
We're watching Glee, and I'm enjoying myself, really. The characters are neat, the music is good, and it's just a -- fun spectacle of a show.
But I have one complaint: In "Preggers" and "Rhodes Not Taken", Rachel quits the club because Will assigned a song from West Side Story to another girl in the club, when Rachel had specifically said that she'd like to do any song from West Side Story, because she deeply relates to the main characters, and has been in love with the play since she was an infant. His excuse is that Rachel already does a lot of songs; he wants this other girl to have a chance to be the star.
That's reasonable. But making it this song is not. It's deliberately slapping Rachel in the face. Unless he did it on purpose like to teach her a lesson, or he has so little respect for her that he just ignores her when she talks, this doesn't make sense.
Rachel's a prima donna. It would have been easy to establish that, say, she has requested the songs for the lead role from every play ever. But we don't say that. Rachel emphasizes that this play, this role, is one she's always been dying to do justice to, and for no reason other than "Well I choose this precise moment and song to let someone else be the lead", she gets shafted.
But the show doesn't seem to notice. Rachel loses track of the emotional appeal of her argument and instead just argues that she's the best so she should get to sing whatever she wants; even though the club is falling apart without her, Will learns a completely irrelevant lesson about chasing an old girlfriend, and seems to think that they should do it without Rachel if she's going to leave. He doesn't show any awareness that her leaving is because of a very deliberate and very informed decision on his part; he actively is a brat to her.
And then -- and then in the end, they don't even do the West Side Story song, and Will's old girlfriend becomes the lead in everything! Without her, the show collapses! So if it's cool to make one woman the only important member of the troupe, and that woman used to be Rachel, why did he make her leave in the first place over a song that he had no reason not to let her sing, or intention to ever perform?! This forces Rachel to come crawling back to the glee club at the last moment, trying to help them, and they're rude to her. Will making a big deal out of this succeeded in making an already unpopular girl even more of an outcast! What is this??
...So, there is a gripe. Me applying too much logic to a show about caricatures singing and dancing. Don't mind me, like I said, it's a great fun spectacle show, I love the song numbers and I'm not precisely in it for the awesome realistic characters. But I can't stop analyzing things that I'm watching, so -- there you go.