Bitsy

Charlie's rehearsal package was a full 90 seconds this week, which is longer than the standard 1:15. He also got perfect scores and virtually no nitpicking, so they're making up for past weeks.

I also saw a quote from Charlie where he said that ALM brought a negative energy to the show, or something like that. Very diplomatically stated, but opinionated by Charlie standards.

Nope. I talked about this in another thread, but he might have been two votes shy of going home, and for whatever reason, the producers thought it would make better television to put other people "in jeopardy". Other than for the person who is actually going home, being in jeopardy or not in jeopardy means nothing. It's quite possible the producers know Charlie only has the votes to last for another week and they wanted to make people think he's doing better so that his elimination will have extra shock impact.

https://twitter.com/KristinHope2

No. The people "in jeopardy" consist of the person going home, and then two other people of the producers' choosing. They even give a disclaimer that "you are not necessarily in the bottom". All we know is that Charlie made it through the elimination last week and that's all. He could have had one more vote than necessary to stay in over Danica. If you disregard Facebook or other social media clues - that's all they are is clues - simple math can't tell you that Meryl is behind in votes. She's at the bottom, so she needs a lot of votes, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have them.

And her bent knees too. It's kind of funny when people keep saying, "She could have easily fixed that!" If it were easy for her to fix, she would have done so years ago. It's not like her ice dance coaches didn't try, I'm sure.

I admire Amy that she was concerned about performing well for the sake of her teammates. She's a little more emotional than I expected a hardcore Olympian to be, but there's nothing wrong with that. She's not being neurotic, she just needs a break once in a while. Yeah, they couldn't NOT put that in the package. But let me say this: Amy's rib was dislocated, which caused her back to spasm, which caused all the drama and the trip to the hospital on Monday night. At the hospital, her rib was popped back into place and she felt much better. She spent the following day taking it easy and administering various therapies. According to Peta, Amy only missed one day of rehearsal. When she came to the team rehearsal, she was "absolutely fine". The package portrayed Amy's injury as something very serious and ongoing, and it wasn't really. It wasn't nearly as serious and didn't impact her rehearsal as much as Danica's broken rib. Danica lost three days of rehearsal and then was severely limited in what she could do for the next two weeks. The package made it look like Amy spent her whole week having to overcome the injury, and I think that was exaggerated. Amy doesn't edit the packages, but the way she talked about the injury helped along all that dramatization. Also, when Amy was doing her red carpet interviews, she was holding either a hot pack or a cold pack on her shoulder. I'm giving her just a tiny bit of side eye for that. If she had a little shoulder pain that only required a hot/cold pack, it possibly could have waited until she was finished being in front of cameras.

On twitter last nigt, the woman who has been analyzing Facebook and correctly predicting the eliminees for a few years now said she doesn't just look at likes, she looks at the whole page. I believe she takes into account how many and what type of comments people are getting too. She also said it's too early in the week to do it right now. I think this week it's going to be about Charlie and James. Per one of her tweets: "James numbers have dropped but Charlie is pretty far behind."

I saw multiple interviews where Peta said nothing but positive things about ALM. All she seemed to care about was that ALM gave them a 10. I suppose Peta does not need to share the opinion of anyone else or back any of them up, but I continue to lose respect for her. And James, who I think is a charming young man, sounded like Eddie Haskell when he offered out of the blue to meet ALM's students and give them signed photos.

TeeM are you going to the Massachusetts show? I'm thinking of going to that one too.

A local Detroit station did a story on Charlie's dad - he watched the Olympics from home because he gets too nervous to watch Charlie compete live. (Actually, he couldn't even watch it on TV, he had to go into his bedroom until he could hear it was over because he was so nervous.) Anyway, yes. He's a total sweety too.

As a few people have pointed out, including Anna Trebunskaya, Danica and Meryl were the only couple being judged on their synchronicity and matched skills because they were women and were not dancing in hold. It really wasn't a fair set up.

I read something about Maks taking Meryl to one of his dance studios when he was in New York and she was really impressed to see how he worked with his kids. None of the pros approve of ALM, but as someone who has been teaching since he was a teenager, Maks has extra reason to have disdain for her. Close! That was Teddy Volynets. He was in the troupe for a couple of years (and taught Hope Solo the samba when Maks was injured). The Chmerkovskiy and Volynets families are partners in their dance studios.

Meryl & Maks said in their red carpet interview that this dance was so satisfying for them that they wouldn't change it for something better scoring. I think that was genuine, and as someone who found it very satisfying to watch, I agree with them. The scoring wasn't egregious - three 9's for not enough rumba/pointed toes and one 10 from Bruno for performance quality would have been more accurate. It seems like Maks is truly inspired by Meryl, and I'm enjoying what they're creating so much that if they wind up with the same scenario in the final and lose, I would accept it as a noble loss.

I don't think Val says anything against his brother, ever. And as patient as he's been with Danica, I think it's an effort. It made sense to me that he'd say nothing and let them try to work it out. I don't think Grandma walking in was a total surprise to any of them, however.

Care to actually add up how long the packages were? Because Meryl was accused of hogging time from Charlie last week, and it wasn't true. Last week, Charlie's rehearsal package was very short (40 seconds) while Candace got three minutes, and Danica and Amy each got almost two minutes. Meryl, James and Nene all came closest to the standard package time of 1:15 - and those packages were all mostly focused on learning the dance, rather than extra drama about fears, injuries or scores. I suspect Amy got the most time this week due to her injury drama, which doesn't mean she was stealing time from Charlie either. Charlie's still not doing anything interesting enough to warrant a lengthy rehearsal package. The mom thing was sweet, but it hardly needed to go on any longer than it did.

I thought the Meryl/Danica/Val/Maks rehearsal dynamic was very authentic. Those are four people who have been working together in various combinations for weeks now and have a store of little irritations and grievances against one another. At least two of them (Maks and Danica) have fussy personalities that require a certain amount of "handling". And then you put them in a situation where their loyalties are all a little at odds with each other, and of course you get some friction. People get upset when they feel ganged up upon. Meryl & Danica expressed irritation that Maks and Val were double-teaming them with dance criticism. (I kind of got the feeling that Meryl was mostly trying to stick up for Danica with that "We're not professional dancers" remark.) Then Danica responded by basically telling Maks that she and his partner/girlfriend shit-talk him in private. Of course he didn't like that. Overall, I didn't think it was a big deal at all, and certainly not an example of Maks being a villain. But I don't think it was the best group dynamic for getting a great dance out of any of them. It was probably good for James/Amy and Candace/Charlie to be able to start fresh with each other.

Charlie and Meryl already shared the dog being named DJ story when they were doing press for DWTS. Meryl also said she made her family call her DJ for a year. I don't know whether that's worth more than 5 seconds of package time anyway. Charlie either needs to yell at Candace during rehearsals or seriously injure her, putting her future on the show in jeopardy. That would be a good storyline.

The writer, Alex Abad-Santos, was fired from The Wire, so that's why there have been no more Hunger Games articles. (I miss them too!) He was picked up by another online publication, and he said on twitter he'd try to publish more Hunger Games articles somewhere, but so far I haven't seen any.

Didn't he just turn 40? People have been calling a lot of attention to that this season. It's over the hill in dancer years. I know there was a lot of fan reaction to there not being enough room on the show this season for Tristan McManus. Tony might be worried that next season they'll make room for some of those younger pros at his expense.

I like the contemporary routines, but they do tend to get overscored on this show. Some people think contemporary shouldn't be allowed in the first few weeks because it tends to throw things off - Candace Cameron's 8-8-9 contemporary from Week 1 is a good example of a routine that was overly impressive due to some good choreography and one lift. It set the expectations for her too high, and subsequent weeks revealed that her dance skills were very primitive.

I don't really understand the significance of Maks not permanently befriending a lot of random celebrities on the show. His social life seems to center around real friends that he's had for decades, which strikes me as healthier than latching onto Rob Kardashian or whoever.

He used to spend every Thanksgiving with Mel B, maybe still does, I don't know.

I think the rule of thumb about team dances after "Derek's team never loses" is "The person going home next will be someone from the losing team". I don't know if that's ever been proven wrong but I heard Derek say it. That leaves James and Charlie, and it looks like Charlie is in worse shape than James right now.

Candace's time will be up soon. There are only three shows left, so there's not much time for a backlash. Either she'll get eliminated before the final, or if she somehow makes it to the final, will be eliminated there. That's the best she's going to do anyway so I wouldn't chalk it up to backlash. I don't think anyone has quite figured out exactly how social media correlates to votes, but I'm sure there is a connection. The Bing calculator measuring all social media activity has been correct with all the eliminations so far, I believe. The site-that-shall-not-be-named has instructed their minions to dismiss all social media clues and just go with their completely unfounded conspiracy theories about how it's all fixed for Maks & Meryl to win.