Glee Finn

Fox’s musical high-school comedy, “Glee, Finn” said goodbye Thursday night to Finn Hudson, the sensitive star quarterback-turned-pop song crooner played by the late actor Cory Monteith, in a one-hour tribute episode that brought out some of what’s still good about the show and a lot of what’s become stale about it.

It’s no secret that “Glee’s” better days are increasingly behind it. In expressing their mournfulness about losing Monteith, who died in July from a heroin and alcohol overdose at age 31, the actors playing the characters demonstrated far less confidence and “Glee”-fullness than they did when the show debuted five seasons ago, in 2009. Sorrow is the last reason any of them signed up or stuck around for this gig.

The episode was written by “Glee Finn” creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, and it was disappointing to see them set aside one of “Glee Finn’s” lasting attributes — cold honesty — as it awkwardly and even sanguinely avoided revealing how Monteith’s character died. Did Finn, like the actor who played him, have a drug problem? Was it a car crash? Did he kill himself? Aneurysm, heart attack, infection, old football injury, what?

“That doesn’t matter,” said Kurt (Chris Colfer) in the episode’s opening.

Which is precisely what we expect that the attention hogs of “Glee” were made to do — sing their hearts out while brimming with manufactured emotions. While the cynics among us strapped in for a long hour of weepy power-pop arias (Mr. Schuester encouraged each of the gleeks to sing a solo about Finn), “Glee Finn” instead briefly reaffirmed its sense of Top 40 surprise and free-ranging taste. Song choices included James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain”; the Pretenders’ “I’ll Stand by You”; Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender”; and, once Lea Michele’s Rachel made her dramatic last-minute entrance into the halls of McKinley High, “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele.