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The thrilling physical pyrotechnics were more subdued this week as the dancers competed outside their genres, and it all culminated in a borderline devastating dismissal.
Like a himbo with a speech impediment, it's almost more charming when So You Think You Can Dance has an off-week. Imperfection serves to remind us that these are human beings operating under extraordinary pressure and maybe we shouldn't expect a full-throttle party wagon of flawlessness like last week's episode. I'm not saying this week's episode of SYTYCD was bad by any stretch (impossible!), but now that the dancers have been shuffled into new pairs and tasked with dancing outside their native genres, it suddenly felt like a competition again. Even the choreographers alternated between rehashing old routines ("this routine is about a love that's unbreakable"; "this routine is about love that got away") or making them too difficult (hi, Benji!). And it all ended with the season's first dismissals, which were both surprising and in one case almost unwatchably sad.
Like last season, the way it works is the bottom six were announced at the top of the episode and then the ensuing performances by those bottom six functioned as a sort of 'dance for your life' scenario after which the judges chose who would go home. This ended up working out pretty well, format-wise, but it did really ramp up the tension for those dancers throughout the episode while also rendering the judges' critiques more foreshadowy than usual. Still though, if I wanted to see a lot of open-faced sobbing, I would've gone home for Christmas! Just kidding, I was not invited home for Christmas.