Dancing with the Stars Season 23, Week 7 – Dancing by the Numbers!

So, I am starting this while sitting in Honolulu airport on early Saturday afternoon. My flight has been delayed and I’m not home until tomorrow at 10am – let’s see if I can manage to get this written in that time. We’ll see. 🙂

I’m not highly motivated to write it, if I’m being honest. I’m kinda over this show and the extremely blatant manipulation. And I’m not even thinking that Marilu might go home. When I start writing this, I’m not actually sure who I think will go home. The margins are pretty tight.

I was also half asleep when I was watching this show, so I can’t comment really on the dances other than I’m surprised Marilu did as well as she did, considering her feet….

And now it’s Sunday afternoon – nearly 24 hours after I started traveling and I’m home and fed. And I haven’t slept. This should be interesting. Kinda pissed off cuz I paid American Airlines coin to have ONE connection in LAX. But one mysterious four hour delay in Honolulu led to a missed connection in LAX, a completely re-booked itinerary after standing in line for more than an hour and a half – and TWO connections! The hell? Honolulu to LAX, then LAX to O’Hare (and a long damn walk in O’Hare) followed by O’Hare to Nashville – my second leg left at ONE AM. Jesus. Also paid for upgraded seats and I think I only got one of those. To add insult to injury – my Group one/priority boarding got down graded to Group four. Not a big deal, you might think. Except the complete bitch at the LAX check-in made me (and quite a few others) gate check my rollerbag because she claimed that the overhead bins were full by the time I went to board – which meant I had to carry my lap top IN MY HANDS, along with my good camera.  Again…you might think no big deal (except I had to carry that f*&king laptop through two airports)….except I get on the plane and there are LOTS OF EMPTY OVERHEAD BINS. Never again, American Airlines.  You owe me MONEY. At least 400 bucks by my reckoning. POS.

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system….let’s take a look at the leader board.

Now, the uneducated in this inner workings of this show might assume that Marilu is going to go home. I am not one of those. I still haven’t decided who IS going home, though. Wish it was Jana, but I have a sneaking feeling that she will end up with immunity unless someone else (James) dances so well that it’s impossible to not give it to him.

There are so many problems with the scenario Monday that I guess I’m going to have to list them – for my own sake as well as yours. Here we go:

• First, handing out immunity. Say that James and Jana tie for the top spot. In the GOOD OLD DAYS, the person with the highest cumulative score would win – that would be James (by 22 points by my count). However, the first time they did the face off this season, LEN was the deciding vote. That means he could EASILY choose Jana over James. This stinks to high heaven. Now, if Laurie and James tie, they are also tied in cumulative score – and neither are in danger anyway, so no big deal. At least, I don’t think they are…

• Second, this little contest is not only tailor made to save someone who might be eliminated tomorrow otherwise, but it COULD also mean that at least three other people NEXT week who might have gone home are again safe. They will start out three points ahead of probably two other people. One person will start out FIVE points ahead of those same two people, and two points ahead of the three who win three extra points (unless one of them goes home).  It’s essentially designed to limit the effectiveness of the viewer votes by weighting the couples very significantly.

• Weighting the couples very significantly in TWO ways. Now, if the margins are similar to this week, and they don’t over and underscore significantly next week, it might not work….but who are we kidding here? If Marilu makes it through and even scores a 36 on her AT (as if they would allow that), Jana could get a perfect score and with her immunity it would put her as much as NINE points ahead of Marilu – a likely impossible margin. It’s disgusting. Say that Marilu dances against Terra and Marilu gets 36 and Terra gets 37 – Terra would get three additional points putting her four points ahead of Marilu, in addition to Jana’s 9 points in this scenario.  Do you see how shabby this is? I know you’re probably sick of hearing this word…but this show really IS rigged this week.  Marilu is just an example – same thing could happen to any of the three they would like to see the backside of.

• Now, the actual functioning of the immunity – I would be willing to bet that Jana is in play. She could go home. Say that Marilu gets the votes to beat Ryan and Jana.  And Ryan, Terra and Laurie also beat Jana in votes – it could happen because Laurie and Terra only need ONE vote per million votes cast, and Ryan needs less than 5.5k votes per million votes cast.  If Marilu is beating Ryan and Jana, and Ryan, Terra and Laurie are beating Jana, Jana would go home. Unless she gets immunity. Suddenly someone who is NOT the person with the lowest combined score and viewer vote goes home – either Marilu or Ryan, most likely.  This is shitty, no matter who it is.

:::sigh::: This bites. So, Marilu is on the bottom of the leaderboard this week – but she doesn’t need a lot to be safe – provided the frakin’ immunity doesn’t get in her way.

Now, assuming that immunity goes to either James, Laurie or Jana, Marilu really only needs to score that 3,630 more votes per million votes cast to be safe over Ryan. And if she gets about 9.1k more votes per million votes cast than Laurie, Jana or Terra, that would also make her safe. I’m inclined to think that Jana is a possibility, but Terra might be out of reach. She’s been making an impact.

See, if Marilu or Ryan get eliminated fair and square – fine. That’s the way the show works. But if one of them (or even Terra) goes home because the producers “save” Jana to keep their new beefcake around a bit longer? That’s bullshit. Let me remind you that Derek and Maks needed NO help being huge draws to this show – and Derek needed no help winning this show. He won it with dancers and non-dancers alike. And NONE of his partners were pimped to the extent we’ve seen with Val and now Gleb. Give me a break. If they were all that, they wouldn’t need their help to be successful. Me thinks these producers are too close to their show and have gotten so into manipulating that it’s like a drug they can’t put down.

Okay, so that covers Marilu – what about Ryan and the gang?  I’ve got all the numbers in the next table, but I’m going to ignore James and Calvin, because I assume they are safe.

Clearly, Ryan needs for Marilu to NOT get the 3.4k more votes per million votes cast OR he needs to get 5.5k more votes per million votes cast than ONE of Laurie, Terra or Jana. These are SMALL numbers…and now you see why I’m not sure who’s going home.  Who’s getting the votes?

Well, my gut still has me wondering if Jana is getting the votes…but I’m over tired and it could be wishful thinking. Let’s take a look at what would have to happen for Jana to be eliminated:

• She doesn’t win immunity, AND;
• Marilu gets 9.1k more votes per million votes cast, AND;
• Ryan gets 5.5k more votes per million votes cast, AND;
• Laurie and Terra BOTH get ONE more vote per million votes cast than her, AND;
• Jana doesn’t get the votes to pass either James or Calvin.

I tend to think that Jana is in real danger – or she was.  The real question is – how gullible is the audience? They’ve been working pretty hard to make Marilu invisible – they don’t include anything about her injuries in her package, they rarely send her up to Erin to chat, her camera time is basically limited.  Conversely, the producers are beating us over the head with Jana.

So why do they feel the need to do this? Well, Marilu is/was getting too many votes or Jana isn’t getting enough… or both. So…did it work? Have they managed to influence the audience? One only has to read some of the comments here to know they have an impact on the gullible.

Considering the unbelievable crap I read about our elections…I tend to think that most people just blindly believe what they see on TV or on the internet without question. While I do think the bottom three are likely Jana, Marilu and Ryan, Jana will end up being safe, one way or another.

I think it will come down to Ryan and Marilu and I really have no idea who will go home. My gut is leaning towards Marilu – a la a Nastia-style hatchet job, combined with other not so fun factors. But my gut is unreliable when it comes to Derek’s partners.

I think without the help, Jana might have been gone a week or two ago – this week for sure. And if Marilu goes, she better pray she gets the extra points for next week.