So You Think You Can Dance recap: Betting It All

(Sniffles) There sure was (gasp) a lot (gulp) of tears (rapid inhales of breath) last night (rubs at eyes), huh? (Stops, takes several deep breaths, centers self, starts sobbing again, steps away from the keyboard, centers self again, blows nose, returns to writing) So You Think You Can Dance‘s Vegas Week has always been a brutal, emotional, and infuriating Bataan Death March of auditions, winnowing nearly 200 dancers down to a TV-friendly 20, and last night’s Vegas Week episode brought the drama on all levels. Some superlative dancers faltered just once and found themselves starring in their own SYTYCD mini-episode of ”Walking Out the Door While Talking to the Camera As Sappy Music Plays Me Home.” Others continually screwed up and were given reprieve several times over, only to be cut at the end. And some made it to the very last stage largely on the sheer power of a well-fitting skimpy dance outfit. Well, okay, I’m only thinking of one specific dancer for each of these categories, but you get the idea.

And such is life as a fan of a reality competition show on the Fox network. Executive producer Nigel Lythgoe told me flat out last year that he’s ”casting” the Top 20, and that he doesn’t ”always pick the best dancers,” so of course some questionable cuts are to be expected. Like, let’s just call it now, the highly mysterious dismissal of Natalie Reid. I’ll grant you that there was a marked contrast between her rehearsal performance and her actual performance of Sonya Tayeh’s jazz routine — while the former, done with BFF Brandon Bryant, was near perfection, she danced for the judges with her new partner like someone had just let rip a massive fart and she was still overcome with the giggles about it. And yet Natalie’s unfocused dancing still wasn’t nearly the kind of stiff, bumfuzzled mess that befell Gabi Rojas in both the Tabitha and Napoleon D’Umo hip-hop and the Sonya jazz number. But Natalie was the one sent home with barely an explanation other than she somehow didn’t live up to expectations, while Gabi was first passed along on the strength of her initial solo after a disastrous hip-hop routine, and then given the chance to dance for her life after her robotic jazz, a chance Natalie equally deserved but never received.

The whole interlude left a bitter taste in my mouth and the feeling that far more went down with both women than we were privy to on the show. Perhaps Nigel and Co. were just put out that Natalie’s performance for them was sub par compared with her performance during rehearsals. (Earlier in the recap, Adam wrote: ”Natalie’s unfocused dancing still wasn’t nearly the kind of stiff, bumfuzzled mess that befell Gabi Rojas.” He will now allude to that sentence while discussing the producer’s apparent lack of confidence in the audience’s short term memories.) Or perhaps the judges cut Gabi more slack for her stiff dancing because she has rheumatoid arthritis — an affliction, by the way, that didn’t come up once in an episode filled with reminders of what had happened two minutes previous, let alone nutshell bios of castoff dancers like “football coach’s son Travis Prokop” and “widow Talia Rickards.”

NEXT: The big and small wonderful moments from last night

And then there was Caitlin Kinney, who was asked to dance for her life after Mia Michaels’ annual gauntlet of a contemporary routine, and even then she only made it to the next stage by the skin of her teeth. Or, perhaps, just her ample amounts of skin, period, given that Nigel voted her through even though he dismissed her solo as ”old fashioned.” How else to explain how Caitlin managed to make it to the final round while her seemingly more talented and marginally less model-esque sister Megan got cut?

Other than the wildly inconsistent ways the show treated these three women, I actually felt like this was a pretty ridiculously fun two hours of TV. It was there in small moments, like judge Debbie Allen mouthing ”shut up!” while watching Alex Wong’s scorching solo that started Vegas Week off. Or a random dancer explaining to the camera that the ice-pack in his hand ”is what happens when you get kicked in the face…by yourself.” Or judge Adam Shankman becoming so tickled by Phillip Chbeeb’s inability to stop popping while dancing his ballroom routine. Or a near-broken Brandon Bryant quietly confiding that getting through his jazz audition was ”really hard after seeing Natalie go.” Or Ryan Kasprzak joking that perhaps baked beans weren’t the smartest thing to feed to dancers about to attempt a Mia Michaels routine. Or Mia then getting Ryan’s brother Evan to ”flee hop” his way off the stage. Or Cat Deeley coaxing a smile out of a nerve-wracked Tony Bellissimo waiting to dance for his life. Or Nigel then starting Tony off by exclaiming, ”Breathe! Focus! Last chance city!”

And it was there in far bigger moments, like when Debbie Allen told Tony that he’d indeed made it to the next round, and his fellow dancers roared with approval while the gangly, earnest 20-year-old completely lost it on stage. Or the audition group led by Ryan Kasprzak called Nerdography, which to my eye delivered the only truly entertaining group number out of the whole lot by actually telling a story, and indeed brought nostalgic tears to Adam Shankman’s eyes. (Which Nigel promptly began mocking, causing Shankers to hurl back at Nigel the most unexpectedly satisfying line of the night: ”Don’t you make fun of me, you English bastard!”) Or Nobuya Nagahama’s wrenching testimonial to his dancing teachers. Or Mia repeatedly announcing that she is ”a cutter,” and clearly meaning it both figuratively and literally. Or, for that matter, the day Mia’s elfin albino hair was shaped like an actual knife.

Even (most of) the harder cuts made sense to me. Tapper Eric ”Silky” Moore’s final solo was some pretty weak tea, especially for someone who was talking up his dancing-for-his-life abilities well into the night before. And while tapper Bianca Revels managed to give her Broadway performance some unmistakable showmanship (er, I mean showomanship), when I watched it a second time it was pretty clear in the wide shots that her dancing didn’t have the fully expressive snap that many of the other women possessed. (Also, her I’m-not-coming-back-to-this-show-again attitude, while understandable, was also total bunk. )

NEXT: Did you think you just missed Kuponohi’ipoi’s scene? Not really.

I was indisputably happy to see that the producers managed to work in screen time for pretty much everyone they’d highlighted during the auditions episodes, with the most notable exception for me being Kuponohi’ipoi Aweau, who appeared to have made it all the way to the final 32 without much more than a blink’s worth of screen time. I certainly do hope, however, that we’ll get to see much more of the final solos than the hyper-edited montage we got last night, which played like someone had hit fast-forward on the DVR remote. I am worried about Ryan Kasprzak’s decision to whip out the whoopee cushion again, especially after seeing that glimpse of the brothers standing together before the judges on the promo for tonight’s reveal of the Top 20, suggesting that both aren’t gonna make it. I can feel my outrage gears warming up for a rant about that possible injustice already.

You know what else is unveiling this week, by the by? That’s right, the start of EW.com’s SYTYCD Prediction Challenge! Like the insanely popular Idol Prediction Challenge, y’all will be able to stack up your So You Think You Can Dance prognostications against those of yours truly, along with fellow EW staffers and SYTYCD obsessives Annie Barrett and Alynda Wheat.

The game will go live on Friday, so be sure to keep your eyes out for cannon fodder on tonight’s big reveal of the Top 20 so you can start percolating over which guy and which girl will be sent home. How many in that list, do you think, will we be meeting essentially for the first time? (Bear in mind, of course, that Season 3 winner Sabra had barely been featured before making the Top 20.) Which dancers do you think are absolute locks for the Top 20, or, at least, should be? And concerning Vegas Week, was I alone in thinking Mary Murphy’s lips looked especially, um, full figured last night? And did you find it as ridiculously adorable as I did when Cat Deeley snuggled up against a weeping Tony Bellissimo, giggling that ”I love it when fully grown men cry,” and then Tony sheepishly flexed his arm? (Adorable, says I!)

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