Things that happened on Glee last night: a proposal, a Broadway audition, less good versions of your favorite Beatles songs. Things that didn’t happen on Glee last night: any mention or recognition of Cory Monteith, the Glee actor who sadly passed away this summer before the show went into production.
Of course it’s better that Glee takes their time on this one. The last thing we need is some slapdash homage that would likely insult Monteith’s memory more than it would honor it. The show has never been good at handling tragedy and their audience skews young, so it’s good that they took some time to figure out the best way to handle it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean Monteith’s loss didn’t darken the episode.
The episode begins with Rachel (played by Monteith’s real life girlfriend Lea Michele) auditioning for Funny Girl. Afterwards, she overhears the casting director (dad vampire from Twilight) say that she’s too green for the role. Dejected, she walks sadly through the streets of New York, singing the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”
With lyrics like “Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play. Now I need a place to hide away” and “Why he had to go, I don’t know, he wouldn’t say,” the song was clearly about Monteith. I know it. Glee knows it. Everyone knows it. But they insisted on pretending that it wasn’t — that this was just about an audition even though the song makes no sense in that context — and that made it incredibly frustrating (and a little bit heartbreaking) to watch.