By M. Giant
There's a long, long recap of last night's top six show that covers everything but the actual singing, and then we're on to the credits and the big entrances. Ryan promises performances from not one but two Idol alumni tonight: both Kelly Clarkson and Scotty McCreery, as well as some results that he makes sound positively pyrotechnical. But first there's a Burt Bacharach/Hal David medley sung by the top six. It's started off by a body-snatcher who has taken over Janelle's physical form but neglected to learn to sing, which completely ruins the illusion. Then Angie gets a turn with some other deep track, then Kree with "Always Something There to Remind Me," which is the first of these songs I know and that only because of Naked Eyes. Lazaro croons us back to obscurity with some song he doesn't know much better than I do and I don't know it at all. Amber and Candice throw in a duet of "A House Is Not a Home" like they're breaking up with each other, and now I've heard twice as many Burt Bacharach songs in my life as I had as of this time last night. Then they all unite for a chorus of "That's What Friends Are For." Hmm, to watch each other slowly vanish one at a time? They get a standing ovation at the end, I guess because the judges couldn't figure out how to get up for only four or five of them.
Esta Fiesta Mission! This one actually has some potential, as the top six head to a large downtown rooftop marked out like a soccer field so they can use cars to kick a giant soccer ball around. Unfortunately, they're just taking turns bumping in foul shots one at a time rather than actually mixing it up. This would be a lot more entertaining if there were actual fouls first.
Back in the auditorium, the finalists are in position on the bleacher-couches as Ryan cues up half of a Jimmy-reel, covering last night's performances by Kree, Angie and Lazaro. Jimmy thinks Kree gave two more beautiful performances, but she's going to need to show more personality, which he believes is in there. So I'm not the only one starting to notice her blank eyes, then. He thinks Angie did a competent job, but not enough to win the night. Jimmy gives credit to Lazaro for making it this far, but says his first song last night was "like an Ambien milkshake." Jimmy admits he's been proven wrong on Lazaro before, and says he'd rank him tenth. "There's only six singers, Jimmy," someone says dutifully from off-camera, and Jimmy says he knows. Okay, that was a little mean.
Back on the stage, Ryan says they're going to do some pairs. He starts by sending Angie way over to stage right and Lazaro to the middle, asking why he's smiling. Lazaro manages to say that Jimmy was funny, so he laughed. Look who's going out classy. Kree gets positioned at stage right, so now we have all of last week's top three awkwardly standing in unnatural positions for no reason. Up : Scotty McCreery! Speaking of awkwardness and unnatural positions.
Ryan chats with a couple of audience members, one of whom is Kevin Bacon, who by total coincidence keeps showing up during the commercials in promos for some other show on this network. Ryan brings up Kevin Bacon's own musical side career, then moves a down a row to tweak Jimmy Iovine for his bad math earlier. Then there's a long intro reel of Scotty McCreery, who comes out to perform a mid-tempo country song called "See You Tonight." Mainly it makes me think of how Keith is always talking about how we have to believe what the singer is saying because it's a song about Scotty McCreery having a date. Suspension of disbelief only gets me so far.
Coming back, last week's top three are on the stage in their positions, as though they never left during Scotty's performance. Like they were sharing the stage with him and his band, just out of phase with this dimension. I'm trying not to read too much into that. Before moving on, they run some more clips from last night. Of Janelle, Jimmy says she used to make songs her own but has unwisely switched to doing straight-up covers for some reason, which isn't going to work against the vocal chops she's facing from the other finalists. Janelle is summoned down to the stage to join Angie at stage right. Jimmy said that Candice was in the lead after just her first performance last night, but the Adele cover showed she also knows how to pick her songs. Ryan sends Candice over to join Kree, and then sits down to Amber on the bleacher-couch to play last night's clip. All Jimmy can say is that he doesn't understand why America doesn't get her, but she needs to keep doing what she's doing. She goes to stand with Lazaro. Now that they're paired off, Ryan says we have the top two, the middle two and the bottom two, and we're going to find out which is which... later.
In introducing Kelly Clarkson, Ryan name-checks Brian Dunkelman, which he kind of has to because in the flashback to eleven years past, the Dunk is standing there outside the audition room, staring about desperately for escape routes while a much-younger Ryan Seacrest chats up a somehow not-that-much-younger Kelly about the homemade jeans-dress she's wearing. Then there's the usual litany of achievements, and Ryan introduces her singing a new song off her
Greatest Hits Chapter One album, "People Like Us." She's up onstage with her band, all of them dressed and black-lit like they're either in the second half of the "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" video or Cosmic Bowling. I guess because this sounds like it could be a Berlin song or something. Berlin's Wham!-adjacent, I suppose, at this remove from the mid-eighties. It's actually a decent song, though I'm the first to admit I have zero objectivity when it comes to Kelly Clarkson. The day-glo eyelashes she's rocking might be a step too far, though, even if the cryptic Twitter hashtag painted on her forearm isn't.
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She gets a standing ovation from all four judges, and doesn't even wait for the applause to die down before dorking out to Ryan about her nerves over singing in front of Mariah Carey. Ryan beckons Mimi up to give her a hug and recounts an earlier Twitter conversation between the two divas before going to sit down and let them kvell over each other on the stage for a while. Kelly Clarkson even makes Mariah Cary seem cool, man, even if it's only for a minute.
So now the finalists are back in their separate pairs on the stage. The real-time Twitter poll about whether the judges should use their save appears on the screen briefly and, presumably, mistakenly. Live TV, everyone. Lazaro and Amber are the bottom two, which means Angie and Janelle are safe and get to go sit back down with Candice and Kree.
And then something terrifying happens. Like someone walking over my grave, and then backing up to walk over it again, leading an elephant on a leash. One day, perhaps one day soon, I and those like me will look back at this as the moment when it all changed.
Here's what happens: we go to a weird semi-break, with the live feed from the stage shrinking down to a picture-in-picture while a packet of ads plays as though this is perfectly normal and not the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the profession of recapping. It's called a commercial break for a reason, TV people! It is a recapper's prerogative to zap the ads and come back when the action resumes. If the action continues during the ads, you are defeating the whole purpose of ads! Which, contrary to popular belief, is not to sell stuff, but to give me a chance to jump ahead a few minutes in time. You take that away and you take away our will to live. So I'm going to pretend it didn't happen.
When that harbinger of doom is over, the show returns to the full screen while Lazaro and Amber wait to hear the news. Ryan says that after 34 million votes, Amber is safe. Lazaro goes into the futile exercise of his last song on this show, which is, ironically, "Feelin' Good." The real-time Twitter poll showing on the screen fluctuates around 60-40 in favor of the judges using the save, which, given the traditional pro-save skewing of these numbers, is the equivalent of Twitter users showing up at the studio in person to install a trapdoor on the stage. Performance-wise, Lazaro manages to finally not completely embarrass himself for the first time in weeks, but it's too little too late and everyone knows it.
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Ryan asks Randy if they'll be using the save, and nobody is surprised when Randy declines. He also doesn't say it wasn't unanimous, which means it was. Lazaro takes it pretty well, all things considered. So just as I predicted lo these many weeks ago, we've got an all-female top five. And Randy's bonus is in the bank. Now where's mine?
M. Giant is a Minneapolis- based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter, or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.
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