Glee has become a lot more loosely scripted this season, which annoys the hell out of my writer brain. It shouldn’t, perhaps. I should just buy into it as if it were opera, because really that’s what it is evolving into: a series of loosely connected, genuinely awesome emotional moments–like the Kurt/Burt scene in “Sexy”– set to music.
There’s so much good I feel bad about complaining. An out gay kid, OMG! With a supportive family! Eee! And the expanded cast has some terrific new characters… though this does mean there’s less action for the folks I love. In particular there’s less Mercedes, less Kurt and less wild-eyed ranting of Sue. Then again, there’s also less of some of the characters I’m not so keen on, characters I don’t love, and plenty of wholesome Artie content.
Anyway, with my backbrain grumbling about the plot, what plot, got plot? between viewings, I forget, sometimes, how much I am enjoying the show now that things with That One storyline, the one that was troubling me, have moved on. One thing I am liking a lot is that there are three unabashedly plus-sized women on the show (that’d be Mercedes Jones, Coach Shannon Bieste, and lately, Lauren Zyses) and not one of them is a villain or a full-time object of ridicule.
Oh, Lauren, I’m oddly in love with you! The crap you hand out to Puck, and the way he bends himself, pretzel-like, around your boundaries, give me no end of joy. Everything you do is magic. And the simple fact that an undisputed high school hottie who could be banging the likes of Santana is instead pursuing a large, proud, demanding, athletic woman… well, it’s delightful. I remember the twiglike cast of Buffy (which I adored, don’t get me wrong) and I compare it with this trio of curvy womanhood and it warms the heart.
Sadly, no amount of Lauren can keep my writerbrain from carping about Will Schuster.
Will is, was and will always be the center of the adult-themed storyline. He’s the major driver for Glee‘s Let’s set the Karate Kid to Music! overall story arc. In the first season, he had so many interesting things to push against: his attraction to Emma, the failing marriage to Terri, Sue’s multiple attempts to sabotage him and, above all, his own competitive demons. The guy had to keep figuring out that glee club was about the kids, not him. It worked, I thought, pretty well.
Nowadays he seems to be all out of push.
Matthew Morrison is such a talented performer. I was thrilled to see him tango and sing in “Sexy.” But he’s seeming underused. Is this character at a dead end? Am I the only one who misses the days when he was fighting to hold the kids together, dodging Sue/Terri attacks of utter bizarre, and occasionally even managing to teach stuff?
These days, Will flails. Sometimes toward or away from Emma, sometimes at Sue, sometimes at getting the kids to Nationals. I am loving his friendship with Shannon, but that’s frosting–it doesn’t a storyline make. Getting just a mouthful of cake now and then would make me so much happier.
I’m not asking for Whedon here, or even Shakespeare, and I am having fun, I am. What do you think, interpeeps? Is it just me?
, by D D Barant, my final book of 2010 was, naturally enough, the book that preceded it in the series: 
.
on Sunday, in a multi-part loafing session of epic proportions. The novel is a supernatural thriller by Michael Koryta, something Kelly had heard about and knew I’d probably enjoy.
, there’s a variation, whereby the evil explodes every X number of years, like 
, which tells the story of the final days of two presidencies: the abrupt death and long funeral of Abraham Lincoln, and the flight from Richmond of Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America. 
. This, though it’s good, isn’t quite as compelling as that. (It’s an unfair comparison, perhaps, because Larsen is so very good, and his subject matter in that book so deliciously dramatic and improbable.) 
, by Karl Marlantes.
