Dancing With The Stars: Week 5

An hour and a half of dance, with the big news being that four all-new dance styles were introduced this week. Salsa, Hustle, West Coast Swing, and Jitterbug were all seen for the first time ever on the show, which meant that some of the professional dancers were performing way outside of their comfort zones. This seemed to really impact a few of them. Since we're now down to a manageable number of dancers, I'll go one by one:


LANCE:
Lance was performing West Coast Swing with the US West Coast Wing champion, his partner Lacey. You would think that this would mean a fantastic routine, but, sadly, the only one who looked fantastic was Lacey, who pulled out all the stops to showcase her talent. The judges called them on the fact that Lance was more of a setpiece than a partner, and downgraded him accordingly. Also, Lance lost his balance and kind of half fell down at one point, but the judges barely mentioned it.

TONI:
Also doing West Coast Swing was Toni and her partner Alec. She was fairly good, but as usual, she was much too hesitant and careful. Her performances have been consistently middling. Once Cloris goes, she's going to be hard-pressed to stick around (or at least...that's what I thought at the time).




SUSAN:
Susan is another performer who is decent, but ho-hum. Besides being the worst dressed this week, with big gold boots that didn't quite match her fringe-laden outfit, she seemed a little lost a couple of times. Even the lift (which is apparently allowed in the Hustle) was boring. The judges didn't seem to be impressed either.




WARREN:
Warren's dance started off slow this week, but then it just got better and better. Something about the requirements of the Hustle, combined with an unflattering top, made it look like his arms didn't have enough space to move around his belly. But when the pace quickened and he swung Kym around like a rag doll, all nitpicks were quickly forgotten. He got a standing O from the crowd.



CLORIS:
Cloris seemed to continue her hard work from last week, and turned in at least a passable Salsa. But she's still miles behind the others. I don't know how the judges could rank her as highly as they ranked Lance, but there you go. She was funnier than usual with Samantha backstage, talking about "something ho...something ho...Oh, yeah, a skanky ho!"




MAURICE:
Maurice's partner Cheryl was hard hit by the new Salsa dance, and she struggled to teach it as she was learning. We got to see her bitching angrily at Maurice when she got too frustrated. I was expecting a disaster when they hit the floor, but it was actually very good. Judge Carrie Ann Inaba was annoying as hell when she beckoned Maurice over to give him a congratulatory hug. Tom looked annoyed, and didn't give her any extra time for her comments, so her critique was basically just the hug.

BROOKE:
Brooke got top score for the fifth week in a row, and she's starting to look like an unbeatable favorite. Derek confessed to having problems learning the Jitterbug, but it turned out to be extremely fun and high energy. I don't like Derek one little bit, but he was spot on when he said that the Jitterbug should look like a cartoon. Theirs did, and it was great.



CODY:
I read somewhere that the problem with Julianne is that she is so watchable that she tends to draw attention away from her partner. Well, that was doubly true this week, when she put on a Lucille Ball costume for their version of the Jitterbug. Their routine was really fantastic, all slapstick and comedy while keeping up a manic energy. Any other week, this would have been the top score, but as it was, they came in second. That was good enough for the judges to request it for the encore performance.


Here are the scores:

Brooke: 29 (+3)
Cody: 28 (+5)
Maurice: 27 (+7 = most improved)
Warren: 25 (+3)
Susan: 22 (-2)
Toni: 22 (no change)
Cloris: 21 (-1)
Lance: 21 (-5 = biggest slide)

During the elimination night, the main attraction was a musical performance called "Dances of the Decades" or something like that. The idea was to recreate top-flight dancing from the 30s, 60s, 80s and "the future." No Dippindots in the future bit, if you were wondering. It was pretty cool, with the black-and-white-seeming 30s portion being the best, but they said it took 6 months and 20,000 man hours to create? Jesus. It wasn't that good.

They gave us a bottom two again, and wonder of wonders, Cloris was not in the bottom two! Neither was the other low scorer for the week, Lance. The bottom two were, instead, Susan and Toni, with Toni getting the boot. This means that Cloris and Lance both pulled more audience votes than Susan, so Susan needs to pull some really good judge scores to stick around.

The Standings

The name of the game this week is -70, +6. Everyone except for Paul got the +6 for correctly predicting that Brooke would get the top score from the judges (everyone got Cloris right, so no points awarded there). Five out of 8 of us had Toni winning the whole season, which means that all of those people dropped a big 70 points. The big winner of the week was Dawn, who lost only 10 points on the Toni surprise elimination, and thereby jumped from 7th to 5th. I increased my lead at the top of the pool, while everyone else pretty much tread water relative to each other. That's bad news for Paul, who is so far behind the rest of the pack that he can just barely see Rick's ass.

1st: Matt 955 (-40 +6)
2nd: Mike 931 (-70 +6)
3rd: Experts 930 (-30 +0)
4th: Carl 902 (-70 +6)
5th: Dawn 877 (-10 +6)
6th: Kim 862 (-50 +6)
7th: Lisa 828 (-70 +6)
8th: Rick 825 (-70 +6)
9th: Paul 778 (-70 +0)

Good luck, everyone!