If you needed any more evidence that the “Dancing with the Stars” voting system is still broken, Ally Brooke got the season’s first perfect score on “Dance-Off Night,” but when the audience votes were factored in at the end of the night, she landed in the bottom two — again! No wonder Carrie Ann Inaba was “irritated” at the end of the night when the judges had to decide who to save and who to eliminate. Watch Brooke’s flawless routine above.
Brooke performed a paso doble this week, and she performed it to her own song, “Higher.” That could have been an indulgent choice, but instead it seemed to give her an even greater ease on the dance floor. After all, if you can’t connect emotionally to your own song, what are you ever going to connect to. The paso doble requires greater intensity than perhaps any other dance style — it’s fierce and aggressive, like dancing as combat. And not only did Brooke have the moves down, she had the mood down too.
Len Goodman thought it was “a mix of good technique and high performance.” Bruno Tonioli thought it was such a command performance she was practically “conducting the orchestra” with her movements. Inaba told her, “You proved to me that you are a freaking superstar … My mind is blown.” Those comments translated to 10s across the board for a perfect score of 30 out of 30. After bonus points were given for the dance-offs at the end of the night (Brooke lost hers to Kel Mitchell), she ended up third on the judges’ leaderboard even with a perfect performance. And that put her on the chopping block.
Brooke landed in the bottom two with Kate Flannery, whom the judges decided to eliminate instead, but the judges weren’t happy that they had to decide between them at all. Sean Spicer still can’t dance and still hasn’t ever been in the bottom two. Now Brooke has been in the bottom two twice, and both times she had been near the top of the scores, which means that the results are so heavily weighted towards viewer votes that the judges’ scores hardly seem to matter at all anymore.
What did you think of Brooke’s performance and this week’s dubious results?
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