Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | 44 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT Fast Forward, Fall Back
By M. Giant | Season 23 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.03.2013
Jamal's opera-face isn't quite enough to get him through his first attempt, given that even Ally can tell he's not singing the right words. Back to the drawing board for him too. Ally takes up the position, and her clear soprano would be almost refreshing after the two guys, if she could sing at all. She barely makes it two lines before the Austrian Simon Cowell cuts her off. Danny observes that Tim's been downstairs for a long time, and we visit him in the music room with an instructor who is becoming increasingly desperate. He advises Tim to imagine himself as Justin Timberlake, then as an opera singer, then to try singing in a child's voice while lying on the ground, while marching in place, and while slapping his own cheeks. Meanwhile, a portrait of some other composer smirks out into the room like a condescending 18th-century version of The Most Interesting Man In The World. The other Tim is almost ready to go, and when he arrives in the rehearsal hall, Marie thinks he can be the first to get this "because of your weird memory. Just do it." He gets pretty far into the first verse before the director has had enough, but Marie keeps her comments to Tim positive, at least for her. "You made it further than anyone else, so go fix it and hurry up and come back." "Yeah, Tim, go fix it now!" Jason orders in a mockingly Marie-like manner. And why not? Marie doesn't give a crap.
As promised, Nicky's first attempt exposes her as the worst singer yet, and on their way back, her instructor says she needs to work on the melody. Which is true, in the sense that she needs to recognize that there is one. Travis, meanwhile, has decided with his coach to take the arrangement down an octave in order to keep it within the top of his range. Of course, his bottom range has a limit as well, so it sounds pretty weird when he heads upstairs and basically belches the first verse. But I suppose that asking the Vienna Boys Choir to just take it down a fifth is not something that is, quite strictly speaking, done. He survives the first verse solo, the kids take the breakdown, and then Travis blessedly returns to his normal range to bring it on home. This time he gets all the way to the end, and the director stands up from the piano and says, "That was pretty good." Coming from the director of the Vienna Boys Choir, that's…well, a total lie. But the ER docs are still the first team to finish the Roadblock. Now they have to go to what the clue calls Schloss Schönbrunn and Phil calls Schönbrunn Palace. They're soon hopping in a taxi outside as Nicole tells him he was awesome. Unlike the director of the Vienna Boys Choir, I think she means it.