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There are so many things right with Glee: the corny but lovable musical numbers; the surprisingly complex distortion of archetypes; the interplay between darkness and froth; everything about Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester.

But everyone I know -- literally every person I personally know -- who loves Glee has nevertheless had the same complaint about the same story, and after the jump, we're going to talk about it and where they went with it last night.

About last night's episode, so don't say you weren't warned, after the jump.

Here's the thing: Everybody hates Fake Baby.

It's sometimes conflated with hating Terri Schuester (Jessalyn Gilsig), the annoying wife of the glee club's coach, Will (Matthew Morrison). In fact, sometimes it's blamed on Gilsig herself. But I think 90 percent of the problem is Fake Baby's very existence. And unlike many widely reviled plot elements, Fake Baby has no defenders as far as I know. Fake Baby is a Fake Baby without a figurative friend in the world.

If you're confused, here's the scoop: Right at the opening of the series, it was established that the Schuester marriage was troubled, and in an effort to save it, Terri decided to pretend she was pregnant. Now, as you probably know, there are a couple of problems with pretending you're pregnant in such a situation. One is that your husband will notice you not being pregnant, and the other is that your husband will notice after, say, 15 or 16 months, that you have not had a baby.

Terri solved these problems with the fake pregnancy belly and the plan to acquire the unwanted baby of cheerleader Quinn (Dianna Agron).

Now, look. We're all suspending disbelief here, what with the breaking into song and so forth. It's not meant to be an especially realistic show. Nevertheless, having Will not realize for months that his wife was merely wearing a pillow under her shirt made him appear stupid. Not just stupid -- oblivious. Not just oblivious -- comatose.

They're married. Married! And never once in the several months she was allegedly pregnant does he have any opportunity to figure this out? Yes, yes, there were little cheats here and there to explain their lack of contact, but come on, now. Believing that a bunch of football players would spontaneously perform "Single Ladies" in the middle of a game as a distraction is nothing compared to the idea that a guy could live with a non-pregnant woman for months and believe she was a pregnant woman, unless he had a head made out of marshmallow fluff.

The fact that Will's sideways romance with Emma (Jayma Mays) wasn't really working (Will's wife wasn't really pregnant, but he thought she was, meaning ... that's still gross, right?) only made it worse. It all dragged on and on, with various near-misses, as the many times Will might logically catch the snap came and went and the snap emphatically was not caught.

The entire story, for me, was only tolerable at all because of the very strong performance from Agron as Quinn, whose genuine and unsentimental mix of terror, regret, and protective-mom instincts made her real pregnancy quite compelling, where Terri's fake pregnancy was a total bust.

Well, last night, Will finally -- in a development that could (and would and should) have happened much earlier -- stumbled across Terri's smaller, early-stages pregnancy belly in her lingerie drawer and busted the whole thing wide open.

So here is what you are being asked to believe: Terri faked a pregnancy, obtained the promise of a baby from a high-school student, arranged for a doctor to falsify an ultrasound, and then left her old pregnancy belly in her underwear drawer for her husband to find.

Also: Will never had any trouble believing that there were logical explanations for other oddities over the last several months, but when she tells him the belly was something she bought early on, before she was showing, in order to try on maternity clothes, he's suddenly a squinty skeptic. (This explanation for the pregnancy belly was, notably, about eight times more plausible than half of the other stuff she's said.)

It's sort of appropriate that the audience is being asked to accept one more rip-roaringly preposterous development before we finally are allowed to get off this ridiculous carousel.

But off it we are: The game was up for good when Will lifted Terri's shirt, saw the current fake belly, and even got her to admit that she was planning on scamming Quinn out of her baby.

There are some signs that the absurdity is still not over -- Emma unbelievably expressed sympathy for Terri, which sent a troubling signal that Will might return to his pregnancy-faking, high-school-student-baby-appropriating wife as if they'd had a misunderstanding over the shopping list.

For the moment, though, we are finished with Fake Baby. No more Fake Baby. Fake Baby has been shoved in the back of the lingerie drawer, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving prosthetic.

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