Derek Hough Blogs About DWTS Season 16, Weeks 7 and 8
Another very interesting and informative blog from Derek. Not only is he not a fan of the whole “immunity” thing, but he actually says he doesn’t think that much emotional connection is necessary for Samba. While I agree with him, I can’t believe he’s actually disagreeing with Carrie Ann in print!! 
You’ll have to click the link to see that part, though. Some excerpts from TV Guide.com:
It’s another busy week for us. I’m doing the Macy’s Stars of Dance and we have two full dances, one of which is a trio. I’m trying to do something new where I’m going to connect the two dances into one. We have the Viennese waltz and the paso doble, which are very different, so I’m going to make parallel universes. The set will be pretty much the same for both, but it’ll be different universes and there’ll be an element to go in the next dimension.
Does that make sense? I’m going to try to make it clear that they’re connected. I was thinking of having a cliff-hanger after one, but then I realized we have to be scored, so that kind of ruins that! That was originally what I had in mind, but now I’m making them separate but related. I really hope it won’t be too out there for the judges. I think just as long there’s enough content and technique, they’ll get it. In some dances, the story outweighs the content, but we’ll have enough of both hopefully.
Rehearsals are going well. Tristan is our trio partner, which is awesome. Kellie’s picking everything up, but we still have a bit more work to do. Carrie Ann was saying last week that she doesn’t feel the emotional connection from Kellie and I thought that was a fair comment. Hopefully this story will help in that it will put her in a world where she can somebody else. Unfortunately, the song is so short that it can be hard. The waltz is only one minute and six seconds
Hee hee…defending his brother to the end. That’s our Derek.
We were pretty surprised to get not only the highest score, but immunity. It was such a crazy week last week that we didn’t really expect it. It was a relief to know that we were safe, but it was also strange. I honestly don’t know how I feel about having immunity on the show. It’s certainly not my favorite new thing they’ve added. That would be the dancing bumpers we do now going in and out of commercials. I love those. It’s a great way of showcasing all our dancers and reminding everyone that this is a dancing show. It adds to the show and I’m not sure what immunity adds. But don’t get me wrong — I’m happy we didn’t have to sweat it out Tuesday.
We also didn’t have to do the dance-off, which was nice. We prepared for it. It’s funny because I hear and read all these comments about the selection process saying how people used or didn’t used strategy, and the truth is we all had it pre-planned. Andy wanted to do cha-cha because that was his best one of the three. Mark wanted to do cha-cha, so they just said to each other, “Hey, you want cha-cha too? We’ll pick each other.” Zendaya and Jacoby wanted to do jive, so they worked it out. And Sean and Ingo had no problem with the rumba since that was their individual dance too. Literally, everyone was going around making deals, like, “Can you pick me?” So it was funny to me to see people thinking Mark and Aly were dissing Andy by choosing him, but Andy told them to pick him!
