; Shut The Fuck Up offering us her thoroughly unnecessary rendition of Adele's "Turning Tables"; and Mercedes wailing out Miss Aretha's"Ain't No Way" to close out the evening.
Listen to the Glee version of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" early.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!
I should have known what a disaster this evening would end up being the instant the camera snapped open on Mr. Schue scrawling the following on a whiteboard:
"5,000 x .25 = 20,000"
I just...I just can't. Can we pretend tonight never happened? You know, skip right to the end where I tell you all about next week's 90-minute extravaGaganza and then direct you towards the e-mail address I haven't checked in three years? No?
Fuck.
"All right!" the innumerate dumbass now plaguing my television screen with his abject stupidity enthuses as he turns away from the mathematical atrocity he's just perpetrated against all that is right and holy. "We need five thousand dollars to pay for our trip to Nationals in New York!" the innumerate dumbass continues, and he would babble on for several minutes as is his wont, I'm sure, were it not for the fact that Quinn raises her voice at this point to rightly inquire, "What happened to the money we got from the Cheerios?" Mr. Schue's absolutely ridiculous answer to this? "I guess Sue was hiding it in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, and we're having some trouble accessing some of it." "Well," Mr. Schue admits as Rachel, Lauren, and Mercedes gawp at him from the peanut gallery, "any of it." But fear not, for Mr. Schue has concocted a brilliant scheme to compensate for the missing funds: The children are to go from classroom to classroom selling twenty-five-cent pieces of saltwater taffy to their peers. Twenty thousand twenty-five-cent pieces of saltwater taffy. To the peers that routinely pelt them with iced-over high-fructose corn syrup and shoes.
Are we sure I can't just skip to the end already?
Double fuck.
Santana Lopez, bless her, openly sneers at Mr. Schue as she wonders, "Do you honestly think we can sell twenty thousand anythings?" "I mean," she continues, "we won Regionals for the first time since dinosaurs roamed the planet, and I still got a freaking Cherry Icee facial!"
Smear sideways to Dave Karofsky delivering said Cherry Icee facial at some point in the indeterminate past, and I don't know if it's the thicker consistency of this particular super-strength Slushie compared to the gruel-like weaklings we've seen recently on this show, or if it's the amped-up sound effects we get when the frigid slop hits Santana's face, or if it's the entirely serendipitous way the whole thing sort of geysers up on impact only to rain back down on her in tiny droplets, as if adding delicious cherry-flavored insult to injury, but it's the funniest Slushie attack since the one Puck laid on Rachel way back during the series premiere. Hee. That said, Dave Karofsky's just thoroughly fucked himself, hasn't he? Discuss.
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