I think the story could have worked out just as well if he had gone to her for advice rather than sex, even if it means stretching the character a bit: the show has this tendency to have people move in the direction of sex more than companionship, and while that may be realistic of hormone-laced teenagers it’s getting both repetitive and reductive. In the case of Puck, the idea that the loss of his mohawk would challenge his social standing is a smart one, and I was glad to see Mark Salling get some more material, but I don’t understand why he felt he had to date Mercedes. I think he’s to varying degrees successful, mainly because the material in between makes up for the rushed nature of it all.
Murphy’s challenge is to get them all to the same place, a sort of saccharine self-awareness which U2’s “One” is used to represent. By comparison, Kurt’s anxieties are the show’s longest ongoing storyline, as he struggles with his father becoming more involved with Finn’s life, which creates a bit of a gap between the various stories in the episode. Puck’s insecurities stem from a haircut, while Rachel’s stem from her concern over whether tonsillitis could damage her vocal ability (a real concern should she have her tonsils removed, although not to the degree the character indicated), so at first we take their anxiety lightly. I don’t know if identity crisis really counts as a theme on Glee considering that it’s been a defining factor of the show since day one, but in this episode we have Puck, Kurt and Rachel all reacting to crises of various ridiculousness. Those elements were still present, but they didn’t feel like they were being used as a shortcut to something more substantial, which helps me accept this episode as a singular statement of musical enjoyment when it may not have worked as part of a larger arc. The reason is that the show doesn’t try to haphazardly connect them to broad ongoing storylines: for once the show sort of settled into a groove, capturing a sustained moment within the lives of the Glee Club rather than periods of intense conflict.
Yes, the show doesn’t entirely work as an out-and-out after school special as Ryan Murphy seems to want it to be, and I still think the show’s all-or-nothing attitude is reckless in ways that only the show’s best characters can really handle, but the stories the show rushed into this week featured characters who I like to spend time with, and reached conclusions which felt honest to those characters in ways that previous episodes did not. The episode embodies many of the thing that I’ve found problematic in recent episodes, so it may seem strange when I say that it was ultimately quite successful.
“Laryngitis” is the latest in a series of episodes which feels repetitive of what we’ve seen before, as we get a focus on the relationship between Kurt and his father, focus on the tensions created by Rachel’s substantial ego, and even the introduction of disability as a way of putting other concerns into perspective (with Tina’s stutter being replaced by Rachel’s tonsillitis). When Ryan Murphy said that the back nine episodes of Glee were going to use “Wheels” as a template, I didn’t know that the show was literally going to take plot elements of “Wheels” and just sort of spin them off into different variations on the same story.