'Glee' Recap: This Is The Song That Doesn't End

Are we sure this wasn’t the season (or even series) finale? Because it had jumping the proverbial shark written all over it. While Gleehas certainly jumped fence after fence into weirder and more nonsensical territory since Season 2, it hasn’t yet fully jumped the issue we’ve been “hoping” and “dreaming” about since Season 1: Winning Nationals.

Not only does the penultimate, two-hour episode before the finale deliver the New Directions a shiny trophy taller than Finn’s hulking structure, it sews up every other little question we may have had. Did the glee club win Nationals? Yep! Did the NYADA dean change her mind about Rachel? Yep! Did Will and Emma finally do it? Yep! Were guest judges Perez Hilton and Lindsay Lohancompletely useless? Yep! And, finally, is Jesse St. James still a douche who occasionally has random glitches of kindness? Yep! Add the cherry on top of Will receiving the Teacher of the Year award (without him even trying to rap for a second) as the whole club surrounds him with hugs and “We Are the Champions” and you’ve got what feels like the end to a very unwieldy series ready to admit its shortcomings and call it a day.

But no! There’s still another hour left of this madness next week! And it’s Graduation, so we’ll have to watch that. (And we’ll have to watch next season too because that “show-within-a-show” promise is simply way too weird to ignore. Will it be a reality show shot by Jacob Ben Israel? If so, let’s start figuring out how to remove mental scarring now.) It’s true. As hard as Tina’s version of Freaky Friday made me want to switch bodies with someone who wasn’t watching Glee and as much as the New Directions receiving the Disney heros’ welcome at McKinley after Nationals made me want to go back to my high school and ask everyone why no one seemed to care that much when my dance team won a first place trophy, I will still be here next week. (But seriously, no student body cares that much about another team’s success outside of football, basketball, and occasionally baseball. No one throws confetti for the choir kids.)

Because the New Directions are apparently fans of procrastination and high risks, they’re just now choosing songs and choreography for Nationals. All this scrambling drives Tina to anger and she revolts when Rachel gets another solo, angrily telling the NYADA-bound teen how selfish she is, to which Rachel replies with her “hard work” (see: impossibly exhaustive schedule) and Tina caves: “Just once I want to know what it’s like to be you.”

When that doesn’t work exactly the way Tina wants, she storms through the mall, furious she’s still stuck on costume duty. She hits her head when she falls in the mall fountain and imagines her little Freaky Friday scenario and which Puck and Blaine, Artie and Santana, Brittany and Mercedes, Finn and Kurt, Sam and Rory, Mike and Joe. Rachel and Tina, and Sue and Schue have switched bodies. And since Tina imagines herself as Rachel, she performs the fantastic solo, which is the series’ way of saying, “Pay attention! She’s going to be the star next season even though she never has been and never showed any desire to do so." And quicker than Joe could mimic a Mike Chang eye-brow-raise, Tina wakes up in the fountain, free from the strange dream world.

The big lesson pulled from the “enlightening” dream was that Tina remembered Rachel/Tina’s advice: If Rachel wants another chance at NYADA from the Carmen Tibideaux, she’s going to have to go at it a little harder. The new besties drive to Oberlin together, where Carmen is conveniently teaching a master class instead of finding new students for her school. There, Carmen tells Rachel she’s not special, crushing her dreams just a little bit more. But of course, by the time Nationals rolls around, Carmen shows up at the last minute to restore all of Rachel’s fears about getting into her dream school. Before that happens, Rachel continues her long list of creating last-minute, pre-graduation best friends and she and Tina sing a duet of “What a Feeling” as the group heads to Nationals in Chicago. If she keeps this up, she’s never going to be able to leave without losing all the tears her body can possibly produce because she's simply got too many best friends.