Zach's Gleecap - "Mattress"

With the 50th yearbook coming out and the Emma/Ken wedding a week away, Will realizes there’s a scheduling conflict with the wedding overlapping sectionals. Ken’s trying to slim down, Emma feels bad about missing sectionals, and Sue’s gone in for a little eyelift and tear-duct removal. She’s gone even more diabolical and gotten the glee club eliminated from the yearbook, maintaining her superiority complex and repeatedly doubting that the club can take sectionals.

With the threat of swirlies and “patriotic wedgies” looming over their heads, Kurt convinces the glee club that a yearbook entry would do more harm than good, but Will vows to fight for a photo in spite of The Principal’s insistence that he’s “doing them a solid.” Figgins compromises – for $1,000. Rachel’s cheery because she’s trying to get in as many yearbook photos as possible so as to better prepare for a life of being stalked by the paparazzi, but Quinn is upset that she’s losing her identity and decides to sneak into the Cheerios yearbook photo.

Will wants to buy out Figgins; his fake-pregnant wife disagrees, but Will goes ahead with it. Rachel invents a new club, the GayLesbAl (“Gay Lesbian Alliance”) in order to become the most involved student on campus; Kurt scoffs, and Rachel dreams of winning the vote for “Team Captain” to appear in the two-person photo. Rachel wins the vote singlehandedly, mostly because the kids don’t want to get vandalized. Will’s worried about this and about his fear that Ken scheduled the wedding over sectionals on purpose. But Emma says she’s in love with Ken, despite his “74 flaws as of yesterday.” Continuing Glee’s reign of hyperbole, new captain Rachel has 65 proposals and gets talked into recruiting a co-captain: Finn.

To get ready for the photo, Rachel serenades Finn with “Smile,” making me wonder who the piano player is and why he’s kind of creepy. The song gets a little too flirty, but when Finn finds out that he’s about to become the target of yearbook vandalization, he backs out and leaves Rachel on her own. It turns out to be serendipitous, because the cameraman is shooting a mattress commercial and Rachel can cry on demand. “Except for nudity and the exploitation of animals, I’ll do anything to break into the business!” The glee club is surprisingly ecstatic, mostly because they’re going to be stars and “nobody defaces pictures of celebrities.”

“Mattresses aren’t just for sleeping and fornicating anymore,” says the mattress man, who’s receptive to the idea of a singing commercial. There’s no way that they can sing so well while performing all these mattress acrobatics, but we’ll suspend disbelief, just hum along, and giggle at how Quinn is on a mattress with Kurt – a match made only in Mattress Land. But get ready for Glee to rock your socks off – Will finds the pregnancy padding Terri’s been wearing and confronts her about it. There’s an intense O’Neill-esque battle of the wills in the kitchen in which all is confessed. This pregnancy plot has been funny all season, but the laughter dies when Will walks out.

Luckily the glee room is filled with comped mattresses. In Sue’s Corner, Sue wants a holiday forcing “fatties and uglies” to stay indoors the Friday after Christmas, but she’s miffed when she sees the commercial. “Sue is right – the glee club has indeed stepped in it,” Figgins groans, because glee club contestants aren’t allowed to participate in professional activity. When Will admits that he’s thinking of leaving Terri, it’s not enough to change Figgins’s mind. “It’s over!” Sue calls.

“VICTORY,” Sue writes in her diary, but Quinn rains on her parade when she extorts Sue for a spot on the squad and in the yearbook photo – and for a glee club page. Emma tells Will he needs to sort out his own life before he solves glee’s problems, confessing that she understands where Terri was coming from. Since he slept on the mattress, Will is forced out of coaching glee, and he tells the kids to go take their picture – cue Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” telling us that maybe everything’s going to turn out all right.

Verdict? Glee’s darkest hour. With only one more week left in this half-season, it’s difficult to see how this is all going to turn out okay in the end, but at least some of the biggest secrets are coming out. While this episode didn’t quite live up to the hype that some of my friends who (to paraphrase Bill O’Reilly) watched it live, “Mattress” was still pretty intense. But, with the exception of Sue’s scenes, it didn’t quite feel like an episode of Glee. Perhaps next week – Glee’s curtain call until April – will see a return to form such as we know and love.