S4, Episode 5: AAAAAHHH, KELLY CLARKSON!!

It’s time for the geeks to look pretty! Or at least as close to pretty as they’re physically capable! Woo hoo!

Unfortunately, they showed Dave getting the full-body wax treatment this season, yank by painful yank. (I wonder how that compares to getting whacked repeatedly by big foam swords…) I have this horrible feeling that had Will still been around for this episode, his entire upper body would have been glowing red from getting so much hair pulled out. I still cringe when I think about it… man, if that doesn’t make a guy appreciate bikini waxes, I don’t know what would. Maybe seeing a non-bikini-waxed girl wearing a bikini… But I digress.

I’m not entirely sure what the beauties’ fashion coaching was for—it seemed like the fashion designers were picking out the clothing that looked the best without a whole lot of input from the geeks. Maybe that was for the best, because I remember what some of the guys considered “fashionable” during Season 3 and the results could have saved them money on a costume to scare little kids on Halloween.

As each geek walked in with their new look, the only time I said “Holy shit!” (and I really did say that out loud) was when Jesse walked in with bleach-white hair. His head matched his partners! Thankfully, none of the rest of him did. Then Joshua came through the curtain and I was immediately struck by how much he looked like a short college professor. And Nicole was Nicole, except this time, she was really hot. I’ll give the producers credit: that was one nice twist to the show’s “evolution”.

Dave, you fool! If you don’t ask the woman, she’ll ask someone else! And then she’ll have sex with him, but while they’re lying in bed, his mistress reappears after an apparent suicide, then she pulls out a knife and you’re left to watch your crush as she lies in a hospital bed in a coma with multiple stab wounds, hooked up to the machine that goes “Ping!” If you’ve ever watched soap operas, you’d have known better.

I think it’s cool that the geeks loosened up enough to talk to people at the prom, but c’mon! They’re teenagers! Everyone in the cast had to be at least 21 and in college; talking to kids in high school couldn’t have been that difficult, could it? Especially when they take Joshua under their wing and do everything but stuff the ballot box for him. Sometimes high school kids are really cool…

It was pretty apparent that the teaching competition was a tight race between Sam and Shay. Both looked like they knew what they were doing (Shay admitted that the key term was “looked”) and both had the kids laughing and enjoying themselves. I probably would have done the same thing that Sam did: “Look at the dinosaur’s big teeth! They could chomp the lunch lady right in half if she was serving tater tot casserole again because it only eats meat! Chomp chomp chomp!” But hey, as long as the kids absorbed the information and didn’t get left behind, that was the important part. And hopefully they didn’t get pushed behind, either—some of the clips they showed were painful to watch.

It’s also pretty apparently that not having anyone to hook up with is going to make Sam an even more dangerous competitor. He was already a threat to win every challenge (aside from “Wait… her left earlobe?”), but now he’ll be able to use that extra time to study. And according to all of the previous episodes, that’s a lot of studying.