Okay, so first off, Kat and Taylor's Idol journeys are montaged to the tune of actual Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," so: awesome start. Ryan can't seem to get his mind past the girl vs. boy thing, which makes him no better than Trump, so I hope he's prepared to live with that. Three songs apiece tonight.
Round 1: Katharine sings decently, but more importantly stands, while performing "Black Horse and a Cherry Tree." The judges are tepid, but I don't think unreasonably so. Meanwhile, Taylor is dressed like The Joker and reprises "Livin' For The City." He tries his best to act a fool, but the fear has taken up residence in his eyes. The judges act the fool in his place, though, and he takes the round.
Round 2: Katharine reprises "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," because after last week, she totally had to. In your recapper's opinion, it was better than last week. The judges loved it. Then, Taylor delivers a hugely affected "Levon," that song about tradition and family planning. A lot of it was pretty nasal, actually. Randy calls him "pitchy," but Paula says Taylor is pitchy (oooookay), and Simon gives the round to Kat.
Round 3: Oh God, the coronation songs. Katharine's is called "My Destiny," and it's basically a low-rent "A Moment Like This." Yeah, yeah. "They all are." What it also is is sung flatly, then sharply, then flatly again by our girl. So that can't help matters. Randy and Paula throw the awful song under the bus, but Simon cops to the vocal ordinariness. Taylor's song is called "Do I Make You Proud?" It's by far the more "I just won American Idol" song, if that's any indication. This would be the low-rent "Inside Your Heaven," melodically-speaking. You can tell exactly when the gold sparks will start to cascade down. Taylor sings it well, if unavoidably boringly. He's totally winning. The judges all think so. Simon even says so, because he's hoping for Katharine sympathy votes. Not gonna help.
Daniel Powter plays us off with a live, acoustic "Bad Day," as we reflect on the season as a whole. Again.
Tomorrow: Taylor wins it. He certainly worked harder for it. I mean, all that spazzing out and hugging himself ticked me off, but it worked for a hell of a lot of people, so...well done. You giant pile of jackass. Once again, America gets the Idol it deserves. This year, American Idol does, too.
Ryan Seacrest is once again clad in funeral garb as he welcomes us to this, the penultimate episode of a season that has only been running since January, even if some days it feels like we've been hearing the words "Taylor Hicks" and "Katharine McPhee" for much, much longer than that. I guess the laws of time and space tend to bend in Taylor's presence, where what feels like a year and a half is actually five months, and what looks like someone who voted for LBJ passes for twenty-nine. Ryan is facing the camera, his back to a pitch-black abyss. I don't know how I manage to keep getting fooled by this switcheroo, but I do. He talks about how Kat and Taylor are vying for the "most sought-after title in television." Take that, bitches! Then he says they'll have to do it "in front of these guys here." And the house lights go up in the Kodak theatre, and it's really quite impressive. The theater, I mean. I always think so on Oscar night, as well. If the point is to simultaneously stroke egos and scare the crap out of people, this is the venue for it. Ryan gets extra-super into it as he says, once again, "THIS is American Idol!" It's like he waits all season for it to matter like this. This is both his Super Bowl and his Gay Super Bowl. You can see how he'd be very excited.Since this is my last shot at the credits for the season, I should mention that it's kind of annoying that Carrie gets shunted into that barely-visible afterthought there at the end, especially since she outsold Fantasia and Ruben (...right?). Also, since I won't be recapping Wednesday's carnival of the absurd, I have to say now that out of all this year's finalists, I wouldn't pick one of them over Carrie. I wouldn't be caught dead at a Carrie Underwood concert, but as a short-term TV karaoke singer, none of these fools could touch her. Ryan takes the stage via the "FANT ASIA" doors, even though we just saw him on the stage not ten seconds ago. Mandy Moore is in the audience, as a goodwill ambassador from the flaming wreckage that was the American Dreamz box-office receipts. Ben Stiller is hunched over in the audience looking like he's trying not to be recognized. I don't think anyone's told him how nobody likes him anymore. Seacrest looks especially orange tonight as he welcomes all three thousand audience members to the Kodak. He introduces the "three very smug-looking judges," and if any and all permutations of the "pot calling the kettle black" cliché hadn't already been ground into paste, I'd probably haul it out for this occasion, because Ryan Seacrest calling someone else smug? That would be like him calling Simon vain and gay. How weird would that sound? Randy, blessedly, fails to boo Simon. And I think Paula fails to punch him, so maybe Simon remembered to hand out those end-of-season gifts this year. Ryan refers to the competition as neck-and-neck (it's not), and he asks Randy what the final two have to do to get ahead. Wait, wait, wait! Don't tell me, I know. They need to choose good songs and sing them well. They need to bring it. Am I close, Randy? "It's now or never, baby. They need to lay it all on the line tonight." Partial credit, then? Paula picks up the rest of the slack by bringing up "song choice." Simon's suggestion? Prayer. And not your normal Christian prayers for good luck and inner strength. No, he means praying the other guy fucks up. Ah, yes. The Serenity Prayer's long-time nemesis: the Turmoil Prayer. I know it well. Ryan lays down the format: three songs, three phone numbers. Two songs apiece will be culled from the last three months of performances, while the third will be the show-appointed Crappy-Ass Single and Thinly-Veiled Coronation Metaphor. Then Ryan continues his obsession from last week about the gender makeup of the finale. He reminds us that there have been "girl-boy" finales twice before, and both times the girl has emerged victorious. Of course, Clay Aiken was a girl-boy finale unto himself, and I believe they're still counting the votes on that one. And, not to be a spoiler or anything, but Wednesday's show will only confuse that issue further. Anyway, Ryan's got a huge boner about the boys-versus-girls thing, painting Taylor as an AI gender pioneer. Do it for Bo Bice, Taylor! Do it for Guarini! ...okay, I rag on the clip packages that litter the AI landscape like so many discarded Diana DeGarmo CDs, but this one is pretty cool. Mostly because it's set to Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," and I went into the Journey thing last week, so I don't feel the need to do so again. Suffice it to say, this song effing rules. The videos are of Taylor and Katharine's Idol journeys. Get it? Journey/journeys? I'm hoping tomorrow will feature a retrospective on the finalists' air supplies. Of note: baby pictures of Katharine. Photos of Taylor with dark hair. Taken the day before the Las Vegas auditions when he dyed it, no doubt. I'm just saying. Believe it or not, they were both very excited to be on the show. They auditioned. Taylor the Alabamian gets lumped in with Bo and Ruben, which actually speaks far better for the diversity of Alabamians than anything I can think of. The only thing I can think of to tie them together is how I don't really care for any of them. Sorry (2006), Rube. Hey, remember when Simon guaranteed that Taylor wouldn't make the Top 24? And then he went back on his word in Hollywood and doomed us to the finale we've got tonight? Seriously, the second Taylor's fate was placed in the hands of the American public, his spot in the finals was all but assured. I'll let Ryan explain it for me. Taylor "defied the odds." No longer would the prematurely gray and incredibly old be treated as second-class citizens on this show. As for the whole "drunk, spazzy asshole" thing, Ryan would rather you think of it as "soulful spirit and contagious dance moves." And just so Katharine doesn't start running away with the title of "Most Self-Centered Idol Experience," Taylor tells us that we're experiencing "The American Dream, by Taylor Hicks." Dude, I know. I keep trying to scream, but I can't wake up.
As for Katharine, remember how she had a mom with a giant forehead and thinning hair? Remember how her face was a little bit fuller at auditions? Remember how she cried at auditions a lot but couldn't manage to even fake the tears on elimination nights even though it might have kept people from calling her a bitch? ["It would have?" -- Sars] Okay, no, it wouldn't have. But still. Remember that awesome back-lit introduction to the Queen song? Remember all the spinning she did this year? Remember that time when she was dressed like a pregnant milkmaid? And then she was dressed like a pregnant Kate Holmes-Cruise? And then she was dressed like an equestrian from space? They forgot to show that last one, but if you're going to show her in the dirndl, why not go the whole nine? You know, looking at the both of them in split-screen, I realize that the degree to which they are both utter and complete fakes might be what's keeping me from caring all that much. I mean, Katharine's been my favorite almost all season, and Taylor's been my least favorite for longer than that, so you'd think I'd be more emotionally invested, but...meh. Maybe I'm being petulant because I know Kat's going to lose, but I don't think I'm totally off-base when I say this is the least compelling final pair ever, with the possible exception of Fantasia/Diana. Which is actually a comparison that's a bit too apt for me to feel comfortable delving into right now. Or ever. Anyway: The Soul Patrol versus The McPheever. Taste the fake excitement!Ryan once again lies to us that the results will be close, before asking the audience who their favorite is. He gets back a mess of noise featuring a lot of "a" vowel sounds, not like that it helps any. Apparently this year the coin toss didn't get fake messed up, so we don't get to see Taylor win and show that genteel southern chivalry by declaring "ladies first." All this shit will go down after the break, however, the better to get a full hour's worth of show and allow the network to suck on the sweet, sweet ratings for one last week.
Commercials. Do you really think they can pull off Pirates of the Caribbean again? Wasn't that like the flukiest fluke of all time? I mean, I'll be seeing it regardless -- something about Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom? -- but what are the odds? Though I will take Bill Nighy over Geoffrey Rush as an upgrade.
Back from the break, Ryan's in the audience, where Bucky and Kellie got aisle seats, but only Chris gets to hug Ryan on camera. Then...awkward. Chris starts to banter with Ryan and goes to put his arm around him like they're going to talk, as Ryan has done with countless audience members before. But Ryan either doesn't have enough time (all that unexpected filler in the first segment, I guess) or Chris is really making a firm commitment to making himself look like a jackass, because Chris keeps standing there, ready to talk, and Ryan keeps walking away from him. Finally, Ryan has to be like, "Dude, looks like you've got a good seat. Take it." That was painful. And after the events of Chris's press tour last week, he totally deserves to have people jumping down his throat for being a prima donna, but for me it always comes down to this: American Idol, as a television program, has its time budgeted down to the tiniest fraction of a second. If Ryan was planning on talking to Chris in the aisle, they'd have told him that. If Ryan was planning a spot-and-go, they'd have told him that, too. So either: a) Ryan saw time was short and switched things up on the fly (which, at the beginning of a segment, at the nine-minute mark, seems quite unlikely); b) Chris was told Ryan wouldn't be stopping to talk to him, but he tried to make it happen anyway; or c) Chris was told Ryan was going to chat with him and they blew past him to make him look like an asshole -- a message to any future AI contestant who wants to make the show look bad after the fact. Yeah, conspiracy theories are for losers, but that whole segment made less than zero sense to me. ANY-way, Ryan proceeds to go chat with the McPhees. Dad's already glassy-eyed, and while it used to be cute, now I wind up comparing him to SurvivorShane a little bit. Or Paul Sorvino, if I'm being kind. Maybe you want to cut your kid a break and quit crying on national television over them? Katharine's first song is "Black Horse and a Cherry Tree," a song I thought she performed well a few weeks ago, but would not have been in my top five choices of songs for her to sing tonight. She's not singing from her knees this time, though she still has to two drummers onstage with her. This is a fun song for Kat and a great opportunity to show off as a performer, but it's just not impressive enough for the finals, and Simon will eventually end up agreeing with me. The backup singers -- who I generally love -- are really annoying on this song. KT Tunstall has that deep, booming voice, while the house singers here are all thin and wispy. Bad trade. I'm not sure why this performance is bugging me so much, but it just sounds weak. She's got three songs with which to pull off an unbelievable upset, and she chooses one that ends up leaving her voice stranded onstage with a pair of too-quiet drums and even-quieter backup singers? It's just not a song where the vocals are going to be able to compensate for that. Not a bad performance, per se, but in the context of the final week, an unforgivably ordinary one.
Kat's family loves it, of course, as does an unfortunately-hatted Christina Applegate. Randy's not so much a fan, and you can see it on his face before he even speaks. Kat's crying, but not because of Randy, I don't think. I just think this is the week she lets it all go, emotionally. Randy says she "finally" looked like she was having fun, which is puzzling because I don't really recall Randy ever harping on her about not having fun onstage. Then he says something really stupid, which is that because he's heard her sing it before, it wasn't that exciting for him. Does Randy once again not understand the theme constraints? Besides the coronation songs, they're all songs we've heard them sing before! He did the same thing last week with the song Clive picked for her. You can't penalize the contestants for the constraints of the show, dawg. He does say that he preferred this rendition of "Black Horse" to the last time she sang it, which is better than a sharp stick in the eye, I guess. Paula smiles and manages to shove as many content-free words into her spiel as possible: "a fun way to celebrate why we're here tonight"? Vintage Abdul, right there. Her "criticism" is that she knows Kat can do better in the songs to come. Simon's prepared to forego the bullshit, at least. He gives it a "good" with a small "g." He says that "the occasion tonight is actually bigger than that song." That's a pretty good way of putting it, actually. Think of how many other songs that she's performed this season would have made a better fit for the finale. "Since I Fell For You," certainly. "Until You Come Back to Me," definitely. "Come Rain or Come Shine," probably. Even -- though I will admit I may be the only one who thought she did a great job on this -- "Who Wants to Live Forever?" It's not like she's been limping by in the competition until the last three weeks. Why the sudden short-sightedness? Again, not like it would have effected the outcome of the show in the slightest, but we might have been able to have a moment here. Anyway, Ryan calls her over to the side of the stage and asks her to justify this awful song choice. In so many words. She's mealy-mouthed about how it's currently in the Top 40 and she wanted to show that she could sing current music. I don't know who on this show gave her the idea that she needs to sound more current, because her entire appeal is a throwback. That's been, like, the theme of this season. That's why the Billboard charts theme was such a challenge, because nobody was willing to step outside their little time machine. Anyway, Ryan asks her about the thousand roses (I think he means that literally) and she says they're from the McPhans, and I suppose there are several dozen ways to be creepier than sending roses, so I'll let the fans slide this time. Kat sincerely/fake/sincerely (her usual 2:1 ratio) thanks her fans for the support as Ryan reads her numbers.
Now: Taylor, who starts things off in the aisles, because he's a man of the people and other such manipulative connotations. He's wearing a truly offensive purple velvet jacket that makes him look like Prince and Michael McDonald birthed a giant baby in a lab experiment. Or, if you're looking for a simpler mental picture: Grimace. I thought this was another odd song choice. All of Taylor's performances tend to blend together for me anyway, but surely there was something that he did better than this song, right? I just...don't remember him singing it. This was the week I was in Austin, though, and there's a very good chance I was still laughing at Kevin singing "Part Time Lover," so maybe this is more my problem than Taylor's. This side of the auditorium has Ace, Paris, and Elliott on the aisles -- three of Taylor's most vocal supporters, so that makes sense. He still seems like way more of a Vegas act to me than a serious musical performer, but the crowd seems really into him. Will the novelty wear off by the time his album hits? I'm going to say probably, but stranger musical acts have acquired cult followings, so who even knows? The only thing I do know, the only thing I can write about, is how profoundly this guy bugs me. He's like...okay, wow, I just realized this, but he behaves onstage quite a bit like John Belushi in The Blues Brothers. Which is admittedly a favorite movie of mine. The difference is, Belushi's playing a character, while Taylor is supposedly playing himself. How did it take four months for me to connect those dots? Taylor ascends his perch behind the judges, and of course, Paula gets her face on camera by turning around to dance. Much as I hate him, he's showing Katharine up in every aspect here. The crowd is into him more anyway, just as a predisposition, but he did more to engage them, with the voice and the ancillary bullshit. I can't fault the guy for giving the people what they want, is where I ultimately come out on Taylor Hicks. There is literally nothing left for the judges to say about Taylor. I mean, Taye Diggs loves him! How can you improve upon that? Randy gives Taylor props for making a Stevie Wonder song his own. I'm supposed to drink now, right? Is it wrong that I've already been drinking for several hours? Taylor giddily pumps his fist at this unexpected development. Randy likes him?! Where did that come from? Randy proclaims the performance a "hot one" and Taylor "woo"s, as he tends to do at times like these. Paula somehow thinks her island-striped dress matches Taylor's "Velvet Eggplant" look, and she seems quite impressed by this. Then she raves about Taylor's dumb dancing and stands up and plays to the audience and seal claps and does everything but toss him the bra she's not wearing. Simon takes the necessary shot at the jacket but otherwise can't complain about the performance, and he gives "round one" to Taylor. Ryan conducts his chat from the platform behind the judges, because that's Taylor's own private grandstand, as it were. He and Taylor make one last sad bid for the family values vote, noting that Taylor's brother was the one who urged him to try out for the show. Dudes, he's going to win. Calm down with the "just folks" stuff. Before they kick it to commercial, Taylor gives a very half-hearted triple "Soul Patrol" that makes me wonder if he's just massively OCD and that's why he always has to say it three times. Or perhaps that's just the incantation he needs to speak every twenty minutes, lest his face revert back to its true sixty-year-old form.
Ryan reads the numbers as the crowd goes crazy. This competition is fucking over. And so is tonight's show! Almost! Everybody, to the rundown! Katharine setting the bar low and stepping over it on "Black Horse." Katharine having her one moment of perfection on "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Katharine conceding defeat on "My Destiny." Taylor playing the part of the Giant Purple People Eater on "Living for the City." Taylor sounding like crap on "Levon." And Taylor winning American Idol on "Do I Make You Proud?" Taylor and Katharine briefly clasp hands as Ryan implores the viewing audience to vote one final time.Before signing off, Ryan introduces the show's "anthem" for this year. The kiss-off song for all eliminated contestants. Now, it's the kiss-off song for you, the viewer. Aw, that's sweet. It's Daniel Powter, live and onstage, with "Bad Day." You know, Daniel Powter is not an unattractive man, and Lord knows the piano thing adds to the appeal, but the stupid hat thing is a hindrance, I'm not going to lie. Anyway, Daniel plays the special sad boy/girl acoustic version of the song, because what will we do with our lives now that the show's over??? FOX would like you to watch Hell's Kitchen, but...come on. As the song plays, the season's highlights play on the big screen, for the 73rd time this season. I will never get tired of Garet Johnson jumping around after he got his golden ticket. See if you remember any of these names: Stevie Scott? David Radford with his cute audition sideburns? Ukrainian Rhapsody? The Fighting Kissing O'Donahues? The applause is in direct proportion to how long each contestant stayed on the show, so Taylor and Kat and Elliott and Chris get the loudest cheers. Crazy Dave. Scary Brace-Face. Paris and her Sounds of Grandma-ness. That dude with the Randy and Paula DVD. The girl who tried to slam the hydraulic door. Hee, that's always going to be funny. Pickler. Covais. Tucker. Elliott crying, natch. The crowd pops a bit at The Manly Hugging of Ace and Chris, though they'll really get their money's worth for that on Wednesday. Cowboy Garet by the strange and new Pacific Ocean. Then we take a tour of the fallen finalists from Melissa through Elliott. My VCR cut out for a few seconds somewhere along the way, and I'm hoping that's where Ayla Brown and Will Makar were featured, because as my gone-too-soon favorites, they deserved to get their props somewhere.
So while Powter's still singing and I'm feeling nostalgic and it's my last recap of the season, I'd like to thank everybody for reading. It was a lot of fun, even when it wasn't, thank you very much five-hour programming weeks. Big huge thanks to Sars for offering me the job and only laughing a little when I took it. ["That you heard, anyway. But check it, check it: you worked it out, dawg." -- Sars] And wild and crazy thanks to Jacob, who was the best tag team partner I could have possibly asked for. Thanks to everyone who emailed me all season, especially the ones who reminded me that Natalie Merchant didn't write "Because the Night," because everyone deserves a good baptism, even if you're not religious. As for you, American Idol, I'll see you season, you bitch. And time, I'll be ready.