MySpace blogger Doug rants about Ricky's elimination and comes up with an interesting proposal:

I do realize that the judges get involved in the elimination for the first few weeks of the competition to try to "be fair" to the competitors. As they've said on the show, America has no idea what every member of the Top 20 can do yet, so they allow America to vote and then try to insert some "reason" into the process by eliminating one of the bottom 3 vote-getters. Their point being: "America doesn't know what a good dancer is or how good each of these dancers are in their respective genres, so we judges have to make the final decision for them." The easiest way around it so the judges NEVER have to be involved once public voting starts? Have the first night of performances after the Top 20 are chosen be solos in their respective dance styles so the audience can SEE their strengths. Have a second night of performances where they do what they already do (draw a style out of a hat and perform with a randomly chosen partner). THEN allow the public to vote. If the public is aware of what each dancer's strengths are and THEN sees them do something randomly chosen, they've been educated. They've been given the tools to make a better judgement. And then, the judges/producers can't manipulate.

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Ricky's dismissal inspires thoughts of gendered normativity and Althusser's essay on ideology in another blogger:

So, to get back to So You Think…?, the same sort of ideological reproduction is happening when we see uneven height in ballroom dance and have that deep twitch, that deeply seated sense that Ricky being shorter than Ashlee isn’t quite right. It doesn’t work. We have that sense without any education whatsoever in dance. We just feel it. Now, learning about dance forms might give us another language for that sense - and one that, in part I’d argue, is purely about an aesthetic form (partly politicized too, of course) - but the immediate feeling “that doesn’t look right” is really something different. If we reject that feeling later, well, it is still rejecting it “later.” Because ideology is so familiar to us, we don’t see ideology itself, but rather have a fairly uniform set of immediate responses to what we see and hear. Becoming aware of how intimate we are with ideology is the first step - the biggest one, really - to imagining different sorts of relation to the world.

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Our proposal: Let 'em all dance for 10 weeks, THEN let us vote.