Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Take Seattle To The Zoo
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.16.2007
Finally Simon stops this song of death and revenge and pottery wheels of heaven and -- with the hand back on his hip, staring and blinking weirdly -- Simon says this: "Thank you, Nicholas. What the bloody hell was that?" Closeup on Nick, who is awesome: "It was me. Was that not good enough?" He blinks like he's about to boot, and Randy's like, "Not even close." Simon admits that it's one of the worst auditions he's ever heard: "Almost... nonhuman." I cannot disagree. Nick blinks and shuts his eyes bizarrely the whole time like he's having to tell the voices to shut up. You know how sometimes the blinking is to keep the tears in? This is like that but with something else instead of tears. Keeping the crazy in. Or like lasers. Randy hits him with the fullness of truth: the tunelessness, the weird tone, the ways in which it was simply "not pleasant," and notes that these things represent the opposite of what we talk about when we talk about singing. They sweetly wish him luck and once he's gone, they stare forever. Simon is quiet and adorable, Randy's amazed by his strangeness, and outside Ryan asks if he'll ever sing again. He says perhaps, but he'll have to see the tape first. They stand silently, weirdly not looking at each other or anything. Now come on. If you cannot count on Ryan to hold your hand and say sweet things and touch you all over like a concerned equestrian, I have to ask what's the point of auditioning. I mean it. Ryan, do your job. They stare some more. "That's pretty much all I have to say about that," Nick says after awhile, and Ryan finally ducks an eye at the camera. Then they go look for Nick's sweatshirt together. In the hallway, he reiterates how he hit the "hiiiiigh parts and the looooow" in a still-more bizarre singsong, and then admits that he could very possibly scare himself when he finally reviews the tape, then makes six bizarre faces in a row, and the image goes still on the most weird one, because this show is nothing if not classy and unwilling to beat the horse all the time.
At the end of Day One, after a bunch of horrible singing, Ryan hooks up with Rudolfo Cardenas (28, North Hollywood) and I think they make out a little. Originally from Venezeula, Rudy's either a real musician or keeping his personality very close to the vest. He's in a band so it could be either. He sings "Open Arms," which is by Journey, who I saw in concert last summer and they were fucking awesome, and in which Randy once played bass, while wearing purple spandex, and he sings this song very well, and the judges applaud madly, and Ryan thanks him for not sucking at singing, and Rudy remarks that "Simon's over it, he's had a bad day," so then we hear the "Bad Day" song and a bunch of losers, and "Die Die My Darling" guy yells, "Simon, you're mine!" at the camera, and it's awesome, and a total of seven people made it through out of 9000 people, and there's still one day to go but it's even more boring, so let's do that now.