By Joe R.
Previously on Shear Genius, freakishly long hair was styled, though not cut, because we're apparently into coddling the tragically coiffed these days. Then Matthew was sent home to be with his beautiful wife and the sun that shines from her ass.
Jaclyn welcomes the stylists and congratulates Charlie on his 17th win of the season. It's weird how Charlie's gone from tedious to kinda funny to serious threat to win in the span of three weeks. He's got immunity this week, which Nekisa finds annoying. I'm sure Kim Kardashian finds the fact that Nekisa is stealing her look annoying, but you don't hear her bitching about it. The Gollum-mouthed Roy Teeluck (seriously, it looks like he just bit into a giant ball of ink) will be the guest judge on the short-cut challenge (and the elimination challenge tomorrow). That challenge will be to start styling one woman's hair, then at various intervals switch clients with another stylist, choosing to continue that stylist's plan or not. They'll be judged on the head of hair they end up with when time runs out. So it's high-stakes Hot Potato (or Hot Po-tah-to if you're Charlize Theron). Paulo, whose sense of self-satisfaction has become so massive that it's weighted down his hair, low-flow-showerhead-style, interviews that this offers a great opportunity for sabotage. The stylists pick models, with Charlie intentionally picking a woman with steel wool hair (and unruly steel wool at that) in the hope that by starting with her, he won't end up with her.
Daniel interviews that the blonde model Meredith chose had colorization issues, which handily ties into Jaclyn's instruction that the stylists must color hair in the first round. GO! There's a lot going on, so I'm just going to sum up the high points: Meredith decides to dye her straw-head red, which is totally scandalous, and which sends Daniel into a tizzy when he gets switched to her. Charlie gives props to Meredith's balls. Oh, yeah, the way the switching goes, all the stylists end up with their original models for the final round. So Charlie ends up with his wooly-headed menace, whose unruly mane Dee has kindly straightened. Dee does the best job keeping cool in the situation, though bonus points to Charlie for taking Paulo's particularly weepy model into a time-wasting "therapy session" without being even a little jerky towards her. Gail -- there's a Gail on this show? -- gets slammed by the other stylists in interviews for being kind of blah and unsure of herself.