#jacob puckerman

So here’s my thing. I will watch a TV show do something unrelentingly stupid, I will yell “What the hell were they thinking?!” and then I will sit down and see if I can actually answer that question. 

In S4, Marley and Jake were sweet. The ‘womaniser’ falling for Local Sweetheart, and genuinely being supportive - when Marley isn’t comfortable with sex, he waits, and is sure to not pressure her. Even if, yes, he wants it, making sure she’s comfortable is his priority (and yes it makes my ace heart happy)

In season 5, er, Jake shouts at Marley for not wanting to sleep with him, and immediately cheats on her. Cue end of the relationship. 

So. 

Let’s acknowledge the first bit of context - the newbies were abruptly kicked off the show midway through S5 for a soft reboot that was better than it had any right to be. One could assume that the relationship would have been continued had the show gone on with them present, as opposed to abruptly writing out anyone not from the first three seasons. 

(Pictured: lines that have aged well. Marley does)

As an end, though, this was a slap in the face to anyone invested in the S4 characters. (Admittedly there don’t seem to be many of us)

It’s a clear-cut bit of bad writing, right? Well, here’s the unfortunate kicker: I like the S5 plot for Jake.

Don’t get me wrong, I loathed it when I first watched it. But time passed, and S5 started to begin to make more sense to me. I still think it has its share of major flaws, especially the first thirteen episodes, but certain beats make a degree of sense to me in a meta sense, even if trying to puzzle out an in-universe justification is the pathway to madness. Still, it gives me a lens through which to view it that at least gives me something to appreciate. 

The Newbies

There’s an accusation that the S4 new cast are just tired rehashes of the old. I used to hold this position, admittedly, but I don’t anymore. Kitty gets likened to Quinn for being the new, mean head cheerleader - but the trajectory of her character is very different to Quinn’s. In the same way, while it’s easy to say Jake is the new Puck, his arc puts him in a very different role. 

So let’s talk about those arcs. I would say that what makes the S4 cast distinct from the old is how their characters were supposed to develop, even if the realisation was sometimes lacking. Kitty starts out mean and generally kind of awful to everyone, but slowly morphs to a character who is genuinely protective and supportive and more self-aware without any drama over her life goals. Jake, ostensibly, begins as a womaniser, but becomes softer and more romantic in a way that makes him significantly more straightforwardly sweet than Puck. 

But if we’re talking season 4, we have to acknowledge that it tried to do way too much, carrying plots in McKinley and New York together, and inevitably there was a price. These characters have development, but you don’t have instigating incidents - they don’t get the equivalent of Quinn’s pregnancy subplot, or Puck realising his prospects, or Santana accepting her sexuality, or Kurt meeting Blaine and growing in confidence... The characters change, but there’s no clear reason why.

Which brings us to season 5, which opens with Kitty and Artie beginning a relationship, playing off a light bit of chemistry towards the end of S4. It’s cute, and Kitty goes from wanting it to be secret to avoid the inevitable drama from Mean Cheerleader #4 Bree if she ends up dating Glee-clubber Artie, to openly deciding, whatever, she likes him, screw the consequences to her social standing. 

It’s cute. And one can imagine that story happening midway through S4, say, and it would serve as a motivating factor for Kitty’s shift from cruel bully to protective friend - she realises what matters more to her. 

Which seems to be some of the intent of S5. It takes characters who developed in S4, realises they never properly justified that development, and gives them an extra arc where the end state matches who they were at the end of S4. 

What The Fuckerman

So let’s talk about Jake. 

He has something of a chip on his shoulder - he and Puck’s dad is established as deadbeat, sleeping with multiple women and bailing when they’re pregnant, and just generally being kind of a jerk. Jake does not like him. 

So then we have this kid, who has a reputation as a flirt, falling for a girl who doesn’t want to sleep with him, deciding to not be faithful. He sleeps with Bree, who has a pregnancy scare, and for a moment Jake is afraid he’s going to be a teenage dad, that he’s going to have to shift focus in light of that - and Bree, similarly, obviously isn’t exactly thrilled. It turns out to just be a false alarm, but it’s something that clearly gets to Jake. 

He was about to be just like his dad. Have a kid he couldn’t support, and wander off to another girl. And that realisation changes him. 

In of itself, it isn’t a bad arc. It would be a nice bit of backstory to see him re-orient his priorities and life and realise that he cares more about the relationship with Marley, someone that loves him, than mindless cliche womanising that makes him more like the man he hates. It is honestly a better plot than he gets in S4. If the newbies had stayed on the show, you could see this serving as a reason for Jake to be a better boyfriend in future - and this is the quiet implication for the aftermath. 

The problem here is twofold. One, we don’t get that follow-up. It’s half a story thrown in and left on a bad note. And two, Jake doesn’t need that development. In season 4, he was already faithful, already content, already good. 

But that doesn’t mean the S5 storyline is a bad arc, it just means that it’s horribly placed. Like, horribly placed. Horribly placed. 

It’s not a bad story inherently, it just needed to come about before we saw Jake stop being who he ostensibly used to be. 

So how many soft reboots are there in S5 anyway?

So let’s talk about what should have been - and what, maybe, was the intent. 

Marley is a sweetheart. Just objectively, even Sue couldn’t insult her. Jake is set up as that cliche bad boy, who Marley is warned against dating - but for all that warning, Jake as a boyfriend in S4 was always just... nice. He’s never jealous, never wanting, always putting Marley first. Which is definitely a good thing, but half the Glee club is wary of Marley dating him even when he’s never anything except sweet. They’re the classic ‘opposites attract’ only they are never actually depicted as significant opposites. 

There’s a definite disconnect here, and I think what S5 tried to do was correct it - Jake isn’t a sex-obsessed cheater, but he starts out as someone not looking for any relationship beyond sex, and ends up finding more value in his relationship with Marley. He has an arc, but it’s over with too quickly. 

If the S5 plot happened in S4, what we’d get would be a sensible character arc - Jake is made to realise what matters to him the most and that he doesn’t like the path he’s on or who he’s growing to be like, and then is left hoping Marley will forgive him, leading to a reunion a little way down the line. A bit of drama, a character arc, no different from Klaine and Brittana and Finnchel breaking up with one another several times over the show’s run. It would be a genuinely solid storyline that ends in the same place, but has more meat to it on the way. 

S5 is an attempt at a redo, to justify Jake’s arc with more Glee-level drama. Through the lens of that redo (which, let’s face it, Ryder quit the Glee Club in the S4 finale and yet was sitting around happily in S5, there is very little continuity between those two seasons) then the storyline is, at least, significantly more bearable. I’ve seen people call Jake’s arc a circle, and I’d agree in practice, though I prefer to see it more as a Z. Who Jake is at the end of the S5 storyline, is who he was in S4 - justified better, but timed worse. 

But it shouldn’t have been allowed to be the end of their story. That, more than anything, is the worst part of this all.