Hey! It was Let’s Just Make Up Random Scores Night on Dancing with the Stars! God, they weren’t even pretending. It seems to be a combination of predetermined “dramatic” storylines and, I’m assuming, the judges and producers each suddenly being gifted with a pony.
Once you get past the fundamental unfairness, the show’s astonishing ineptitude at trying to promote Rob Kardashian as a super awesome dancer is pretty funny. Well, unless, I imagine, you’re one of the other competitors.
Everyone had to do three (or really two and a quarter) dances this week. Two couples did a paso doble, two couples did the samba, everyone performed an Argentine tango, and then there was a “cha cha relay,” which meant everyone danced a piece of the same cha-cha, though there was a disappointing lack of batons.
We’ll take this in descending order of scores following the first two dances so you can feel the totally spontaneous drama!
Ricki Lake and Derek Hough, after a couple of weeks of being pretend underdogs, are back on top.
SCORE: A perfect 30! Which in this case seems to mean “This dance was perfectly nice and we’d already scripted you guys a 30. Why struggle?” I mean, they were good, as usual, but this 30 hardly seemed to compare to what it took to get a 30 last week. Ooh, maybe Dancing with the Stars has become unstuck in time.
Tango time!
SCORE: 29 for a two-dance total of 59. OK, fine. At least Ricki Lake is a good dancer and fun to watch.
Rob Kalamazoo and Cheryl Burke were — what’s that you say? I missed J.R. Martinez and Karina Smirnoff? Wrong. The judges are pretending that Rob is a better dancer than J.R. now. I’d accuse them of thinking we have no frontal lobes whatsoever, but clearly they are assuming we all have vibrant imaginations.
Anyway, Rob and Cheryl arrived for their samba on the worst float from your high school homecoming parade.
SCORE: A delightfully ridiculous 28. To get a 28, they had to get a perfect 10 from one judge. Yes, certainly they deserved that. Also, pixies are here to give us all nectar tea served in buttercups!
Now let’s pretend that the next thing you’re about to see is excitingly sensual.
SCORE: 27 Yes. After all that clomping around. Two-dance total: 55
J.R. Martinez and Karina Smirnoff danced a fun, Zorro-themed paso doble.
… So the judges suddenly pretended that J.R. has terrible posture. Terrible! We’ve been fretting over it this whole time! Ooh, look, a mastodon!
SCORE: An utterly fictional 23.
Let’s tango it up! Get ready for some fun lifts.
SCORE: 27, which was almost enough to make up for that atrocious lowballing earlier. Two-dance total: 50
Hey, speaking of atrocious lowballing, let’s see how Hope Solo and Maksin Chmerkovskiy did! [Spoiler: Quite well, unless you meant in terms of actual scoring!]
SCORE: 21, which is just silly. What’s that, flying panda? Yes, I agree – maybe the judges will appreciate the “ambitious” lifts in their tango and score them accordingly!
SCORE: 24 for a two-dance total of 45. They are spiking Hope so hard I keep wondering if they think she’s a volleyball player.
To repeat: Sir Klumpington the Overmarketed was, at this point, ten full points ahead of Hope Solo and five ahead of J.R.
But now it’s time for the exciting cha-cha relay, where the scores can really change! Or they could also stay pretty much the same, based on the show’s long-predetermined outcomes! It could go either way! Also, we could all start riding fuel-efficient gryphons to work!
Anyway, the winner of this dance gets 10 points, second place gets 8, then 6 and 4.
FINAL SCORES:
Ricki and Derek took second in the cha cha, for a total of 67 for the show.
Rob and Cheryl took first (Are you KIDDING ME?!), for a total of 65.
J.R. and Karina took third, for a total of 56.
And Hope and Maks (Surprise!) were in last place, for a total of 49.
Wow, do they not want Hope in the finals. I’m pretty sure she knew it the minute she saw that she was the only woman the costume designers put in pants.
I’d tell you to go forth and dance, but it’s not going to matter in terms of your final score. Just do whateverthehell. Ooh, look! Magical candypuppies!
