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
You know who doesn't have a problem with nerves? The Hotness. What she does have a problem with, though, is a very long list. Starting with the face, which is kind of harlequin ichthyosis-esque, with terrible skin and dead eyes, and a strange voice where she sounds affronted all the time. She should have played the neighbor on Ugly Betty is how aversive she is, and the delusion... I would have to say on the list of Hotness issues, it's reality at the very top. Just the whole shebang. She tells us in her weird voice that she has her own unique sound and style and thus cannot compare herself to anyone famous or listenable. But if she had to, it's Mariah Carey that first comes to mind. There's a long -- I would say exploitative, but she's asking for it so hardcore and so forcefully that really it's just a Christmas present of exactly what she wanted, because she's not going to get the problem here either way -- a long shot of her doing things that are not okay. There's a closeup on her fucked up face with Isaac Hayes sexy music, and a scary dance with tossing hair like Buffy right before she was going to explode that time, and a short disquisition on how they started calling her The Hotness in high school. Which they did not, or if they did, it was a bucket of pig's blood situation that she never understood. Which is probably best for everybody, because I do believe that the Hotness is screwed up enough to have magic powers. Footage of her scary, awkward, herky-jerky dancing -- imagine trying to seduce the Mask, what that would look like -- as she explains that she has, quote, a "rrrrrow spicy personality." It is... spicy. I will give her that. "I'm going to deliver the Hotness, and it's going to go good," she says. I wish she would deliver some freakin' grammar as well; it costs nothing.
Meet Jennifer Chapton (23, Seattle WA). She's not as bad as other people from the past about whom I'm still having nightmares, but she's an affront regardless. Paula tells her to take her gum out, and Simon says to stick it on Taylor's face on the backdrop. HA! Randy's like, "Oh, Simon." She sings some song which sounds like "Tenderoni Need Your Love," and I don't care enough to parse out which part of that is the band and which is the song title, because it doesn't sound like any song at all. The only "Tenderoni" I know is its own song, and if that's what she's trying to sing, we're in bigger trouble than I think. Her overall issue, besides being tone-deaf, is this weird squeaking sex noise she keeps making at the end of every phrase that sounds like she has a deflated lung. It's really upsetting. Even if you look away because if what it's like looking at her, you have to look when she makes the noise, just to make sure you're not missing something really amazing like a person getting Faces of Death'd right on the TV. There are some okay parts, all right, but they're all Savol Fakeouts, because there's a really horrible, tinny, reedy tone to it all over. Paula dances around and sings along silently like your mom at a Journey concert. The post-singing part is pretty formulaic: she gets all Maury on them about how they don't know what they're talking about, and as usual she focuses on Simon for the venting of spleen, which...all three of them know what they're talking about, but Simon is always right, and in addition does not sugarcoat it, and I don't get why they go after him. You go after Paula, if anything, because she would fold. Simon won't fold. (Can you imagine if a contestant talked the shit to Paula that they talk to Simon? That would be so awful!) Paula does her whole "I love how you're being an asshole" thing, which as usual is stupid and unoriginal, and they go around and around and Simon is just gorgeously dismissive of her and her five miles of bullshit, and Randy reminds her that he also thinks it was bad. Which is also, of course, just his opinion.