It’s been five years since the series finale of one-time cultural iconoclastGlee, which is wild to rewatch thanks to a plot choice thatRyan Murphyand his writing staff could not have known would feel so strange. Like many other final episodes of TV shows, Season 6 Episode 13, “Dreams Come True,” flashforwards in time to show just how bright the future ends up being for its characters.
So it jumps forward to the spring of 2020.
While Murphy was a well-known TV producer for years, it wasn’t untilGlee, co-created byBrad FalchukandIan Brennan, that his shows started becoming mainstream favorites. The musical dramedy (one of the few hour-long shows of its era to truly straddle the line between big comedic swings and heartfelt moments) about a group of underdog high school kids whose lives change after forming a (yep) glee club.
Almost from the beginning,Gleebecame a phenomenon for Fox and developed a fanbase that cleaved passionately to the show’s ahead-of-its-time embrace of LGBTQ+ characters. Its six seasons were marked by tragic deaths, creative swings that missed wildly, and other complications, its cultural imprint remains unforgettable, and its final episode is an artifact of a far more optimistic time than our own.
The finale was written and filmed in early 2015, and in the alternate universe presented by the series, the first big twist is that Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) has moved on from being the forever nemesis of New Directions to politics — specifically, somehow she ended up being elected Vice-President of the United States, in service to President Jeb Bush, and they’re now running for a second term. It’s a bracing reminder of the fact that in 2015, Donald Trump’s candidacy was still seen largely as a joke (hell, has that actually ever really changed, in the long run?), but that the public perception of the myriad Democratic candidates was mixed.
So, a Republican President is the incumbent going into the 2020 election, but what else is happening for our favorite characters, in the year 2020? Well, Mercedes (Amber Riley) has become a very successful musical artist, Artie (Kevin McHale) and Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz) are together, and Artie wrote a film that got into the Slamdance Film Festival (notSundance).
Also, Kurt (Chris Colfer) and Blaine (Darren Criss) are still happily together, and we learn recently starred in the first LGBTQ Broadway production ofWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?They’re living in New York. It’s a bustling, lively place.
Also living in New York is Rachel (Lea Michele) and her now-finally husband Jesse St. James (Jonathan Groff), and Rachel (heavily pregnant as a surrogate for Klaine) is going to the Tony Awards, because the Tony Awards are happening in 2020, and Rachel is nominated for Best Actress for her role in a show entitledJane Austen Sings. And sure, becausethis is a Ryan Murphy production,the show can’t help but have some fun with the other nominees in her category, as announced by Andrew Rannels (as himself), here they are for posterity’s sake:
Of course, becauseGleeis giving us the mega-happy ending, Rachel wins, and gives a heartfelt speech thanking the show’s platonic ideal of an educator, Mr. Schu (Matthew Morrison). It’s a moment that was always an alternate future, but is even more so now in 2020. And the most striking moment of the episode is perhaps this — all of Rachel’s friends, gathered in a living room, watching the show together, as seen below.
The series doesn’t end there, though. Instead, the final sequence ofGleepays tribute to deceased cast memberCory Monteithwhile also bringing together almost the cast for a massive on-stage singalong to OneRepublic’s “I Lived.”
That final sequence takes place during another, shorter leap into the future: Fall 2020, as Mr. Schu embraces his new role as school principal. There is dancing, and healthy people slapping hands and hugging, and it is exuberant and tear-jerking if you’re even the least bit susceptible to this sort of thing, even under far less emotional circumstances.
Right now, in the incredibly-inaccurate-non-Glee-world, things are rough for so many, but the message ofGleewas always rooted in hopes and dreams. While its predictions about what 2020 would look like proved to be wildly inaccurate, maybe it’s worth believing, just for the sake of day-to-day sanity, that it won’t completely wrong forever, and that “dreams really can come true.”
