When the best holiday coincides with the best DWTS gimmick, it’s going to be a good week!
DWTS had Halloween as their weekly theme, which meant spooky dances, Sasha jumping out and terrifying people, and almost enough smoke to turn DWTS into a radio show. Unfortunately, Leah Remini returned as co-host, and proceeded to muck up her job as usual.
The couple eliminated this week, finishing in ninth place, was Hayes and Emma! This result is middling for Emma, and it’s a shame as Hayes finally recovered this week after some lackluster weeks. Once team scores factored in, he tied for second place this week. But the competition has become too uniformly strong to allow errors, and so Hayes was sent packing. Adding insult to injury, Hayes was the last one chosen during team dances, reinforcing the unintentional theme of not being wanted on the show.
In parting, DWTS made an extended metaphor for Hayes going through puberty by assigning him the werewolf for his individual dance. Turns out, Hayes is now a big fan of facial hair (that he can’t grow himself), and that translates to better dancing. He and Emma waltzed to a very creepy version of “Once Upon a Dream” from Sleeping Beauty, and he did a good job extending his lines. But our favorite moment was the knife held by Emma behind her back at the end of the dance – perhaps more foreshadowing for Hayes’s ignominious exit?
The teams were split up into Team Nightmare and Team Who You Gonna Call (henceforth, Team WYGC) under the captainship of Nick and Bindi respectively (the highest-scoring stars of the season. So much was made of Derek’s undefeated streak in team dances (he’d never lost), that it was obvious the producers set him up to lose. To that end, Carrie Ann and Bruno overscored Team Nightmare, and hallucinated an out-of-sync moment for Team WYGC to dock them points.
Team Nightmare’s theme was Nightmare Before Christmas, realized by having all eight dancers attending a very creepy dinner. The team consisted of Nick, Tamar, Andy, and Hayes. It was a perfectly serviceable routine – competent dancing, decent solos (with Nick as a creepy standout), and an interesting formation at the end. But it is a far cry from the best thing ever, as the judges raved about it.
Team WYGC, paid homage to Ghostbusters, with the women as the ghosts and the guys busting them. It was the dream team – Derek and Mark together, Lindsay and Witney together, the PenaVegas together because Bindi considers them a package deal. Alek fretted about not letting the team down. The parts where everyone was dancing were fantastic, as was Bindi’s solo. Unfortunately, the other solos were just puzzling – Alek just held Lindsay up and spun her, whereas Witney and Carlos were on wheels instead of actually dancing.
So, combining individual and team scores, let’s welcome our stars!
First Place, 58 points: Bindi & Derek. The world’s most adorable vampire gave a “masterclass in Argentine tango” according to Bruno. Bindi’s dancing was superb, every flick in place, and Derek’s choreography and staging were incredibly creepy. The issue was making Bindi, the show’s biggest sweetheart, a believable Queen of Darkness. Bindi rose to the occasion magnificently, with everyone praising her breakthrough in terms of embodying character.
Second Place (tie), 56 points: Carlos & Witney. If a Phantom of the Opera homage does not happen to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, did it even happen? Carlos felt he was overscored for last week’s stripper dance, so he wanted to really earn tens this week… by requesting a simpler routine when he struggled with the paso doble. We couldn’t see the actual dance due to the smoke monster, but Carlos’s package did him no favors this week.
Second Place (tie), 56 points: Andy & Allison. Julianne is apparently turned on by vampires with bad posture… and wonders what that says about her. So do we, Julianne. Allison felt the pressure of living up to last week’s perfect score, and really cracked the whip with Andy more than we’ve seen thus far. But while there was much to commend in his paso, his posture was horrific. Leah asked how he felt about turning Julianne on – bemused, Andy replied, “Excited.” We’re just going to leave that one alone
Third Place, 55 points: Alexa & Mark. Alexa takes things personally, so her poor results last week really got in her head. Combine this with the fact that there are only good dancers left in the competition, as Mark pointed out, and that’s a lot of pressure. Determined to let nothing phase her anymore, she and Mark attacked the paso doble with renewed vigor. Mark got to play Edward Scissorhands, which must have been a dream come true, and somehow managed to create a paso around that, enormous scissorhands and all. Just the logistics of that choreography is mind-boggling. Alexa did a great job with a challenging routine, and is back in the game.
Fourth Place (tie), 54 points: Nick & Sharna. The concept for this gets a perfect ten – Frankenstein’s monster and his bride doing an Argentine tango to an Evanescence song. If only Nick’s technique had been a bit better! He didn’t make enough of a distinction between the fast and the slow moves, which gives this dance its dynamism. Sharna did choreograph a hell of a routine though, but Nick’s busy schedule made this routine not quite as polished as his usual performances.
Fourth Place (tie), 54 points: Tamar & Val. Tamar’s awful arrogance reached new heights this week as she told the camera she believes she’s the best dancer in the competition. Yeah… not so much. We’d like to direct her attention to literally everyone else in the competition, who scored higher than her in the individual round. She was delightfully put in her place by the judges, who called her out for her numerous mistakes, and for how she still struggles in hold (as in, when the attention is not solely on her). Even after her fiasco of a fun-house-themed paso, she believed she was the best thing since sliced bread, and no amount of attempted damage control by Val can make her likable.
Last Place, 53 points: Alek & Lindsay. Alek was rather a sore loser regarding all the criticism he received last week, maintaining that the judges were wrong. He did call in Artem for lessons on intensity, and it seems to have helped. We can’t tell if his dancing was actually better, given the enormous smoke monster that obscured his homage to Woman in Black, but the judges praised his newly intense face. Alek needs a breakthrough in the next week or so, or he’ll head home, which would be a real shame.
Are you Team Nightmare or Team WYGC? Are you sad to see Hayes make like a Vine and leave? And which couple did you consider the scariest?
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