Tyra and her terrible roots tell the Top 13 there are some changes this season: Everything will be graded, and that scores will be quantitative rather than qualitative, which is kind of like college, I guess. There's a product-placement closet winners can raid, and every week there will be a chance to win a $10,000 scholarship money deposit, but only the winner will get to cash their check. That just seems cruel.
Just when all of the ladies are hanging and Victoria is freaking everyone out, a loud thud is heard... and after a brand new theme song, the girls run downstairs only to find the Iota Phi Theta Step Team, comprised of "fine chocolate men" dancing with great power. Then dreamy Rob Evans comes out to melt our hearts and tell the ladies that they're going to Hollywood.
They party-bus off to a club where we meet a Miss Jay rip-off, who tells the crew how important it is to connect with the public, considering they'll be voting this time around and everything. Whoever brings it the most, Rob tells us, gets a fancy-looking key and wins the mini-challenge... which involves walking a runway in a club, not unlike a stripper. This whole thing is painfully low budget.
All of the walks are pretty much the same, except mean girl Kristin's butt hangs out, Harvard Maria is totally boring and trips a little bit, Yvonne does impressive kicks and then Victoria brining the sexxx like the weird relative at the bar mitzvah she is. Fake Miss Jay crowns Yvonne, who is this year's most voluptuous contestant.
Then out comes fake Zach Galifiankis from last week's premiere, whose names turns out to be P'Trique. He gives the first Tyra Mail of the season, saying tomorrow's challenge will "leave you hanging" so "be sure to kill the shot."
When the ladies get home, the challenge scoreboard is up, and Kiara and Destiny get into the first fight of the season. Fortunately, both tell us they are strong competitors who are here to win. Phew!
The next day, the girls head over to the shoot, and enter what turns out to be a room filled with taxidermy. Creative director Johnny Wujek welcomes them and introduces 90210's Shenae Grimes as today's photographer(!). The challenge is that the girls will be posing as... dead animals. As in, their heads will look like they are mounted onto plaques, and their bodies won't be shot. Just like in college!
Again, there are no obvious standouts here, but Victoria is once again weird (which is a plus in this show, as we've learned), Jesse clearly blows it by not posing strong enough, Harvard Maria is super boring and too good for the challenge, Destiny looks like she's about to fall asleep, Leila is freaking fierce and Kiara is full of herself.
When they get back, Victoria gets on the phone with her mom and loses her shit in like, the best way imaginable.
Time for the first judging. We say hello to Kelly Cutrone, Rob Evans and Bryanboy, our "social media correspondent," here to read us mean comments and introduce poor-quality videos from fans. Leila, who got a perfect score from the judges, wins the challenges and gets the key to the Tyra suite for the week. Runner-up is Natasia, who made a weird face that Tyra mostly-arbitrarily liked. Former (or current?) angry girl Destiny and mousey hipster Jesse are the bottom two, and ultimately Jesse gets sent home. She barely even got to booty tooch this season!
Oh, fuck, there's an opportunity of Jesse coming back in a Top Chef Last Chance Kitchen-type challenge that all of the rejected models will face. You can watch that online, or, you know, not at all. Either way. -- Rachel Stein
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
We start with a reminder: Welcome (again!) to ANTM college edition! It's a reboot for the show kind of, except the contestants will be doing the same stupid shit as always, and probably Tyra will continue to talk about how Naomi Campbell was mean to her 20 years ago. The Nigel role on the judging panel has gotten a major hotness upgrade with the addition of supermodel Rob Evans; Katy Perry stylist Johnny Wujek was the only person on earth who had shirts ugly enough to match Jay Manuel, and so is the new creative consultant on photo shoots; and fashion blogger Bryanboy will be representing we, the people, at panel. There's a whole new scoring system, in which the girls get points for their challenge performance, points from each of the judges for their photos, and a "social media" score that is based on how fans ranked their photos, which are posted online after each shoot. Will someone tell me where those are? Clearly I care a lot about it since I can't be bothered to Google it even when I am already at my laptop. But it's such a pain to maximize the Firefox screen!
Previously: Quasi-educated bitches! Thirteen finalists attending college or some sort of trade school moved into their "sorority" house. The only one we should care about is Victoria, who is insane and goes to Liberty University online. And, spoiler alert, I cannot WAIT until we get to the part in this episode when she's doing calisthenics on the lawn. It may literally be my favorite thing ever to have happened on this show. I want to play it on a loop inside my brain, always.
Speaking of Victoria, she starts off the episode by telling us how she's gunning hard for the fan votes. Well, she has mine, that's for sure. My only demand is that she always be filmed while engaging in her daily calisthenics routine. She can turn all of the footage into a series of exercise DVDs called, "Crazy Off the Pounds!" Being crazy burns calories -- it's the new South Beach Diet! Jessie reminds us that she's a grad student in architecture at USC, and says that if she weren't doing architecture she'd be doing fashion design. This gives me hope that maybe we'll see her on Project Runway one day.
Tyra enters and everyone screams and screams, per usual. Kiara tells us that it's game time, and she's channeling her basketball persona into the competition. Whose head will she slam dunk? Kristin seems like the obvious choice. Tyra explains the new rules, and how everything they do will be graded/scored. She says it's no longer just qualitative, it's quantitative. Because now they are taking completely subjective opinions and assigning a numerical value to them! It's VERY scientific, obviously, and too much for those of us who didn't go (or not go) to Harvard Business School to understand. (And yes, I'm going to link to that Jezebel article in every recap.)
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