We’ve created a monster.

Please only consume this recap in a controlled environment.

Previously on Strictly Come Dancing, we managed to pass the blockage that was clogging up the show like 3kgs of Haribo Cola Bottles in our lower intestines and the competition can officially begin now. So it’s on to the highs and many, many, *many* lows of Musicals Movie Week with our very special Guest Judging Anomaly, Cynthia Erivo!

she wasn’t there in the capacity of a judge – she’s been banned from wielding the power of the paddles ever since she ruined Tom Fletcher’s life

the show was calling her a “mentor” but I do believe you probably have to do more than watch a 20 minute dress rehearsal and make Vicky Pattison hold her fingers for a bit

however, having only known Ross King for 20 minutes would not stop Cynthia getting a little bit emotional over how good he was at pretending to be a Thunderbirds Puppet. Which really explains why the Wicked press tour was so weird

that all being said, Cynthia is a bonkers pull for Strictly in the wake of the success of “Wicked Part 1: Harold, They’re Lesbians” and the lead-up to “Wicked Part 2: Sapphic Boogaloo”, a movie that really does not need this chicken shit gig to promote

and thus Jason Gilkison leapt at the opportunity to do a Wicked themed pro-routine like Anton at the opportunity to do a rambling zinger about Craig being old

Sir, Craig is 1 year older than you and those with glass hair transplants probably shouldn’t throw stones.
My personal favourite Jason Gilkison contribution to this episode was him sitting in on everyone’s photo op with jet lagged Cynthia Erivo

Sir, why are YOU there?
Because everyone would inevitably fight over who gets to be Elphaba, it was a dance of “Oops, All Elphabas”

and it sucks to be Jason Gilkison, because it’s still only the second best production of Too Many Elphabas that’s ever been done

and thus the men were all playing Prince Fiyero Tigelaar of Winkie Country – a name I CACKLED at in a packed cinema viewing of the first Wicked film and nobody else did. In that moment, I felt myself make enemies with 90 odd theatre kids, much like Strictly insisting that this is definitely Movie Week

MOTSI! Stay on script! To be fair, it was very confusing – Alex and Johannes had just gone to the Devil Wears Prada Musical for tips, we had our 100th outing of The Sound of Music and Harry & Karen were just in costumes from the Lion King stage musical

I know the alternative is Death by Primark Onesie

but I was promised a horrible lion costume, I better get my horrible lion costume! Luckily for the couples, they seem to have learned to keep the novelty loungewear for the training room

and as delighted as I was to get at least *some* footage of Aljaz cooing his way through a Waltz

there is a small part of me that is sad we didn’t get to see La Voix having to try waltz with Aljaz in a papier mache pigeon costume with all the manoeuvrability of Chris Robshaw

however, La Voix had chosen Movie Week of all weeks to be completely sincere and we all know there’s no such thing as a funny waltz. And with Mary Poppins having been so thoroughly explored on this show, the only place left to go with it is Sad Destitute Bird Woman Scene sandwiched between Ross King’s Hitler Youth Puppet Theatre and George Clarke playing a PaRappa The Rapper rhythm game on the Playstation 2

definitely the biggest case of tonal whiplash of the evening.

With Operation Immovable Pigeon Aljaz having been completely scuppered and the show being too afraid to put Aljaz’s brick face into butch Mary Poppins drag – Aljaz’s role in this production was as Mr Banks, famously a fan of capitalism and not The Destitute Bird Woman and her godforsaken bewinged rats

it’s not often you can really say “Dressing him up as a less convincing anthropomorphised pigeon than the characters in Valiant (2005) would’ve made more sense”

and because La Voix was being super serious, she’d shed her signature drag face – which can be quite a big thing for a drag queen but I could talk forever about how La Voix’s attempt to look like THE DESTITUTE BIRD WOMAN

resulted in her looking about 10 years younger

I fear we accidentally yassified poverty but it’s a rare win on Movie Week where your unrecognisable makeover results in you looking better and not like you’re the result of the lame racehorse that got melted down for glue

I can only imagine that Stefan Dennis was not in fact ill and he just saw the Lord Farquaad wig they were going to put on him so he barricaded himself in a bathroom and started threatening to drink bleach

I do admire the restraint in not immediately making Neil dress up as Lord Farquaad for the entire evening – he would’ve done it! The uncoupled dancers weren’t even in costume! Except Amy of course, who has come dressed as the mid-point twist of Gone Girl

but maybe now everyone can stop being weird about La Voix acting like a drag queen – I mean, the change didn’t last too long. It took all of one critique before she’d mutinied TessBot for the third time this series

as it turns out, there’s also No Such Thing As An Interesting Waltz and there wasn’t anything particularly memorable or challenging about it – remember that period of Strictly where you’d have to sit through 12 alternating waltzes and cha chas?

the kids don’t know how lucky they are to experience more than 2 different time signatures over the course of 2 and a half hours of programming. I find myself longing for it like Chris Robshaw longing for a time before this wig

it was really doing it for me at the start of the episode – granted it helps that I like my men tired and in pain

you’d be forgiven for thinking this was after he’d performed a 90 second Paso Doble, however all he had done at this point was walk down the stairs and, to quote Vicky Pattison The North-East Quote Machine: “You’re dripping like an egg sandwich”. AND HE WAS ON SECOND! So he only got to go lie down for as long as it took the show to set up and take down FOUR! WHOLE! BENCHES!

all Chris got was a movie accurate Mjolnir prop that he had to borrow from his 5 year old son

JIMMY GOT A WHOLE CAR! (If you can see it behind The Continuing Trouser Woes of One Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink)

take that, Four! Whole! Benches!

Chris’s Paso Doble was the first our Three Paso Pile-up and it was certainly an improvement – both in that I felt like he was actually contributing to the routine more than he did in his Viennese Waltz last week and didn’t have the look of Nadiya trying to set up a clothes horse during an earthquake that his Samba had. The judges even highly praised his posture, which I’m sure the pizza box they’d shoved over him like a Boston brace was really helping

as was the fact Nadiya had given him an extremely simple paso – give me 2 days and I reckon I could do a passingly good recreation of this routine. A lot of it is just stamping really fast and thrusting with the bite force of a saltwater crocodile

there are game birds that do more complicated routines and they have brains the size of a peanut and tits only almost as good as Harry’s

Nadiya didn’t even make him do anything with the cape! He just takes it off immediately and drops it on the floor! Did the party city red riding hood costumes you practiced with MEAN NOTHING to you?

we sadly appear to be entering an era of Capeless Pasos – Alexis presenting like a frilled neck lizard in a haunted house last week doesn’t count

it’s a skirt until it gets ripped off and wafted around like you’re trying to get the smoke alarm to shut up.
Katya however did get a sword which is arguably better

this one’s for you, Sword Enthusiast Lesbians! Her having done a Viennese Waltz in barely fitting paso doble clothing last week certainly paid off because this performance was bloody good

Motsi probably could’ve held off on that 10 paddle for a little bit longer because now Unhumble Filthy Ringer Lewis is painted into even more of a narrativeless corner than he was beforehand

but it does work as the perfect foil to Incurious George having a “cruel” 6 thrown at him from Craig after he bipped and bopped his way through the roughest attempt at K-pop you’ve seen since Dear Alice while the other judges threw 8s and 9s at it because they don’t know how to critique anything outside of the ballroom norm and are scared of teenagers with Instagram accounts

we have to kill Couple’s Choice – beyond the absurd judging of it, I cannot put up with another ~emotional origin story~ VT before coming out and doing something as goofy as this

I have had to convince MYSELF that I haven’t tampered with the speed of that clip – that is its actual speed. It’s BAD bad. NINE SHIRLEY? NINE.

George’s VT doesn’t reach the absurd heights of Sara Davies dedicating her draconic sex dungeon to her family or Rhys Stephenson declaring Spider-man as his own personal Jesus because is “My friends had lofty dreams of being zookeepers and curing cancer but I was just a shy Ipad baby” meant to make me feel *anything*?

I think George is sweet, I really do! He’s a very nice man, I just need him to have more dimension than “I run a tiktok account” – he has to have a hobby!? I know they’re squeezing him into the shape of a social media correspondent for The One Show like someone being converted into a Cyberman

but can they just pretend he likes to do one of those critically endangered crafts to try get the youth interested in arrowsmithing, horsehair weaving or linen beetling again

Only you can save the Sussex Trugs, George Clarke (internet personality). We did however learn that George Clarke Has Friends – but they didn’t get to go on a quirky day out, he just got to eat pizza in a sparsely furnished and barely decorated flat clearly owned by a man in his early 20s with a 60% of the bed just being a mattress on the floor

it’s got very liminal space porn vibes.

Over in the last of our three Paso Dobles, usually in Movie Week the celebs might go and watch a clip of their chosen film in an empty theatre

However, Jowita had to be introduced to Thunderbirds gently and in a controlled environment

also, if anything is not made to be stretched across a 30ft cinema screen, it’s Thunderbirds and even in the safety of her dance training room and with a handful of Xanax at the ready, Jowita’s brain still leaked out of her ears

Strictly claims its Modus Operandi is Family Entertainment but somewhere in the fine print there’s something about driving as many eastern european professional dancers to the brink of insanity as they possibly can. Hence a Paso Doble in which even Jowita looks like she’s being piloted by a brain slug rather than her own conviction

it’s also got that Movie Week problem of being nigh on impossible to actually critique because as a dance that’s trying to replicate the movement of fibreglass and resin puppets filled with asbestos being dragged around by fishing line? NAILED IT! As a Paso Doble? I think trying to control a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel comes closer to achieving a spanish line

there’s “marching” and then there’s The Homosexual Hitler Youth’s Annual Christmas Spectacular

It really wasn’t a surprise that this landed in the bottom 2 – the bigger surprise was that it wasn’t “Paso” vs Pas-eh with Chris and Nadiya getting their first entry into the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery

and with Ross being eliminated, here’s a poll for his bests and worsts!

a quick Results Show Sidebar because I don’t get to whine about it in a separate recap anymore – does ANYONE like the new format the show has decided to go with? It’s so disjointed and broken up, I don’t understand the creative decision behind it? It just means I have to spend the first 15 minutes in constant suspense while I wait for the Minecraft group number to be emerge from The Nether like a monster in a horror survival game

we used to be a proper country. WHAT IS THIS? Why is Vito dressed as a brick wall doing a Nazi salute?

is this a Labubu?

AND IT GETS WORSE! Neil Jones is the most unfortunate thing to become airborne since Covid-19

I admire the restraint in not doing a whole “CHICKEN JOCKEY!” bit – you don’t want to overstimulate the kids at home this close to bedtime – a second viewing of Madame Tussaud’s In SPAAAAAAACE! was probably enough

and the only couple committing a worse crime than looking like Seargent Pepper’s Rebel Flesh

was Hot and Weird Julian who had made the rookie mistake of choosing to do a dance theme dance in a week that really called for him to dress up as Captain Underpants. Fred and Ginger are absolutely the pinnacle of musical cinema, but how often on this show do we just have the names of Fred and Ginger evoked anytime someone so much as sneezes at a foxtrot? It does at least mean that Balvinder got to wear a pretty frock though

but it is very much the sort of amalgamation of christmas galandry that Vicky Gill and her workshop of infinite monkey seamstresses could whip up for anything. So I’m not surprised that despite a perfectly pleasant performance that you can’t say anything discernibly bad about that Balvinder faded into the background of Movie Week kitschiness. I think she might’ve managed to avoid that bottom 2 if Vicky hadn’t received quite as scathing a critique for performing her Charleston like a goose in boiling water

Vicky was dealt a rotten card this week after Shirley told Kai to throw her out the nest a good 3 weeks before she was ready to fledge – Godforbid someone whose dance experience amounts to 1 mime class and 2 weeks of fast-tracked Cha Cha and Foxtrot training relies on dancing with her partner, Shirley. And on top of that, the music she’d been saddled with is a mess. A Little Party Never Killed Nobody from Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby is full of incredibly chaotic timings and weird noises – it’s audible rat poison and nobody put the child-safety lock on it. I think it would work better if they played up the Fergie doing weird scatting and trombone noises side of it, like they did when Aljaz and Emma got to fight over who got to shove the candlestick up their arse

but the version they did for Vicky and Kai went overboard on the *checks notes* GoonRock of it all, resulting in this thumping bass boosted cacophony that only made Vicky stomping through a Charleston like she’s making wine seem even heavier than it was

there was however a saving grace, and I’m not just talking about the judges score being insanely inflated for what was delivered – even Kai knew they didn’t deserve that 7

Craig giving this a 5 when if anyone else came out and performed a Charleston like their Movie Week theme was the curb stomping scene from American History X, they’d be lucky to get a 3 is WHACKY. However, the true saving grace of Vicky’s routine was this lift, which AGAIN – possibly a little too advanced for a Week 3 Charleston but I adore the concept of it

I’d really love to see this executed in a proper professional routine and not just because they needed to give the poor dancefloor a 10 second reprieve from goose stepping Vicky.

But while Vicky’s scores continue a steady increase week from week, Karen is still trapped in the turbulence of her lady-fication plotline with Craig somehow deeming her cha-cha-cha to be on the same level as Ross’s House of Wax Paso Doble

you really see how awful these costumes are when even Jowita ends up with an arse like a frog in them

I think she should sue.

I didn’t not entirely disagree with Craig, Carlos had thrown a very difficult routine at Karen and while she and Ellie could have a Beyblade battle with how amazingly the pair of them spin

she hits A LOT of poses like she’s a praying mantis that’s about to eat the head of her mate

but at least she’s learned to use a napkin and how to politely think about the correct number of times to stab a man with a teaspoon

this is as close as I am willing to let this glorified London tourist attraction of a man get to Strictly. I forbid them from casting him, I do not need to see his training VT about teaching Dianne how to eat a cucumber sandwich with a knife and fork. I also hope this finally puts a pin in The Pygmalioning of Karen Carney and she can now be more than Footballer, Woman, Occasional Podcast Guest. Take her to airshow, Carlos.

Despite having gone to the Barbie well last year for Tasha and Aljaz, the show wasn’t going to pass up as easy an opportunity to get in the factoid that Ellie helped design the first Barbie doll to have Down Syndrome

and so it was a very good and well-reasoned retread, unlike the 100th Sound of Music routine that I would like to drown in a lake, I DON’T CARE HOW MANY BENCHES YOU HAVE, NIKITA! I will tie them all to you and throw you in the Thames. I do feel like this could’ve been a better week to give Ellie a Couple’s Choice rather than George having KPop Demon Hunters thrown at him and being made to dance like an organist’s monkey experiencing self-awareness for the first time. AND ESPECIALLY because Ellie is just getting 2 Movie Weeks in a row as we take a second long swig of Dave Arch spiking the Kpop Kool-Aid with Ellie doing a Couple’s Choice to Golden from KPop Demon Hunters next week as the producers continue to just slam that Kpop Demon Hunters routine generator until someone goes viral

I fear we are trapped in a nosedive, building up an unstoppable speed towards the Kpopification event horizon. Much like Shirley Ballas trying to critique hip-hop, it is just a genre that Strictly doesn’t feel built for. I don’t think a Kpop routine works for anything less than 4 people, when it’s just a couple it feels messy and haphazard. By all means, let Jason Gilkison do his worst with a pro-routine, and he will do his worst!
I respect that the show has to appeal to a younger audience to have any hope of remaining relevant (kids love broad English accented Mufasa, right?) but I think more adaptations have to be made to the whole format of the show to achieve anything that doesn’t feel like you’ve rocked up to a high school wearing a baseball cap backwards

not that I think Ellie and Vito are going to try doing a Kpop routine, but I can feel it in my bones that Dave Arch is downloading that Blackpink sheet music while pondering how he can shove a trombone in it and I need him to not.
But for now, we have Ellie as Barbie and Vito as I Am Supposed To Be Ken

and this was a very fun improvement with Ellie’s sense of balance and control of her feet having come on leaps and bounds since her Week 1 Cha Cha. Her side-by-side work with Vito was a real highlight of the entire evening

I think the only person having more fun than Ellie being met with the concept of Barbie Tiramisu (excellent drag name) delivered by the world’s most sinister maitre d’

was Alex spending the evening doing a method acting approach to Miranda Priestly just when Tess thought it was safe to go back in the water

it’s terrible and annoying when Jared Leto does it on the set of his 13th box office flop in 7 years, but it’s funny when Alex Kingston is barking “IT’S CERULEAN!” at a terrified Claudia Winkleman

and this is where we truly hit the “this is just Musicals Week” portion of the show as Alex and Johannes take a trip to visit Vanessa Williams on the set of The Devil Wears Prada

and would immediately be followed by Harry and Karen dressed as The Lion King: The Stage Musical for their salsa themed around Disney making a TWO HOUR movie just to explain why Scar is called Scar instead of having a Swahili name. I’m not even joking, that’s the big payoff of the movie. It doesn’t answer the question about Mufasa having a Brit School accent or why Mufasa has such cracking knockers

Dan nicky your bobbie s.

Much like Aljaz absolving Mr. Banks of his crimes against peristeronic poverty, Alex’s Quickstep was another case of ballroom fanfiction because “Suddenly I See” is not Miranda’s song and it really doesn’t suit the poised ice queen persona that Alex was selling as she tried to quickstep with a mobile phone like some dork on The Apprentice doing a phone call in a taxi

it was very much a routine designed from the fact Alex can do a convincing enough La Voix’s sister Meryl Streep impression first, and unfortunately nobody wants to do the Sophie’s Choice tango. And as much as I adored Alex in this wide legged trouser suit that moved so fantastically during their runs around the ballroom. I do kind of wish they’d saved her Meryl for a Death Becomes Her routine in Halloween Week – I can only hope La Voix has that teed up on her wish list, Halloween is after all Drag Queen Easter and this series has shown it’s not afraid to repeat itself. But sometimes they do learn from their previous mistakes – case in point the Evolution of the Lion King Costumes from concerning porn bait

through grass skirted weirdness (and persisting with the face paint)

to the Onesie Debacle and finally giving up on leonine aspects entirely – Harry is so lucky that the weakest part of his outfit is the makeup that looks like he got attacked by one of the Clinique Beauty Counter girlies doing a swatch test

I do find it interesting that they’d go so heavy on the Musical iteration of The Lion King given there’s a pretty strong chance that Harry is sticking around that long anyway providing we get a 4 person final if Stefan doesn’t realise that having him return after a bout of illness to a Charleston isn’t a deliberate attempt to kill him and retire early.

As for Harry’s Salsa, I really wasn’t surprised that he’d taken to this particular dance so well and if anything I was a little surprised that it wasn’t even more athletic, they’d definitely leaned further into the rhythmic side of things, for better or worse, I don’t know because this choreography is… to be blunt: a little naff even if Harry does have a good groove – WHAT IS KAREN DOING?

this song is a nightmare of the worst kind of Disney talk-singing and this performance would be vastly improved if it was just an instrumental version. Karen did however, thoroughly steal the show with this spinning

I do think the dance ended up slightly overmarked – I wouldn’t have given it the string of 8s that it got

just because there were still a fair few moments where it didn’t feel like Harry was doing anything – this section just before the spin being the worst offender

much like Vicky, I just don’t see the point in overmarking him this much – I doubt he’s at risk with the public vote until at least Blackpool. That’s the thing that’s interesting about this series, once we’ve cut the obvious sandbags in Chris, Stefan and Balvinder, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. Given they’re speed running through Ellie’s narratively important dances (Barbie & Couples Choice) I’m guessing she’ll possibly be out around Halloween. I think Ellie was a much more viable finalist before Amber and Lewis were dumped on our doorstep like a sack of ringer kittens. And also before Jimmy ended up scoring a 28 for a Week 3 Rumba

Jimmy being a good dancer is still the biggest twist of this series aside from Ross King having a girlfriend – sue me, I assumed the LA Showbiz Correspondent was gay without checking his Wikipedia entry to see he’s been married to 2 women.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been more invested in a contestant than I am with Jimmy and his innate ability to dance being perfectly balanced by his innate inability to make jokes

rivalled only by Lewis Cope’s one weakness being improv comedy

I would wake up in a cold sweat every night if I gave that response. Katya’s clearly not dishing out the stand-up comedy tips

Katya has learned not to let her partners do unsupervised ~cheeky bantz~.

Finally we have Nikita dancing with four whole benches and Amber Davies was there too

aside from the novelty of Nikita performing the world’s first televised bench orgy after soft launching his outdoor furniture erotica last week

this American Smooth was a really charming routine – again, not a real surprise that Amber did so well considering the whole thing was very musical theatre and they did lure her into Elstree with a trail of Mamma Mia playbooks. My only qualm is that Sixteen Going On Seventeen is a truly rancid song – but the Six O’clock Penché (my favourite French soap opera) on a bicycle is almost enough to forgive that entirely

for the amount of piddling Sound of Music routines we’ve endured over the years, this one does at least feel memorable and not bogged down by a saccharine reverence for Julie Andrews. Let’s just be happy that they nipped the bowing down to Cynthia in the bud before it became A Thing

she’s not even scoring you, get off the floor!

And with that, here’s a look at the winner projection chart after the Episode 2 GeorgeQuake

lol – 2 ringers, a drag queen with charisma out the wazoo, Alex Kingston having an unreciprocated Diva Off, Harry’s Cracking Tits and two footballers who can finally put one foot in front of the other successfully AND STILL the pre-packaged egg mayo sandwich of a TikToker is going to come out on top. We should’ve given Cynthia a paddle, she might have been able to stop this. Alas, let’s vote for the Post-Movie Week winner projection

and I’ll see you in Week 4!