Glee spoilers "Shooting Star"

[babydraco]

First of all, don't do puns in the title of a Very Special Episode. Comedy fail right there, part of Glee's constant difficulty in balancing sharp witted black comedy with the Serious Social Issues they want to preach about. This is funny, that's not, except when we say it IS.

Second, the Fox network, at least in many US markets, showed previews the week before of an entirely different, much more lighthearted, NYC centric episode and then showed...this thing. If you're the sort of person who finds school shootings triggering, you'd be walking into this unprepared.

Third, as someone who went to high school during the Columbine era, I'm in two minds about how the reactions were portrayed. Are kids more likely to panic and freak out to epic levels now as opposed to then, when we didn't know how bad it was possible for things to get? If we'd all had cell phones, and those phones had been equipped with the ability to record video, would we have recorded messages to our families? Granted, the policy now seems to be, "get down on the floor, turn off the lights and hide" as opposed to back then, when schools either had no policy or the policy was "evacuate immediately". At my school, it wasn't guns so much as bomb threats (we were actually infamous for that in the following year, we had sixteen and briefly got mentioned on a national radio show), so evacuation makes a lot more sense there. We were evacuated outside, taken to another building (usually the middle school) or sent home for the day. We got surprisingly blase about it (but then, as New Englanders, we might've been shamed for freaking out to much because heaven forfend you get emotional in public ).

Fourth, I finally realized what Glee could have done to make "Shooting Star" a better episode. It should have been entirely about everyone who was not in the choir room. These kids have friends, and parents, and other teachers, all of whom would be locked outside the room, with no idea what's going on. It was a golden opportunity to focus on a different perspective, of terrified parents who don't know what's going on, and other students who were not safely locked behind the music room's doors with all their friends. The only time we should've seen the Glee kids themselves is via their cell phone messages.