 While the sequence featuring Mercedes singing "I Will Always Love You" was very well received, Entertainment Weekly's Joseph Brannigan Lynch was not happy about the state of Mercedes and Sam's relationship: "If these two don 't get together soon, I'm voting we just call the whole thing off, because I 'm tired of these false starts." VanDerWerff, referring to the third member of that romantic triangle, wrote that one of the two "tertiary characters" he responded to most was "Shane, who didn ’ t say anything but gave good cry-face". VanDerWerff's other character was Karofsky, and Michael Slezak of TVLine characterized his scene with Kurt as "electric, with Kurt tenderly giving the 'just friends' speech to Dave". Lynch thought the plot of having Karofsky be Kurt's secret admirer was "vaguely stalker-ish on Karofsky's part, and contrived on the part of the show", and Canning accurately predicted that after Karofsky had been seen by his classmate, it would "just be an episode or two before Karofsky gets bullied into thinking about suicide, if not actually taking his own life".
