Larva Nude Girls!

Foundation Challenge

We open the episode with McKenzie waiting for the facetestants in the lab, which has been filled with a bunch of fanciful hats, and as any of us would expect, this means they're each to pick a hat and, in two hours, create an original character to wear it. The guest judge is Season 7 Ve Neill replacement Lois Burwell, who comes out in a little Tyrolean hat; in the most hilarious moment of the segment, McKenzie compliments the hat, and Lois remarks, "It would be rude not to, wouldn't it, on a hat challenge," and the utterly hatless McKenzie starts to shrug but the camera cuts away from her reaction so quickly that I can barely capture a frame of it.

It is weird that McKenzie wouldn't be given a hat for this; could she really be such a diva that they'd have offered her options and she'd refuse?! Because if that's the case...like, your job is to read cards and look sad when prompting judges to talk about the looks that didn't work for them. Get over yourself.

This goes pretty fast, and the fact that we see the most of Rob and Emily tips you that they're going to be the top looks, but can I just break in here and note that Kelly picked this hat

because of course she did.

Lois likes Rob's...

...because the simplicity of the hat he chose is reflected in his makeup, and she likes the backstory of a "dark Pinocchio" who never got rescued from the whale. Emily's goddess...

...took a huge amount of work to complete in just two hours, and shows a strong grasp of colour, particularly the transition from one to the other, and she ends up being the winner, getting immunity for the next challenge. I believe this makes Emily the first artist to rack up more than one win for the season, which is pretty fucking impressive for someone who's only eighteen, and is in the competition with some full-time makeup professionals.

Spotlight Challenge Announcement

Normally I feel you should skip these because the parameters of the challenge get repeated five hundred times per episode, but I'm making an exception here for one reason: naked people. The designers meet McKenzie in Canyon Ranch, where she blahs a bunch of stuff about how royalty rules over commoners in the insect world much as in in the human one, and that's the idea behind today's challenge: they're going to choose partners, choose an insect/habitat, and design two characters -- one a queen, and the other whatever they want (which apparently means whatever given that a bunch of them just decide to make their second model part of the landscape). Once again, Kelly's reaction to the announcement alone is crazy over-the-top.

CALM DOWN, THIS IS NOT A CLOWNING COMPETITION.

By the way: they're not going to be working in the lab; the entire challenge will take place here in the woods. How's that going to work with molding and stuff? Oh, there's no molding: out come the models, and they're all fully nude.

It's a body painting challenge! Out comes Nix Herrera, late of Naked Vegas, to offer some tips to the artists, many of whom are freaked out at the idea of body painting since they've never done it before: they should take advantage of the fact that they get to use the whole body as a canvas, and reflect their insects' bold colour schemes in their designs. When they're done, their creations will be photographed in their habitats, and that's what they're going to be judged on tomorrow back on the Reveal Stage. I will...have more to say about that then!

Design Phase

Given what nerds most of these people are, I was really expecting a lot more awkwardness from them while they're forced to interact with their totally naked models, but that doesn't really happen, and is therefore pretty boring. Here's what and whom everyone's working with:

• Emily & Jamie / Honey Bee
• Darla & Stephanie / Jewel Beetle
• Julian & Logan / Cuckoo Wasp
• Kelly & Ben / European Hornet
• Adam & Rob / Ladybug

When the coaches show up and see what their charges are working on, we get more of a picture of the concepts the artists have come up with, though it's hard to tell how much work has already been done by the time the coaches get there: in some cases, it seems like the designers are pretty far along in their work to be taking on notes. Emily and Jamie seem to be the only ones who are making their second character a drone, which seems like the smart play, because they just get down to it with a lot of confidence and clarity.

At the other end of the spectrum, for instance, is Julian, who has to explain a wasp-and-larva concept to Laura and then admit that they don't actually know what a cuckoo wasp larva looks like and are just going to (no pun intended) wing it. Laura thinks it's a bad idea to guess at what a larva looks like, and instead suggests that they put the male model in a kind of yoga child's pose and have the queen sitting on him so that the male model becomes her thorax. Logan and Julian are like, sure?

Anthony gets very concerned about Kelly and Ben, as he should be (since before he even gets to them we hear how Kelly wanted to do the very thorax idea Laura's just proposed to Julian and Logan, only to be overruled by Ben, who's very committed to doing a camouflage makeup on their male model). Anthony feels that their models' poses don't tell a story and that they aren't interacting with each other about it, and I guess Anthony's getting to them last because Ben gets VERY pissy about it, at everyone, saying he's not comfortable changing up his whole paint job. As Anthony continues to offer suggestions for poses, Ben just shuts down. Hey, tell me again why this coach thing is a good idea?

We kind of see the same thing again with Darla and Stephanie, as Laura tells them to scrap their notion of doing a camouflage makeup on their male model and instead have him provide the wingspan for their queen. Even though they're also pretty far along, they go with Laura's suggestion, using leaves they've found to be the wings. Darla -- already freaked out because she's never done body painting before -- is nervous that the leaves are too dark and opaque, but now that they've changed concept, they're going to have to see it through.

And then Nix rolls through to offer even more input, none of which is that important to watch unless you're planning to do any body painting in the next while.

In the last moments before they have to wrap and turn their models over for their photo shoots, Darla worries that their male model is underutilized, since all you're going to be able to see of him in the photo are his arms; she's pretty sure that if they end up in the bottom, she'll be the one going home, since the wings are pretty much all she did, and she looks seriously terrified.

Reveal Stage

So what happens is that the photos are unveiled, everyone looks at them, and then the judges get up and stand several feet away from them like they're in an art gallery, I assume because the way they're projected in the studio prevents them from getting closer. I guess I wonder why there had to be a photo shoot rather than the judges coming to the location to get all up on the models like they normally do? Anyway, I feel like we and they have a roughly equal idea of how well these turned out, if all we have to go by are the very weirdly lit photos.

Logan and Julian were clearly right to follow Laura's advice and scrap the larva idea, because this came out looking pretty cool, with the two models well-integrated to create a single character.

Darla is right to worry that she'll get dinged for the use of the male model: it's almost impossible to tell there are even two models in the photo. There's also the issue that the way the photographer posed the models -- which, to be fair, the artists didn't get to stay for -- makes it look like the wings are coming out of the queen's neck, not her back.

My viewing companion Dave comments that the face on Adam and Rob's ladybug looks like it was done by a carnival face painter, to which I would add, one who was told by the kid getting it done that he wanted to be a superhero.

Jamie and Emily's is clearly the best? Like, to me there's really no question about it?

If Ben's guy is just supposed to be part of the landscape, then why is their queen touching him?

After the judges have peered at the photos, they talk to everyone. Julian and Logan get compliments for their iridescent effect, and for the combination of bodies. (If they credited this to Laura on the stage, we don't see it.)

Darla and Stephanie are kind of laughing as they take their place, like they know they're fucked, and Ve seems amused like she knows they know. She says they made a big mistake by not camouflaging their model's breasts: by putting those front and center, it marks her as human and therefore not an insect. Neville also says that the wing placement is wrong, diplomatically saying that there were "some missed opportunities."

The critique of Rob and Adam's ladybug is that it doesn't feel elegant or queenlike: the face is like a hybrid of a Cowardly Lion and a Kabuki face paint, while Ve echoes Dave's county fair dis. Yikes.

No one has anything bad to say about Emily and Jamie's: Ve even says the paint on their queen is one of the prettiest she's ever seen on the show. They are, obviously, the clear winners here.

And then it's time for Kelly and Ben. Kelly immediately throws Ben under the bus for nixing her idea of using the male model for their queen's torso, which they've just heard Logan and Julian getting praised for having done. Ben agrees that he was very committed to doing a camouflage makeup. Neville can tell the two of them were working independently from one another, and came up with a finished photo in which the two models work separately but are boring as a unit. "I hate it as an overall image," says Glenn, getting right to it; he can tell they had a lack of teamwork. I would note that these two have clashed since she had mold problems on the first challenge and he got totally impatient with her so it's weird that they teamed up here, unless they were forced to because they were the last two left.

Winner And Loser

Logan and Julian did well with their paint palette, and with the unconventional choice of their pose. Emily and Jamie brought a striking final image to the Reveal Stage. But in the end, the winner is exactly who we could tell along it would be: wait, it's Julian and Logan?! Ugh. I have to call shenanigans here and say that Emily was denied the win because she already had immunity. Logan is the super-winner, and says that if he can win a body-painting challenge having previously painted zero bodies, there probably isn't a challenge on this show he can't win. Darla and Stephanie are dismissed as safe, and TOTALLY SHOCKED not to be in the bottom.

Adam and Rob are in the bottom, with Rob eliminated. Glenn says he didn't do anything "horrific," but that they just can't see any standout contributions he made in these two creations. This is a drag given that Rob almost won the foundation challenge this week, and Adam has been in the bottom kind of a lot, but no one asked me. Rob wanted to win for his family, but he knows they'll be proud of him.

Verdict

Though the body-painting means there's none of what normally goes into an episode -- sculpting, molding, etc. -- this is interesting to watch because everyone seems to be evenly matched in terms of the experience, or lack thereof, that they bring to the challenge. (You also have to watch to see if you agree with me that Emily got screwed.)