This week on Face Off…
I don’t even want to write this week because 1.) I am well aware that these recaps are terrrrrrrribly uninteresting, 2.) this week was particularly uninteresting to watch, and 3.) I am sleepy and lazy.
So, short but sweet?!
EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS EPISODE MADE ME UNCOMFORTABLE. I am a white person who is trying to not be racist. I don’t think of myself as racist and I know that I don’t knowingly feel or think racist things, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do or say or think stupid shit all the time. Being a good person, or at the very least trying to be a good person, is about awareness and checking your shit at ALL TIMES. And anytime a bunch of white people go to a Non-White Cultural Place I get REAL NERVOUS. Appropriation is a thing! And white people are fucking terribly guilty of it all the time. And I try really hard not to be!
I don’t deserve cookies for this, to be clear.
So all of this going there and watching people perform their cultural ceremony and then being like, “OKAY LET’S MAKE SOMETHING ~INSPIRED~ BY THIS NOW!” just makes me purely nervous. So I am just going to throw down and say up front: this was probably appropriative, it was probably stereotypical, and I hate that it’s still so easy to do that and that people are totally unaware of it. And I am not educated enough on Chinese culture to discuss it further than that. So I won’t.
That being said, this episode was B-O-R-I-N-G and I almost fell asleep. Like, I like these people quite a bit because they all seem pretty human and non-dramatic and that’s GR8. But it clearly doesn’t make for particularly compelling television. The entire ep was devoted to the team challenge of making an interpretation of a New Year’s dragon and it just wasn’t compelling at all.
The highlights were Derek being like, “I DRAW A LOT OF DRAGONS” which is the most duh statement ever. YOU ARE A TATTOO ARTIST IN MIAMI, DEREK, OF COURSE YOU DRAW A LOT OF DRAGONS.
And then Alana hacked her thumb open so badly that she had to leave the campus to go get stitches. Well done, you neck-breakingly ditzy disaster.
Other than that I can’t remember anything. I wasn’t even impressed with anyone’s work?! Like, that’s how bad this ep was. When they showed the preview last week, I thought it’d be pretty good since the make-up had to survive the dance, but it was totally anticlimactic. Snoozeville.
UHHHHHHHHHH. I guess Derek and Tommy deserved to be the top look? It looked good up close and was solidly executed, it was just not that new or interesting. It looked like a make-up version of the traditional Chinese dragon costume. And while it was well done, it wasn’t very inventive. Alana and Laura’s was REALLY CREEPY. Nicole and Rod’s costume was really pretty and theirs moved the best, by far. Everything else was just so meh.
I don’t even care that Eric went home! My girlfriend was REALLY SAD though. When he and Derek hugged she got weirdly emotional and was like, “HIS BROTHER HAS TO LEAVE AND THEY WON’T EVEN BE ABLE TO TALK*.” and made this weird strangled sad noise. It was awful. It was obviously going to be Eric or Jason since both Roy and Sarah have previously done such good work, so even that was boring.
MEHSVILLE, POPULATION: FACE OFF.
*Assuming it works like last season where they had no outside contact during the competition.
