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Recaps were very popular in southern Europe throughout the 1500s.

Bloody Hellmouth

Friends, comrades and my one mortal enemy (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), Today we enter a state of prolonged mourning as Bathroom Week has officially died

now join me as I lay a rose on the grave of the Musical Theatre themed Bidets that never were. Can you imagine the Cynthia Erivo statement if someone had made an Elphaba bidet?

In reality, it was probably a little unwise to make something as niche as bathroom related ceramics a cornerstone of your series – you kind of paint yourself into a urine splashed corner with that one. So in Bathroom Week’s stead, the Unhinged Build of the Series Week was instead dedicated to building a Hellmouth Fireplace which was stressed to be “popular” in the 1500s

Readers. There is like 1 example of this fireplace existing, everything else is a recreation or inspired by the same fireplace at the Villa Della Torre in Verona. Where you can indeed get married, so… what if we kissed in front of the hellmouth? 👉👈😳

If the hellmouths were “incredibly popular” at any point in history, it was the late 90s and early 2000s when they were featured on the cover of California Home & Design

I love this show when it just… says stuff. If you google hellmouth fireplace” 80% of the results are already FOR THIS EPISODE. It’s the terracotta water bottle for cowboys all over again!

The brief was essentially just to make a big scary fireplace. To which James said “No.” and promptly decided to just make the episode of Spongebob about imagination

and you could see Keith worrying that the episode was about to go off script and potentially have James eliminated because the other three were really leaning into the Guillermo del Toro’s wet dream of it all

and I was a little worried too, but then they showed the illustration of Diana’s that looked like someone’s MS Paint fanart of Oblina from AAAAH! Real Monsters (who is transition goals)

so the episode was firmly on script. God bless Diana, she really was just in this episode for vibes having completely accepted her fate as The Spare

and as someone staring their own doom in the face, she was aptly drawing her inspiration from medieval religious trauma, which was also very popular in 1500s Europe

which only partially explained the well lubricated skeleton centipede

I think I missed that one in the Book of Genesis?

Diana wasn’t the only one drawing inspiration from a horror movie, accidentally or otherwise, as Steve was really leaning into the 80s horror movie aesthetic which was also very popular in the 16th century Europe – The Duchy of Prussia couldn’t get enough of John Carpenter

I feel like if God had just called it “The Tree of Eternal Suffering” Eve wouldn’t have eaten the apple. “The Tree of Knowledge” really set her up for failure, huh? God forbid a woman wants to know things.

The clay the potters were using, much like the Barbary pirates of the 16th century, had a very high grog content which basically means it has the texture of off-brand hobnobs made with a 30% sawdust content

however Steve had a trick up his sleeve to disguise the cracks

they’re not imperfections, they’re character! A galaxy-brained move, I can only respect the hustle. It’s a good thing he won’t have to think of a reason for any overt shrinkage

God laughed.

Lastly we have Natalie who hadn’t realised that a box fort was an option so spent an agonising amount of time coming up with a terrifying enough visage – the first attempts being adorable

I want an entire children’s book about the elderly lion with a bad perm.
She did eventually land on a bird-snake hybrid that spits out motivational bon mots which is just a way of not saying “dragon”

the discourse about whether a dragon was a reptile or a bird consumed Europe in the 1500s. It was the “Salad or Sandwich?” of the 16th century – endlessly debated around the incredibly common hellmouth fireplaces, which of course were the original Facebook.

Giving Me The Stick

In what feels more like a contractual obligation of cultural representation, this week’s second challenge saw the semi-finalists doing Transfer Ware, which guest judge and local ceramicist, Jon Plant had to desperately try to make sound like more than just sticking a temporary tattoo to a plate

as well as calling it “Stokie Ware” because everyone that says “Ey up” thinks they’re the only ones that say “Ey up”, as evidenced by him trying to sniff out the Stokie in the room

NO, MY GUY! IT’S JUST A GREETING EVERYWHERE BETWEEN BIRMINGHAM AND NEWCASTLE!

The whole thing just reminds me of the excellent mural drama that grips any online Sheffield community. There’s a local artist, Pete Mckee, who has done a lot of excellent local mural work around the city

and recently it appears that it got a bit expensive to commission McKee, so they’ve hired another local artist, Luke Horton, who is essentially cribbing Mckee’s style so everything he does is reductive and incredibly unsubtle

everyone hates it – I have never seen a single positive comment about this absolute disaster which sits forlornly behind a KFC. It gets graffitied regularly and they keep having to touch it up – so the cost of it must be approaching the Mckee budget by now. Anyway… enough about Local Drama.

This whole challenge seemed… a weird degree of difficulty to whip out in the semi-final. Granted they’d spent the morning lugging around fireplace pieces and I probably wouldn’t have had the mental capacity to try sticking the Mel C barbed wire to my wrist either

am I forgetting something – why are the official Spice Girls temporary tattoos barbed wire and generic bro-y tribal?

The main challenge for the potters was trying to avoid getting air bubbles and creases under their transfers. As well as knowing when to stop sticking things on – something Steve never quite got the hang of

the biggest conundrum of the episode was definitely how to read whatever the potters had written around the rim of their plates – Diana’s probably being the biggest offender

Love We Home <3

However, the funniest thing about this challenge was that it was a blind judging but everyone had made theirs so specific that it was INCREDIBLY obvious whose was whose. None more so than James who was going to make damn sure he got his third episode win that the prophecies had spoken of

absolutely incredible work, Cakesby James. And when you look at the entire group there’s only one of them that could ever be Live. Laugh. Love. adjacent

everyone needs at least 1 fatal flaw, Natalie’s is garden centre wall art.

An Official Transfer Ware Ranking:
1. Cakes by Cakesby James
2. Love We Home
3. Live. Laugh. Love. by any other name is just as Twee
4. Steve’s Everything And The Artisanal Sink

Hell. O. Hell

The true test of any good gateway to Hell is how it manages to withstand heat, and unfortunately for Diana her fireplace just wasn’t quite passing muster

and given that she still had to glaze the damn thing entirely black (James reclines smugly on his throne of clay-coloured cardboard) there just wasn’t enough time to try to fix it so she was leaning into the Steve of it all

and while the final result wasn’t superb, she’d certainly captured that nauseous feeling that any sort of religious artwork depicting Hell gives you. Somewhere Pieter Bruegel the Elder is smiling exactly like Diana’s horrible fireplace [tone indicator: slightly delighted]

as well as a piece of religious artwork, it also works as a perfect representation of what it feels like to be sitting in a dentist’s chair. And what’s more hellacious than that? My dentist, in the midst of a root canal treatment, asked me if I could remember who sang the song “Torn”. MA’AM – you try saying “Natalie Imbruglia” with a face full of anaesthetic and someone else’s fingers in your mouth!

Diana’s tableau approach to Hell did mean that hers was one of the most visually interesting. By which I do mostly mean, I need to know what’s happening here

is that an intestine? Because if so, congratulations Diana, you’re the first person to make an intestine on the silly wholesome pottery show. I think you should be proud of that.

The other three had all largely leaned into varying shades of brown – imaginably because it’s easier to make brown clay browner. Or in the case of James, just leave it and only pick small details to glaze. I cannot get over how well James played this challenge, every single decision and choice he made was the most intelligent one

making everything look like boxes so he didn’t have to work too hard to hide the joins? The natural colour of the clay already being cardboard-like? The texturing? I really do think this fireplace is perhaps the best piece of design work we’ve ever seen on the show, it’s incredible work, even when you get up close

I look forward to it being the top search result for “Hellmouth Fireplace” in about 2 days time. Romano and Sanmicheli found dead in a ditch.

Natalie and Steve both ended up with fairly similar pieces – or at least similar in that they both looked at least a little bit related to Olmec from Secrets of the Hidden Temple

Steve’s marginally edges Natalie out, purely because his looks more likely to entomb a team of children within an ancient cursed temple. And Natalie’s looks a bit like it’s from the pages of Where The Wild Things Are

the cuter-than-it-is-scary vibe largely being owed to the de-lippening

Not entirely sure where exactly the lips come into play between the famously lipless inspirations of a snake and a bird, or as I call it: Benedict Cumberbatch

I reckon he must really struggle to eat soup.

An Unofficial Hellmouth Fireplace Ranking:
1. James’s Hellmouth Box Fort
2. That Chapter of The Vampire Diaries Novels Where Damon Is Killed By A Tree.
3. Where the Wild Things Get Lip Filler
4. Diana’s Tableau of Halloween Decorations

Everything you thought would happen in this episode happened – it truly could have been an email and saved everyone the repetitive strain injury of trying to make a fireplace. James, extremely deservedly, took the win

and Diana was the one just missing out on the final and even if we all saw it coming from the second episode, she will still be missed, she’s been a delightful force of positive vibes-based potting

I did see a lot of people saying Natalie should’ve gone home and… no. You cannot possibly look at that line up of fireplaces and come to the conclusion Diana’s wasn’t lagging behind in quality by quite some distance. She’s just not a big build potter and it clearly pushed her a little too far out of her comfort zone.

And so, we have the world’s most predictable set of finalists!