The big tease of “Glee”

BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

The following recap of "Glee" season three, episode 5 contains spoilers; read at your own risk.

Really, “Glee”? Was it really necessary to end an episode revolving around virginity loss with a shot of a roaring fireplace?

That’s a trick question. Midway through its third season there’s little that’s necessary about “Glee,” save for the underused Chris Colfer’s performance as out gay teenager Kurt Hummel, the even more severely underused Mike O’Malley’s performance as his dad, one out of every five musical numbers, and Sue Sylvester’s surreal rants, which Jane Lynch sells even when the writing is just sassy word salad. And even those compensatory values aren’t enough to make me watch each week. After a long and increasingly desperate infatuation with this musical comedy soap — which repeatedly threatened to be astonishing and sometimes delivered, only to settle for cheerfully incoherent inanity at least 80 percent of the time — I’ve relegated it to the second tier of my DVR, which consists of shows that I skip for weeks at a time, then catch up on in one dutiful burst. I doubt I would have watched this installment in real time if my 14-year-old daughter hadn’t reminded me that it promised to deliver big moments this week. Her reactions were more entertaining than the show. She contrived reasons to leave the room whenever nooky threatened to break out, and ended up watching the parts she’d skipped while I was in the next room writing this recap. “If you were 14, would you want to watch this episode with your dad?” she asked later. Hell, no. I vividly recall being in the same tiny house with my mom while she watched “The Postman Always Rings Twice” on cable with the sound cranked way up, but only because my therapist dug that repressed memory out through hypnosis and primal scream therapy.

But as my tombstone will one day read, I digress. Sue was absent this hour, which was imaginatively titled “The First Time,” and that was a good thing for her as well as us. As written by Bradley Buecker and directed by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa Robe (deep breath), this episode was stuffed to bursting. None of the characters — even theoretically important ones — got much time to shine, or even behave like plausible humans. It was an end-of-innocence roundelay, with a capper to Mike’s “Asian F” story line awkwardly shoehorned in. (Really, “Glee”? You actually wrote and aired an “I have no son!” scene?)

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