KISS.

Halloween Week draws to a close and all I can hope is that you eventually recover from the Saturday night Pro Dance.

After the Main Show’s Grab Bag of Media Properties Pro Dance™, I am glad to inform you that we get to kick off the Results Show with a proper routine that doesn’t feel like it was whipped up in 30 minutes in the parking lot of Party City while Jason Gilkison nursed a monster hangover. Instead they bring to life the tale of how the temporally displaced Kai Widdrington came to the year 2021 from 1954. It’s a tale of loss, sorrow and high levels of vampire camp.

We set our scene at The Widdrington Estate and the life of Kai Widdrington, root beer tycoon, in tatters

it turns out that root beer only brings in so much money and the mortgage for their Cornish manor house was all being paid for by his deceased elven bride, Nadiya, who was really committing to Lord of the Rings cosplay this Halloween

rude of them not to give Kai a crown to be honest, he’s The Root Beer King of South-west England!
But wait! What’s this? Not all is lost for everyone’s favourite aspirational barman, there be magic in these them halls

but it appears Kai made the same mistake as I have and wished upon a Monkey’s Paw because while he is reuinted with the ghost of his elven bride for one night, it comes with the catch of Gorka, King of The Dark And Potential Husband of Katya’s Queen of the Dark, making his grand entrance

Can someone at Strictly please stop playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on Adam Peaty’s Cursed piano? We can’t keep opening the gates of Hell, eventually we’ll end up with Ann Widdecombe again.
And Gorka brought company to make his entrance, you might recognise the outfits the female pros are wearing as Luba’s Wicked Witch costume from the previous night which kind of only proves the rushed, hodgepodge nature of that disaster – the bravery to use the same costume twice on the same weekend <3

Jason Gilkison spent a lot of time watching that New York TikTok Coven that just mostly walks in sync while occasionally doing some milquetoast Michelle Visage-style vogueing over the summer. It’s fair to say Gorka outdid them ALL

more people should play devilish lords of the underworld like George Blagden’s King Louis XVI – I just imagine the political landscape of Hell is probably more like 18th century France than we think.
But the King of the Dark doesn’t appear in your Cornish manor home just for a nice chat and some tea, he was there to strike a bargain. And by bargain I do mean just take the elven ghost bride

I hate it when that happens.
And so, having had the spirit of Galadriel Bychkova taken from him, Kai’s life was once again devoid of love and meaning. But The King of the Dark is a (somewhat) merciful man and granted Kai the mercy of taking him away from this life

and that is how Kai Widdrington came to be in the year 2021, still mourning the loss of his Elven Bride and desperately trying to fill the void with routines involving romancing any number of deadly Australian wildlife – expect AJ to be dressed up as a platypus any day now.

Having not properly embraced the spirit of Halloween on Saturday, Tess and Claudia had at least shown up in a couples costume tonight: hotel maid and feather duster

it’s not quite the undead pantomime horse but I’ll take what I can get seeing as the judges weren’t afforded the time to do a second round of Spooky Drag but Shirley was trying out her best Davina McCall costume

Motsi vamped at an 11 to try and distract us from the fact she wasn’t still in her Maleficent costume

and Anton had raided Vicky Gill’s Drawer of Bedazzled Hands

and someone had been nice enough to buy Craig a rubber tarantula while the were raiding London Zoo’s gift shop of its rubber snake supply for AJ’s Medusa costume

I can only imagine it’s giving Kai thoughts for whatever Latin AJ has to try and get her legs to cope with next weekend.

And now we begin to find out how The Fates of Fright Night have been determined for the couples in The Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery

Gotta say you lot, WORK HARDER. At least fake it! And eyes to the front dammit!
And the first couple in the Bottom 2 is…

well, that’s what you get for not being Sexy Beethoven.
As for the advice, Anton mostly just tells Adam how good he is and very much comes across as “Mate, we’re not sending you home we have viewing figures and headlines to think about!”.

The only vague routine reveal we get from the safe couples is that Sara and Aljaz will be dancing to 9 to 5 by Dolly Parton, in possibly a Quickstep? It was hard to tell, everyone was talking at once and it is kind of hard to hear everyone over Aljaz’s outfit

I have an illegal amount of screenshots, I make no apologies. LOCK ME UP IN HORNY JAIL AND THROW AWAY THE KEY.
There is yet more eulogising of Nikita’s choreography and the fact Tilly now has the highest scoring Cha Cha Cha, not that that’s hard considering the contenders are Tom and Amy at the Pansexual Pride Kiosk, Rhys Being Electrocuted for 90 Seconds, Mr. Tumnus’s Disco Days and The Undead Jazzercize Class. Tilly also brings up Peppa Pig which is a dangerous thing to do on this show so fully prepare yourselves for her and Nikita to be doing a couples choice routine to the theme tune for Tilly’s little brother – let’s just hope Dianne burnt that damn pig mask.
Claudia brings up how emotional Giovanni got on the previous night over their scores and rudely offers him absolutely no advice on how to cry while wearing comedic amounts of eyeliner

and then there’s Rhys who just uses his entire Claudia Chat as a therapy session

it’s both heart-breaking and a little bit funny because he’s dressed as an Edwardian man that looks like a building collapsed on him. Halloween Week is an absolute treat.

Before we get to find out who will be joining Adam and Katya in the bottom 2, there’s a performance of Dry Bones by Gregory Porter, with Jowitza and Cameron as two very on theme jive-fighting skeletons

and yes, because it is Cameron, there is of course a forward roll

what is brand shall never die. I like to think his CV has a whole section titled “Playground Skills” – he’s saving handstands for when they finally relent and reward his unparalleled mugging to camera with a partner.
In all seriousness though, this routine was one of my favourite guest performance interludes the show has ever done – it just all came together so well and Cameron and Jowitza really are two very charismatic dancers.

And now for The Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery 2: Spoopy Boogaloo with Nadiya giving a thoroughly good display and showing just about everyone else up

now THAT’S a reaction.

which means it’s down to Tom and Amy or Judi and Graziano, the latter of which are so at ease with how obviously this was going to swing that they just gently sway to the tense heartbeat music, pull tongues at the judges and act thoroughly unsurprised when their light goes red

as if Giovanna Fletcher would have let anything else happen.
And Judi joins Tess and basically begins giving her goodbye speech before Tess cuts her off and goes to Shirley for advice, the advice being to stay on time at the beginning of the dance which is advice Judi seemingly did everything to ignore.

Up with Claudia we learn that AJ and Kai will be doing the Charleston next, it’s unconfirmed which deadly animal she’ll be dressed as though but I’m excited because her Week 1 jive was phenomenal so I have high hopes!
We also learn that John and Johannes will be doing the rumba, the highest score for which is 25 for Sara and Aljaz’s so hopefully it’s only an upward trajectory and they don’t get sabotaged with some weird Avatar theming. I’ll be interested to see how Johannes plays this because, as Shirley has noted, his Latin choreography has often resisted closeness which can’t really be done in a rumba.
As for the others, Dan Walker is continuing his personal brand of Weekly Bin Banter, which is a bit of a sore subject in Sheffield at the moment. And Amy is really dining out on the whole microphone palaver in their routine as though it didn’t only affect the last 4 seconds of their routine – I hope we get a full “woe is me” VT out of this next week – milk it for all its worth Amy! Ride it to the finale!

And so we come to the bottom two where it’s honestly a bit of a tough call – Adam did improve a lot but he still almost fell over after that weird sprint section which begs the question as to whether he ever pulled it off in training and why Katya thought it was good? Even with his improvements though, it’s still a little rough and perhaps it’s because we saw it already but it lacked some of the drama of the Saturday night performance. The real improvement and benefit for the Sunday show being pre-recorded is that they could clip off the footage of Katya dismounting the piano once she had crawled back inside it, so for prosperity, let’s just relive it

it’s the “help me Adam!” as she thoroughly regrets everything about this routine that gets me.
As for Judi, she pulls a bit of a Dan Walker in that she has a moment at the beginning where she’s off time and clearly thrown by it and desperately trying to get back into the step rhythm

YOU CURSED HER SHIRLEY!
She did at least recover from it but it was still a clean sweep to save Adam and Katya with Motsi wording it as weirdly as she possibly could and starting all sorts of FIX! rumours

so it is with great sadness that we have to say goodbye to Judi and Graziano, but not before the two of them sing each other’s praises in a very touching send-off. I’m so glad we got to see more of Graziano this series and Judi was the perfect partner to help the audience warm to him. To think, Graziano was relegated to side piece for the previous two years

he’s a reaction jpeg craftsman that has been overlooked for far too long!

And as we reach the halfway point of the competition, 9 couples remain

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