Glee Review: Blaine and Kurt FINALLY Kiss!

“Everyone has a moment…” Blaine (Darren Criss) said before kissing Kurt (Chris Colfer). Yes, and this was an important moment for network TV.

I thought it would take a singing crab and a spinning boat to get a KLAINE kiss, but it happened! And what a kiss! Blaine worked up to it, confessed his feelings, leaned in for the first smooch and then…fricking went right back in for a second taste! It’s the kind of kiss heterosexual supercouples always get, making it symbolically important that the show's first gay super-couple be given the same respect. 

Once again, I find myself defending Glee. Yes this show is often erratically written, but what it does best is create a queer fantasia to celebrate "otherness", with much mirth and little victim-hood. No other show on TV features a cast this diverse: people of color, sexual others, different body types, gender subversion and even the disabled.

Glee sketches a world where margins are pulled right into the center. Instead of misfits in a normal world, the world itself is rendered misfit. So much so that an Everyman character like Will Schuster (Matthew Morrison) seems dull, his role decreasing exponentially in relevance, even though he was initially the titular star. The white straight dude has been marginalized on this show!

Last night, Quinn (Dianna Agron) told Rachel (Lea Michele) that the former will end up with Finn (Cory Monteith) not because conventionally pretty people must win, but because Rachel is destined to be a star. On this show, the pretty blonde girl recognizes the misfit’s talent and sees her own goal (prom queen) as a consolation prize, not a real victory. Even Finn told Rachel the same thing two weeks ago! They also thematically paralleled Rachel with Kurt, as two misfits exalted by their teams.

Note how the Regional competition came down to the underdogs of New Directions versus the really gay Warblers. The “normal” team (Aural Intensity) seemed completely out of it, and tone-deaf to the world they inhabited, pandering to a Tea Party judge (Kathy Griffin) with a Jesus number. Implicitly, they’re performing to an audience (us, the viewers) who will reject them precisely for being too normal, too square. And the inclusion of an exotic dancer-cum-nun judge (Loretta Devine) neatly referenced Sister Act, another show about underdogs taking center stage and letting their freak flag fly via song-and-dance.

Like the best musicals, Glee features intimate character moments, surrounded and interrupted by wall-to-wall comedy, and song-and-dance numbers. By not telling a story straight through, the story is essentially marked as not straight (heterosexual). This is the essence of Queer Theory, and it’s remarkable to see on network TV.

I’ve written before about Glee’s self-awareness, dissolving the line between stage and audience. Consider how the Warblers turned Pink's "Raise Your Glass" into an anthem for otherness: "Raise your glass/All my underdogs/Dirty little freaks."

Then, in the original “Loser Like Me”, New Directions flashed Glee’s trademark “L” sign, which the show has renamed as something cool. And instead of cups full of slush that's usually thrown at the Glee Club, the cups were filled with red confetti and thrown at the audience. This neat moment captured the show’s conceit: taking something ugly and oppressive and turning it into something beautiful and celebratory.

There was also self-referential humor. Kurt complaining that the Warbler numbers had become monotonous and all about Blaine echoed some fan sentiment, though I maintain their "Misery" perfomance (complete with Bob Fosse dance moves) was hot! And Santana's (Naya Rivera) hilarious attempt at songwriting -- "Trouty Mouth" -- played on a long-running joke about Sam's (Chord Overstreet) lips.

Glee also understands the unifying potential in pop music, how it transcends culture. That's why it's so satisfying when they reinterpret pop songs as character delineation. Was there a lovelier example than Blaine falling in love with Kurt as the latter sang "Blackbird?" The close-up as realization dawned on Blaine's cute face is pop at its most moving.

And the real world ramifications cannot be devalued. Already as I'm writing this, Twitter has exploded with “They kissed!” as audiences embraced the gay super-couple. The same thing happened when Darren Criss performed “Teenage Dream” last fall. That a song between two gay boys hit one million views on Youtube, shot to number one on the Billboard, and launched a new star, certainly heralded a mainstream embrace of queerness. Significantly, the only romantic duet performed last night was between the two gay boys ("Candles" by Hey Monday).

If kids all over the country are watching this show, rooting for gays, and singing along with misfits, then that’s worth a song, a dance, and a confetti shower.