Previously: Hipsters in love are worse than regular style. Jes showed her unique style, Johnny showed his less-unique but still very strong talent. Jackie wanted more than she ever could explain. Karen went home to cook you a meal and beg for your affection in the most hackneyed possible words she could think of.
MORNING
Nick is, let's just ease into the shocks one by one, not a morning person.
Nick: "Dude I had this depressing dream that Karen went home, but then I woke up and it was real."
Scotty: "Usually people tell that story when somebody died, like their grandma or whatever. I guess vague, sentimental game show contestants are similar."
Everybody: "I wish Melissa would go home. She is the worst."
Nick: "I wish more that Jackie would leave. She is all about Jackie. There is never a dull moment in her life, or a moment that doesn't bear telling the universe about."
ibid.: Is half the time quite a cocksucker, but he is never, ever wrong.
Jackie, verbatim, as proof: "I'm dressed as a warrior today! Ready to redeem myself!"
Everybody: Indulges her.
Sonyae: Ululates at a high frequency. Possibly this in support of Warrior Jackie; it is equally possible she's just working on her hook for today.
Melissa: This is the first thing Jackie's said that makes sense to her, probably.
Theme: Jackie is in this to win this, this week.
Implication: Jackie's going to get it smack in the box this week.
I must say, I'm worried. I have fallen for old Jackie Tohn, as bizarre as it is to admit. It's kind of a relief, because I don't like hating people. Even when it's richly deserved, which as it turns out maybe it wasn't, in this case. And plus -- this is on me, I am an idiot, it's a known fact -- but I honestly think that part of it is that I had it in my head that she was from Silver Lake on the west coast, and not Long Island Silver Lake, which I've never heard of. Long Island Jackie makes total sense and is lovable. Silver Lake CA, that shit is way too much to deal with.
Isn't that weird? I'm sure there's other things like that, like, hipsters in Dallas are way dumber and more service industry-oriented than hipsters in Austin, which makes them hella easier to take as hipsters but way less interesting to be around as people.
Perhaps I need to stop using that word with this show, but I don't know any other words. And even if I tried, Johnny would still just be like this open dare from the universe.
HOOK CHALLENGE
Rapping. About superpowers.
What's to add to that?
Guest judge this week is Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins, who seems like a sweet enough fellow. The kids all go crazy about this, because they are part of this industry and need to know who these people are, so I guess he's important. Michael Jackson, the Black-Eyed Peas, and Lady Gaga. Quite a heady mixture, that particular mélange. I don't know that I would ever admit to people that I worked with the Black-Eyed Peas, but at least the other two are music.
Johnny: "He's the ish!"
Johnny: "Now there's the real danger of looking like a douche tool."
(Rewind less than one second.)
Johnny: "He's the ish!"
Johnny: "Now there's the real danger of looking like a douche tool."
SEE HOW THAT WORKS?
Brian makes that face he makes, and they all grab notebooks and split off to do some songwriting. I do not want to see these motherfuckers rap. I do not want to see these motherfuckers rap. I do not want to see these motherfuckers rap.
Sonyae: "Much like every other week, this week's musical style is central to what Sonyae is about."
Let's play a game while they work. What would your superpower be? I would like the superpower of, Everybody Does What I Say Or Else.
Alternately, I would like the power of figuring my shit out without a bunch of foolin' around. Like say you are bad with money, you would just sit down and turn on this power and boom: Ten years of therapy in one second, no learning curve, no weird drunk Amazon blitzes in the middle of the night, no post-college collection-agency shame calls. You're just good with money after that, the end.
Oh, I just hate the taste of broccoli, you say, you sit down and flick the switch and then boom: Broccoli is delicious. Chock full of vitamins and nutrients like always, only it doesn't taste like the self-hatred of a gay evangelical pastor anymore.
Doesn't that sound like an awesome power? "Stop sleeping with guys who have girlfriends," you say firmly into the mirror, and then the thing you know, boom: Married to Neil Patrick Harris and nobody's smashing in your car windows or hacking into your email or getting knocked up just to annoy you. None of this "once bitten"/"fool me once" nonsense: Bite me zero. Fool me zero.
EARLY GUESSES
Jackie: Superpower of Teleportation, for the Road is her Home.
Sonyae: Superpower of People Recognizing her Swerve without Prompting.
Jes: Superpower of Expert Level Harpistry.
Nevin: Superpower of Being Appreciated For What He Contributes to Humanity.
Melissa: Superpower of Aloha Concertina Shake-Weight Symposium.
Brian: Superpower of Elvissing.
Blessing: Superpower of Gospel Superstardom Without Effort.
Scotty: Superpower of Greta Garbo & Monroe, Deitrich & DiMaggio.
Karen: Superpower of Self-Respect Without the Need for Approval or Validation.
Amber: Superpower of Having a Recognizable Genre.
Johnny: Superpower of Catching in the Rye.
Nick: Superpower of Mommy & Daddy Finally Love Me So I Guess I Can Just Calm the Hell Down.
HOOKING II
Nick: Fully hating on Jackie for practicing, despite the fact that everybody is practicing, because that's what's happening.
Jackie: "I am not a rapper. This should be painful for everybody."
Melissa: "You know who I love? Tupac."
Scotty: "Oh girl, you gotta see this."
Melissa: Rapping in this totally ridiculous, awesome way about how her superpower is making you fall in love with her and marry her so she doesn't die alone in Hawaii as the insane cat lady she clearly is.
Scotty: "It's almost worth not tossing her in front of the bus because she's so reliably trainwrecky. But I am going to if I can."
Jes & Johnny: Painfully white. Zero percent of a clue.
I knew this was going to give me hives and now look: Hives. Spreading up my neck. The only thing worse than watching people sing is watching people rap. It makes me want to hurl myself out of a window, every time. I might not make it through the actual hooks.
Johnny: Some mess about how superheroes aren't cool, but video games are.
HOOKTIME
Melissa: Singing "In An Hour," about the power to make a man love you instantly.
Jackie: Kind of worried until it turns out that Melissa is not actually rapping, just being a weird mom like usual.
Everybody, even the judges: Can't help but laugh.
Amber: Her song is about controlling the elements, which leads to metaphors about "quiet storms" and the like.
Nick: "I like watching Amber but not listening to her. She is like Baywatch."
Jes: It's the worst. "Rapture" amounts of bad.
Johnny: "This is the best!"
Jackie: Goes meta with a song about wishing she was a super-good rapper.
Nick: Once again, literally he talks through her performance about how much he hates her. This personal thing he's got going for her, it is not normal. It has an unconscious component. If they worked together in an office or something, it would get one of them fired.
Scotty: "She kept talking about how she was a cracker."
Jewel: "I loved the lyrics."
Nick: "I take that personally! For no reason!"
My Ridiculous: I can't even.
Nick: Commercial and contemporary as usual.
Scotty: Awesome. Really beautiful.
Sonyae: Duh, her song is about hurting boys and having no feelings. You could see that coming from super space.
Johnny: Bleep-bloop. Can't do it. Simply cannot do it. Caught a glimpse of him folding his arms at the end, as is the custom. Almost kept fast-forwarding to the end of the episode, like a stock-car ride into the sun, just to get away from this entire bloody-bones horror concept. I would rather watch them strip down and raw-dog each other for an hour than go through what we are currently witnessing.
Nick: "It was like John Mayer's cousin, rapping."
The Reality: It was John Mayer's cousin. Rapping.
Everybody feels all weird and group-therapy about it, because that was a fucking killing floor. If this were summer camp they'd be like, "Do the silliest thing you can think of!" and this is precisely how everybody would feel afterwards: Hollowed out, ashamed, but also less ashamed than previously. And I would be dead. A dead corpse.
TOP HOOKERS
Jackie comes in third for shooting the moon, as it turns out. I hope Nick cries. I really feel like it could make him cry this time. They compare her to Missy Elliott and you can actually see Nick's heart breaking inside him.
Second place is Sonyae, because her lyrics are getting better every week. The man with the round teeth explains that her lyrics are relatable, because being a woman can be weird.
The first-place winner was, once again, Johnny. I will take that on faith. I hope he informs us in a flesh-crawlingly awkward way about how important it is that he keep winning... Yep.
Johnny: "I'm really growing in this competition."
And so on. Bonus Ugh Points for saying not only "not gonna lie" but following that up with "NGL," so we know he's hip to the tweets or whatever. I think what Johnny is, now that I'm zeroing in, I think that what he is, is a borderline-neurotypical expert programmer who consciously decided to become normal one day -- ending up at John Mayer by mirroring the masculinity of the relatively small crowd of young men around him -- which is probably my favorite kind of person on earth, but then also you have the effect of this troubling journey getting further interrupted by becoming blazing hot in a very short amount of time.
So that necessary bullying element, that turns the boys into men, gets cut off at just the wrong time because now he is surrounded by people who get confused about who's cool and who's not, and they are willing to indulge and laugh at the jokes, whatever they are, so he has no way of applying his algorithm to decide which jokes are funny, because now all the jokes are funny. Success assured, without regard to the variables.
This is where hipsters come from -- the generational stresses of being caught between '90s irony and millennial earnestness until you barely even have permission to like exist without feeling nervous about it -- but it's also why the thing with Jes: Absent the pushback of his formative years, he really has no way of determining what is actual, so he's going off some very faulty instincts and whatever he remembers from films he loved as a youth, such as Joe Vs. The Volcano, for how people interact with each other. That's my theory this week.
Back on the show, congratulations to Johnny for his walking-through-walls superhero rap, and the grim knowledge that we will now be watching him perform it for the rest of the hour, which just got mighty long.
THE GOOD NEWS
Is that we're not actually rapping this week, but blurring the lines just like Run DMC and Aerosmith did, if you are from olden times and remember that. Against Jes's wishes, Johnny chooses "Scotaaaaay" for his first teammate, while Sonyae cutely invites Nick because he's a good collaborator and brings the rap-rock thing. Jackie picks Brian, correctly, because they are a great team. Johnny picks Jes, of course, so let's talk about that for a million years and their "feelings" for each other some more. Sonyae's second pick is Melissa, because nobody has figured out that Amber's aiming for urban when she works, because you wouldn't know that from her music. So poor Amber ends up with Jackie and Brian, which boo-hoo, that's going to be awesome.
Johnny: "Can you think of any famous walls?"
Jes: "You know, like, emotional walls..."
Johnny: "-- Emotional walls! Jinx, we're so in sync."
Scotty: "Barf. Let's sing opera in our song."
He sings this totally beautiful take on the hook and it sounds like a superhero taking flight.
Scotty: Explains that same thing. This is going to be great, actually.
Brian: "Jackie, what is this song about?"
Jackie: "Being white and wishing you are black."
Amber: "This is within my wheelhouse."
Brian: "Yeah, I think we're all on the same page here."
They decide on doo-wop for the other element; Brian has decided that this is Amber's genre. Amber's like Sure, whatever.
Sonyae: "Sonyae's song is mostly about Sonyae. Sonyae would like Nick to write it."
Nick: "What about like rap-rock?"
Sonyae: "What a great idea you just had."
Melissa: Wanders around being a weird old bitch like usual.
Nick & Sonyae: Fight about something, who knows what.
Melissa: "Who gives a shit about any of this, really."
Scotty stresses about their timeframe and starts putting together this beautiful track; Johnny keeps coming up with "brilliant" lyrics that Jes just so totally loves, and Scotty is just grossed out. This is because it is gross, but the show seems to feel like he's feeling third-wheeled when honestly they're just ignoring the task so they can be annoying.
Brian: "I'm not interested in doing novelty music, obviously, because that's embarrassing. So what if it was beautiful?"
Jackie & Amber: Coming up with pretty creative ideas that play the music off the lyrics, like talking about having off timing and then the music goes off, or talking about bad rhymes and then spitting a bad one. This song is going to be so annoying.
Nick: The usual.
Melissa: Tries to have like one idea.
Sonyae: "Melissa, if you could just shut the fuck up."
Good, be mean to her. After that "simple brain" shit last week there will never be a problem with that.
PUNCH-DRUNK SMUG
Everybody's getting dizzy and giddy and confused because they're on totally restricted time for this doomed exercise and it's getting late at night and the trios have all broken down into pairs and extras:
Scotty: "I should honestly just shut the fuck up -- STFU, as Johnny would say -- because he's totally turning this into a stage for his gender performance."
Melissa: "I should honestly just shut the fuck up because Sonyae's going to punch me pretty soon."
Brian: "I checked out of this shit literally hours ago because you guys are both wearing capes and won't shut up."
My Ridiculous does a little dance while Amber records her doo-wop riff; they are nervous but maybe it'll be okay.
Back home, Scotty and Nick Vogue together (one of Scotty's best and most favorite things) and Scotty reminds us that Nick's desire to be an asshole is at odds with his not being an asshole. But he is a very good actor, at least, when acting like an asshole. Method. Really believable.
I mean, I get desperately wanting people to like you -- obviously I understand that part of it on a fundamental level -- but then you shoot yourself in the foot by also playing the "I'm an asshole who doesn't give a shit" card. It just seems so inefficient and dumb. It's like, who are you trying to impress? Who is going to somehow be fooled by both things? I say pick your thing and go for it. Look at Jackie: She does desperation and niceness, and it works way better for her.
Jes goes to visit Johnny in his lonely bachelor pad, and they drink wine, and talk about themselves and talk about each other which is really just also talking about themselves. Eventually they drink enough to slur their words and awkwardly flirt in the grodiest saddest hugging. No door-sliding this week, which honestly would have been funny given how much they ended up drinking just to deal with the horrible fact of each other.
AM
Johnny: Still nervous about rapping. Still not-so-secretly convinced he can do no wrong.
Jackie: Dressed like 100% of an asshole. Dressed like a Carrie Brownstein joke about Jackie Tohn.
Team Johnny-Jes-Scotty start with their song about walking through walls. The highlight is Scott's range, then Jes's harmonies with him... And then Johnny puts a knitcap on his head and sleeveless shirt and sings in an urban way, and it's a bloodbath. The track carries it, but if you Baywatch it and just watch Johnny and forget how he normally looks, then you can pretend he's like the scuzzy hot perp on an episode of SVU that turns out to just be a thug. Oh, for Johnny to have played 8-Mile the Pedophile on The Killing. What a different show that might have been.
Team Sonyae-Nick-Melissa sing the song about not having feelings; it's very much a Mary J Blige song, down to Sonyae's costume, but they bring in Nick rap-rocking in the way he does to sing about her feelings also, and even Melissa does her best keyboarding rock-out, and Sonyae's managed to get about three different excellent riffs out of Nick.
Jackie, still lowering herself to his level even if she's not wrong: "Surprise, Nick played Green Day chords and sang like he was strangling loudly."
Team Jackie-Amber-Brian look amazing, given the tux jacket and Jackie's fanny pack and Amber's pretty much stunning looks getting the Billie Holliday glam treatment. The song is an unholy mess, but maybe not in a bad way. You never know with this show. And the important thing is that Nick manages to bitch as usual while still harping on his desire to fuck Amber, so at least his little shitty corner of the world makes sense.
BULL SESH
Hey, let's all talk shit about each other in front of each other. Oh, except for Jackie who's not here for some reason.
Nick: One terrible thing after another.
Jes: Some powerful motherfucking stink-eye in his direction. Worth DVRing, in fact, just to see the faces she makes at this juncture. She looks like she's trying to suck her soft spot inside out.
Sonyae: "Say what you will, but these protestations about Jackie's 'dark side' couldn't be a clearer expression of this shadow-projection complex you've got going on. You've offloaded a lot of unwanted psychological contents onto her, possibly out of fear that you're mirroring her grabs for attention, possibly because you associate her with an attention-hogging or smothering maternal figure -- or simply your own twisted and denying relationship to the anima, from which you clearly derive a lot of your creative power, vide the impossible spiritual life you assign Karen and impossibly negative intentions you assign Jackie, both as a matter of course and sometimes in the same breath, much less the dehumanizing way you've approached Amber from the beginning -- but more likely it's just because you're jealous that she's working the same psychic corner as you and getting paid a lot better for it. She's taken the role you always desire in the group and yet are always denied, due to your uncontrolled self-sabotage and compensatory self-punishment, which causes you to undervalue her talent and get even more confused and irate at the fact that other people appreciate talent which you, subjectively, literally cannot see exists. The fact that she is returning this fire, basically what amounts to spiritual warfare in the Jungian sense, and unconsciously playing into your projection by downplaying your own talent doesn't make her blameless, but it does ensure the bullshit will continue, and you're both suffering for it. So by bringing this up to the group in her absence, you're asking us to cosign it, to ally the objective universe with your perceptions through a democratic vote of your peers, the better to assure yourself that you're correct in your highly tainted perspective of her. But the fact is that none of the rest of us are engaged in this little projection-scenario shadow-dance the two of you are enjoying, which means you both look crazy from out here."
Just kidding! Instead Everybody: Keeps drinking, drinking, staring at Nick, drinking.
BULL SESH II: OFFICIAL
Team Johnny-Jes-Scotty did a bombastic, lovely song about walking through walls. Jes sang high, there was a strong operatic melody, and they started with the hook. Scotty compares the process to giving birth through one's urethra. Nice. The judges talk about the opera thing a little bit, but mostly are unequivocal; the visiting producer loved the music and arrangement from go thanks to Scotty's instinct about making it soar.
Team Nick-Sonyae-Melissa talk about how Sonyae knew exactly what she was doing, including let Nick think he was in charge, and vice versa. Melissa doesn't admit how horrible it was dealing with the two of them, and is super classy about how dynamic they both are. We discuss how honestly Sonyae is the most base-level pop-culture person who combines the catchy LCD and creative twists, which is nice to hear them talk about.
(This means that Jackie-Brian-Amber are in trouble.)
Once again, Johnny wins. Scotty is thrilled because neither Sonyae's well-travelled lyrical roads nor the "super white people" song won; he's sad that Melissa is still there but gives the camera some major shade: "Not for long, trick."
Nick sucks his teeth, and tries once again to get everybody talking about how much we all hate Jackie. They don't go along with that, but they do finally engage in his larger project of talking about how much she goes on and on about herself, which admittedly is a rich trove. Even Jen and Sonyae are like, "The girl has lots of words inside her." The tone is more group-cathartic fun than perhaps the conversation Nick would like to have curated, but we'll see if he can take it darker while the judging continues.
Brian: "Our song was not overtly commercial, but as a novelty, one-hit-wonder type of thing, it's pretty creative."
Jackie: Cannot believe his defense of the team, and thus her, involved the words "one-hit wonder." I have to admit, I'm officially scared now.
Judges: "Okay, but this was not even good comedy. Perhaps some social commentary or something, to let the rest of us in on the joke. White girls who don't know anything about rap do not, as a rule, enjoy songs in the genre of rap."
Jackie: "I... Am at a loss for words. For the first time in my life. Fear is actually happening."
Jewel: "Maybe you should have thought more about our visiting judge's past projects. Absolutely nobody in the history of music is more of a fucking joke than the Black-Eyed Peas, who are essentially Yo Gabba Gabba for drunk stupid people, which is their genius and their triumph. Less can be more."
Jackie: "I do not know what this word 'less' means. We thought we were following his notes about Missy Elliott."
Jewel, teeth gnashing: "Are you comparing yourself to Missy Elliott?"
Jackie: "No ma'am! No I do not! Am not! Forgive me!"
Jewel: "So what the fuck was that?"
Jackie: "Honestly, I think I misunderstood what you liked about the hook."
True, and understandable, but a wrathful Jewel will not be denied.
Jewel: "Your job was to write a hit song. You understood that part, at least?"
Jackie: "Yes."
Jewel: "And did you fucking write a hit song?"
Jackie: "I thought possibly..."
Jewel: "Look into my eyes and tell me honestly that you are so fucking retarded that you thought that song was worthy of existing. That I should not pull out a knife and gut you where you stand. Swear to me in front of all these people that you believe this lie."
Jackie: Tries; fails.
Judges: Loving it. This is one of those shows where you can pause at almost any point throughout a given episode and somebody is making an amazing face.
Then they go after their lyrics, specifically one by beautiful sweet Amber, and the temperature drops even more. The lyric involved a canopy bed, I'll say that. The judges go after her for still not having a recognizable point or genre, with which she has a problem because in fact she is a really good collaborator. She only comes up in these judging sessions as the fall guy, so it seems like she's not doing anything.
under the microscope is My Ridiculous, who designed a lackluster track around a song he thought was stupid from go.
The girls chuck Brian's ass instantly, in a blinding flurry of treachery.
Jewel: "Do you also hate Jackie? Because a little birdie told me everybody hates Jackie."
Brian: "I work well with Jackie. Except for how we keep fucking up."
Jewel: "Jackie, you keep ending up in the B3."
Jackie: "Yeah, and I keep ending up on top in the hook challenges."
Jewel: "So what you're saying is you come up with good ideas and the squander them."
Well, but maybe that's a failing of the show, because the Top Hookers/Team Captains get grilled for the finished product every week, which in terms of leadership makes sense but also gives the other chosen teammembers an umbrella to hide under. A real collaborative effort means everybody is there doing their best. I don't know that Top Hooker should really be seen as a leader in any real sense for the purposes of this final judging.
On the other hand, that means the person who opts out of the losing team each week -- Blessing, Karen in some ways, this week My Ridiculous -- should automatically leave. Which is a problem because... No, that's not a problem. That sounds right to me. In theory. But honestly, I like all three of these dudes and I feel like Jackie's shitty concept shouldn't have won Top Hooker in the first place, because it was setting this team up to fail no matter what, despite having some of the most talented musicians in it. If any other hook had won, you see what I'm saying, we wouldn't be having this discussion. These three people would be on other teams, or even on the same team, dealing with a different hook.
Actually, of all the times for Amber to actually perform the kind of music she likes, whatever that is, this week could have been her week. Brian and Jackie would have kicked ass supporting an Amber hook. They would have gone all Idlewild "Ain't No Other Man" "Hit 'Em Up Style" on it so fast, wouldn't they? Out-Sonyae'd Sonyae. It would have ruled.
But instead, Jackie tried to bunt -- actually wrote a song about how she was incapable of doing this Hook Challenge, overlook me this week if you please -- and ended up the captain of a nearly sunken ship. Maybe her reputation preceded her.
Jewel: "I will not be satisfied until you are in tears once again."
Jackie: "People are bringing it more than I am bringing it, sometimes."
Kara: "So if Jackie made up the mess, and Brian made up the dumb track, then I guess Amber didn't really do anything?"
Brian & Jackie: Chuck Amber's ass instantly in a blinding flurry of treachery.
Amber, to her credit: "Fuck all of you! I am not the invisible girl! This is stupid!"
Jewel: "Be gone, Brian and Jackie. And the pretty one."
Brian: "I will be goddamned if I go home for this stupid song."
BACKSTAGE
Brian: The Monday-morning quarterback thing the boys always do about how you should always make your music "timeless" or whatever, akin to last week's bizarre Johnny/Nick fight about the importance of lyrics and melody.
Jackie: "It's kind of sickening to hear you talk strategy right now since you were dead weight in the session and onstage."
Brian: "Oh, you have no idea the pit of vipers you've just walked into."
Nick: "Finally! My dark plans come to fruition! But too late!"
Scotty: "Sweetie, the consensus is that you're kind of hard to work with because of your whole Never-Shutting-Up problem. Your focus is steamroller-oriented."
Jackie, later: "Shut the fuck up, nobody asked you for your input."
(Actually I am grateful. Scotty has put his finger on Nick's problem with her, possibly; for certain he has nailed why my own emotional relationship with Jackie Tohn has been so tempestuous for so many years now.)
Jackie, in tears: "Well, thanks for informing me of the 'general consensus.'"
Scotty: "It's not me, I'm just saying that you have this reputational handicap in the game show..."
Scotty: Visual frustration that he's being perceived as attacking her and/or speaking for the group, when he -- and we -- know it's Melissa he wants gone. This part was amazing
Scotty, off-camera: "Bitch, I am not coming for you! Don't start with me!"
Nick: Finding it hard to reconcile his nasty glee at all this business versus pretending to be above it all. Also, is wearing a fedora cocked sideways like to make you wanna motherfucking kill him.
Johnny: Intense, uncomfortable, intensely uncomfortable.
When exactly did I fall for Scotty? How odd. He's kind of great.
Jackie: "So who is talking shit about me, then? If not Scotty, who? If not now, when?"
Nick: "I think Sonyae hates Jackie. [Surprise surprise, his second-tier obsessive hate object.] Pretty sure she called you a bitch and said your mother sucks dicks in Jersey."
Sonyae: "The fuck are you talking about? I am way too self-obsessed to worry about anybody else. Whenever Jackie starts talking about herself I just change her name to my name and assume she's talking about me. It's the only way to survive being roommates with her. But also I do that anyway, with everybody, all the time."
Nick: "No, I'm pretty sure you said she has a dark side. Also that you want to fuck Amber and that you hate Sonyae. Pretty sure that was you."
Nick, using a ventriloquist's trick to throw his voice toward a corner: "You're right, Nick. I heard Sonyae hates Jackie too!"
Sonyae: "Seriously, you are so fucking full of shit."
Nick: "Things are getting out of control. Sonyae is acting crazy, you guys!"
Sonyae: "Fine! I will act crazy! You are the worst!"
Nick: "But everybody forgot how I totally just lied about the bullshit I've been up to."
Sonyae: "Well-played, sir. But fighting with me is nothing new, given that you've been attacking me openly since the first episode, so there's not a lot to be gained here as a primary focus for you. One wonders, one muses, if this isn't just a secondary manipulation to split the difference and distract everybody from your increasingly transparent attempts to turn the group against its most talented members. I'd predict that you'll go after Johnny , but we both know you'd never attack a man the way you attack women. Not because you prize them more highly, or respect them more, or even because you hate women more -- you've shown yourself more than willing to project positive attributes onto female subjects just as avidly as you do more negative energy -- but merely because you see women as weaker than yourself, and men as stronger. Your inability to consciously claim your own masculinity is at the root of a lot of your discomfort and aggressive behavior, and a common trouble area among men our age. But then, I suppose, so goes the world. Misogyny arises not from power misused, but only ever power unclaimed and unrecognized. Still slightly less grody than Johnny's whole deal."
Jes & Jackie stare horrified at all of this occurring, like it's a dog they just ran over. The chaos is impressive to behold. Everybody who thought they were on top of this is looking regretful, and everybody who has no idea what's going on -- Johnny -- is staring in abject terror and disgust, and the two people who might have the presence of mind -- Brian and Amber -- are the ones that just managed to get a taste of Jackie's nonexistent "dark side," and thus stay silent.
Ugly, yes, but if you just posit the artiste self-centeredness of these people it's pretty easy to see that Nick is 100% running this table, because he is in the grips of his own personal bullshitty bullshit, which makes it easier to watch for the rest of them but way worse for the watching of him. Because he's not a bad person: I don't believe in evil, I believe in personal misfortune. But that doesn't make it funny or scary to watch, just sad. He's so young and so full of magic and so very, very far from getting there. He is kind of a bummer to watch on TV.
On the network that airs the Real Housewives franchise, I'm saying, Nick is a little upsetting to be dealing with.
IF THIS WERE NEW JERSEY, HE'S HONESTLY AT ABOUT ASHLEY LEVEL
Back to the judges, where Brian's face is once again doing all the trucks you wish it never learned. Kara calls him out for working so hard on the bad track and no lyrics. Jackie took her hook and made troubles with it. Amber's contributions were not a help in any way.
Jewel: "It's not how much you bring to the project, it's the quality of what you bring. Except for this week, where Amber as usual brought nothing that you were able to tell us about, and will thus be punished by beheading. Amber, submit yourself to me. To my authority."
Kind of a bummer that she got kicked for the thing we've been saying since the beginning, that she had no identifiable viewpoint, but out of the three of them she's the one we'll miss the least because we never really met her. I'll miss looking at her, for sure, and she's been good in the sessions. But I can honestly say I don't remember a single thing she actually did.
MOMENTS LATER
Jackie, sobbing: "Back to me, though, it's even sadder that everybody hates me!"
Everybody: "Oh, Jackie."
Nick: "Just to sum up, I would like to say that Jackie is the worst piece of garbage you've ever seen in the universe, and I'd like to put my penis in Amber. In her vagina. Put those two statements together, and I come off outrageously gay. Pass me that eyeliner?"
Amber: "Kara said that my approach to collaboration reminded her of what a nurse might say. That's a compliment, nurses rock. Maybe I missed the point there. Maybe I'm just babbling because reality shows warp your brain for a few months afterward. Maybe I will go be a nurse now. Maybe I will spend some times crying in my canopy bed. Probably I will go back to singing in my preferred genre, Songs."
week: Love songs! Love songs about Johnny and nerds doing it with each other on a hairless hilltop, presumably, but also love songs from Sonyae about boys and feelings and pretending to be hardcore but wanting to be secretly loved, or love songs about the wolves in Hawaii being reincarnated, or love songs about how everybody hates Jackie but one day she will be loved. I don't know, it looks highly messy. This show kind of rules.