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Glee – “Home”

“Home”

April 27th, 2010

“I don’t try to change you, you don’t try to change me”

There is nothing I hate more than a show doing everything I ask it to and nonetheless leaves me cold. If you had asked me to focus on some of the prevailing problems to this point in Glee’s Spring season, I would have pointed to the narrow storylines which tend to focus on the central love triangles rather than the supporting characters, so to have an episode that so clearly focuses on characters like Kurt and Mercedes seems like it should be right up my alley.

The problem with “Home” is that it feels like the show is being changed rather than changing, characters emerging from their prison of one-dimensionality and returning to the last time they had anything close to character development. At times this results in beautiful musical numbers and emotionally resonant scenes which speak to the larger series, but as an actual episode “Home” feels equal parts honest and dishonest thanks to the sense that none of it has been earned from a narrative perspective.

You could make the same argument about “Wheels,” I realize this, but I think that this episode contained more of both sides of the show’s schizophrenia as it relates to certain characters, and comes directly after an episode which presented such wildly different versions of these characters that the jarring lack of continuity cannot be overcome by an emotional performance of a Burt Bacharach song, no matter how hard the show tries to make it so.

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The McNuttCast: Episode One – “Battlestar Galactica”

mcnuttcastlogoConsidering how much time and energy I’ve devoted to Battlestar Galactica, one would think that I would have spent all of this week preparing an epic list of episodes, plus some final thoughts before the show’s series finale this evening. However, I realized at a certain point that I couldn’t do it: there was too much to say, too much that I’d end up repeating in tonight’s review of the finale itself. If I was going to discuss or engage with the series, I had to diversify.

As a result, after many requests and much rumination, my brother Ryan (from McNutt Against the Music) and I collaborated on the very first, and special, edition of The McNuttCast, a half-hour discussion about popular culture, including television, movies, music and video games.

In this episode focused solely on Battlestar Galactica, we discuss everything ranging from favourite episodes and characters to the pacing concerns in Season Four and our hopes for tonight’s finale. We discuss some big questions, including at what point the series first struck us as something genuinely unique, and also some smaller things along the way.

When The McNuttCast moves to its normal structure, it’ll be a bit more of a departure for me and the blog – rather than replacing any existing blog content, it’s rather there to add a little bit of diversity. While I’ll be leading the way on television, and the Elder McNutt has the music beat, we’re pretty even on movies and video games, so it will be interesting to see how I adapt to suddenly discussing those topics on a regular basis in a critical framework beyond Twitter. There’s more information about our goals and our future structure in the first episode.

In the meantime, though, it’s all Battlestar all the time – in our 30-minute structure (this one runs a bit longer) we don’t have room (or the free time) to delve into every single episode, so feel free to let us know which ones we forgot, or which ones we were remiss in including. And, of course, come back in the wee hours this evening for my full, likely thesis-length review, of the second part of “Daybreak.”

So say we all!

McNuttCast: Episode One – “Battlestar Galactica”

Download the MP3 (36:20)

NOTE: You can find chapter breaks in the list below – we’re currently working on getting the Subscription side of things together, as this was a bit of a last minute launch (and the Elder is currently on a plane on his way to Saskatchewan of all places). When we get things finalized, we’ll be sure to update accordingly.

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