Glee: Saturday Night Gleever Review (2.5/5)

Remember what I said about Glee losing its way mid-run...?
I hate to say I told you so, but...Many American dramas often suffer from a fatigue of sorts when they reach the penultimate five or six episodes or so of their annual run, losing ideas fast and thus desperately trying to shovel in plot threads to buy time until the season finale. Glee has often fallen culprit to this, and sadly Saturday Night Gleever is just another instance of how things can go wrong. As much as I admire the various tributes the show has payed to Journey, Rocky Horror, Michael Jackson, Madonna and soon Whitney Houston, this week's take on the Bee Gees and their musical movie classic Saturday Night Fever feels completely shoehorned in from a viewer's perspective. When you attempt to look for an actual plot amongst You Should Be Dancing, That's The Way (I Like It), Night Fever, Disco Inferno, If I Can't Have You, How Deep Is Your Love, Boogie Shoes, More Than A Woman AND (breath) Staying Alive, then, it's irritatingly difficult, a quality which I thought the show had boldly managed to step away from falling into possessing in the past few weeks. We essentially get the tale of Finn, Mercedes and Santana trying to work out just what they want to do with their lives after graduation, character arcs which definitely needed longer development cycles than a single episode of a 40 minute running time and thus don't get all the focus they deserve. Although the acting on the parts of all of the leads is sublime as always, what the episode really needed for some redemption was voices which could handle the challenge of these high-pitched songs from the Bee Gees, though, and in this respect the New Directions fall well short of the mark. Put simply, these singers just don't hold the talent yet to match such staples of pop music (and rightly so- they are still relatively young), so expect them to attempt to do so was just an unrealistic move on the part of the producers. Much as you'll enjoy seeing Finn in particular work out his future here, the rest of the episode just crumbles under the weight of already fairly flimsy expectations, making for a dull viewing experience that just has fans yearning to get to the finale for more profound plot developments.