Fortunately, I was voted off Jury Island before making the top 12. I don't get to go on the tour of a drug-deal-gone-bad murder case, but I have a bunch of stuff to catch up with.
BuddyTV has the usual interviews with the dearly departed.
Lauren:
Was it strange to do that elimination last week without the studio audience? It was so quiet.
I would have to say it was my least favorite part of the whole season. It was such an awful feeling because you forget that you want to look out into the crowd and people are cheering you on and saying good job. I almost couldn’t talk, I was kind of speechless because I was just looking to the right and I see all my friends, all my close friends and it made the experience a little more personal then being able to look out and thank people for sticking by me for so long. Sitting there watching my good bye package, it was like seven of us in the room, it felt really weird.
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Pasha:
You've danced with a lot of different women on the show. Do you have a favorite partner that you got to work with?
I would say, probably Sara. All the girls were incredible and I find a special connection for each person. I think it's a special part of the dancing especially the partnership dancing. But I think the best was with Sara.
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The LATimes' Jon Caramanica reviews the season and prepares us for the finale:
Even more than its dancers, though, "SYTYCD" fetishizes its choreographers, a rotating bunch who, in the eyes of the show, can do no wrong. There's Mandy Moore (not to be confused with the pop singer Mandy Moore), whose routines have been crisp, energetic and modern, and the sublime Mia Michaels, advocating on behalf of "alien" movements, and sometimes even getting the dancers to achieve them. Hunter Johnson has lent a touch of class to the competition with his waltzes, and Alex Da Silva's Latin routines have been slick.
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Mentioned by one of our many outstanding commenters, Deborah Starr Seibel was backstage at the results show:
So this year, the producers decided to take a kinder, gentler approach. For the first time, the dancers had a whole week off around the Fourth of July. "Even if they weren't feeling fatigued, to have a week off made a huge difference," says Donyelle Jones, also in the audience tonight. "They came back refreshed." The top four this year were also taken to a local spa last Friday for some serious pampering. "They're going to get a little spa, a little massage," said executive producer Nigel Lythgoe. All day Friday? "Oh, no, no, no," said Lythgoe. "They've got to work. They've got 11 or 12 routines to do next week between the last night of competition and the finale." Says Murphy, "I talked to the kids and they're in pretty good shape. We told them in Vegas (before the competition started in earnest), and I think they took it to heart: Get your bodies prepared. And that's exactly what they did. So just maybe we're going to see some of the best dancing out of them in the finale, which we definitely did not have last year because of the injuries. There's no way you can get the best out of somebody when they have a sprained knee or a broken toe."
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