Last night’s Face Off took the series into unexplored territory again. Season 3 forged ahead with brand new ideas so far and I couldn’t be more excited. Most reality shows already run out of steam by this point. Face Off refuses to go down that easily.

It was the “design a makeup for live performance” challenge, but there was a great twist. The contestants weren’t just making a character for dancers: they were making a full character concept for a traditional Chinese dragon dancer team. Each pair of designers had to incorporate two zodiac signs into a cohesive and functional performance look. That meant making the two man costume and the character alike. The makeups would be presented on stage before a very lively performance to see how durable the designs really were.

Essentially, it’s the first official Face Off fabrication challenge. Contestants have won or lost because of their fabrication–prop, costumes, accessories, etc.–skills in previous seasons. There have even been challenges where the totality of the look was stressed. This is the first time that the ability to create a costume and appropriate accessories had to be weighed in as heavily as effects makeup for everyone.

The top teams for the challenge were Rod & Nicole, Alana & Laura, and Derek & Tommy. Rod & Nicole used the snake and the rat to create a very traditional dragon costume. Had the challenge been judged on authenticity, they would have won. The color scheme and use of flags on the head were perfect for this task. The costume moved very well during the dance. It really was a beautiful and traditional design.

Derek & Tommy used the monkey and the ox for another traditional look. Their dragon concept was executed perfectly and really looked like the work of one person. My one issue with this design in a Chinese dragon costume challenge was the use of traditional Japanese patterns and motifs. The overall effect was great. I just wish they didn’t cross cultures for the challenge. I have to hand it to this team. The red and the gold stood out like nothing else in the performance number.

Alana & Laura were my picks to win. What will it take for Laura to actually win a challenge on this show? Their combination of the goat and the rat was quite striking. Nothing else looked like it during the performance. I will admit that it was perhaps a bit too sinister to really fit the challenge head on, but no other team actually designed a “mask” that would read during a parade or showcase performance.

Derek & Tommy’s look came out on top for its cohesion. Derek was awarded the victory for his design concept.

Here’s where Face Off can get a little sad. The bottom two looks were very good, as well. These decisions came down to judges’ preferences and I don’t agree with all of them.

Eric & Sarah were in the bottom largely because of their color scheme. Apparently, blue and orange don’t go together in makeup design. It’s a pretty common design combination, especially in the shades they chose, so the criticism threw me for a loop. The horns were very uneven and the facial prosthetic fell in between perfect symmetry and agreeable asymmetry. Their zodiac influences weren’t as clear as the other designs. I saw monkey, but I did not see boar.

Jason & Roy wound up in the bottom because of their paint job. The dark red used to bring out the snake hid all the detail in the sculpt. The rabbit was lost completely in the color. It wass quite a striking character if you could get past the poor color choice. Will these contestants ever learn that red does not read well on the bright purple set of Face Off? No? Ok then.

Ultimately, Eric & Sarah’s look was deemed the worst and Eric went home for fabricating the horns. That’s not exactly a bad thing. If you’re eliminated on this kind of show just because someone didn’t like an accessory to a costume, it’s not going to hurt your professional reputation. This was the equivalent of going home on Top Chef because the guest judge doesn’t care for raw onions in a side salad. This was clearly a matter of taste and no reflection on the actual abilities of Eric as a special effects makeup artist.

Thoughts on the latest episode? I loved the challenge more than you can imagine. I can only hope this season keeps stressing story and function in the designs rather than rewarding contestants for elaborate but impractical makeups. Sound off with your thoughts below.

Face Off had its third season premiere last night. SyFy’s original reality show is all about creating and executing Hollywood makeup effects on very tight deadlines. Judged by working industry professionals (a rarity for this genre of competition), Face Off is marked by its quality of challenges and professionalism above all else. Even if the contestants start fighting, they’re judged on the quality of their work and how well they would function on an actual set.

Each episode is broken into two challenges. The Foundation Challenge is a quick two or three hour challenge where the contestants demonstrate technical skills for a guest judge. These have included designing facial hair, creating realistic blood for a crime scene, and executing character defining tattoos.

The Spotlight Challenge is where the movie magic happens. The contestants get 2-3 days to create full bodied characters based on a theme. Sometimes, it’s body painting to incorporate into an existing photograph. Other times, it’s the creation of an original character to center a movie or TV scene around. And, in the most challenging weeks, it’s a functionality challenge, where an original makeup has to survive huge dance routines or total immersion in water.

This season, 12 contestants are vying for the Face Off prize, which includes a new car, lecturing at a top industry makeup school in NYC and Paris, and $100,000. For the first time ever, all of the contestants have extensive prosthetic makeup experience. Previous seasons have seen a number of body painters or beauty makeup specialists compete and, for the most part, fail miserably in what is ostensibly a fabrication contest. Now, there are no excuses.

The Foundation Challenge was a bit of a let down this time. It was a repeat of the season 1 “create a character in two hours using a makeup kit and something from your surroundings” challenge and the results weren’t as interesting. The production staff did not provide enough interesting materials to get most people thinking beyond plant aliens/tissue paper monsters. Me? I would have gone for a superhero concept using one of the floating beach balls to create a mask, but that’s just me.

The winner of the Foundation Challenge was Eric and he did a lovely paint job to incorporate a distinctive plant into what he called a witch design. Guest judge Sean Astin said it looked like an alien. I’m siding with Sean Astin. Not a witch.

The Spotlight Challenge is where Face Off proved how far they’ve come. The contestants were randomly split up into pairs to design an original alien for the Star Wars Cantina scene. The prize? Having that alien included in an upcoming episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That’s a big prize. Forget what you think about the animated series. Two of these artists are going from reality show contestants to Lucasfilm Animation designers in a three day challenge.

The concept behind the challenge allows for so many directions. Do you try to create something brand new that has never been seen before in Star Wars? Do you riff on existing species to build off the rich backstories of the universe? Or do you fall somewhere in between, crafting a new species but placing them in a familiar context with colors or costuming? All three approaches were used this week and, for the most part, the contestants were successful.

The top 2 looks, decided by the judges, came from Sarah/Laura and Rod/Roy. Sarah/Laura are both self-proclaimed geeks and immediately were drawn to Yoda’s home planet. They decided to create an amphibian-like bounty hunter in the color family of Ventress. The hook was the need for moisture. This character has to wear a cloak to keep its skin moist and travel with a mask and air tank to survive on the harsh desert of Tatooine.

Rod/Roy went in the something new direction. Their monstrous little creature is fat, disgusting, and unappealing. The quality of fabrication on the articulated suit carrying the squat beast is stunning. Their “backstory” covered for a lack of backstory, claiming no one knows where this creature comes but he spends all of his time at the Mos Eisley Cantina. This look won the challenge and Rod was named the winner for doing the facial prosthetic and paint job on the creature within the costume.

The bottom 2 looks were defined by poor finishing. Both C.C./Derek and Tommy/Joe came up with great concepts for alien species. They just did terrible paint jobs.

C.C./Derek went with a musician at the Cantina. Their concept and sculpt were excellent. Things fell apart with the paint job. Aiming for a bronze-orange, the pair couldn’t get the color right and wound up with the burn color in a bad Halloween makeup kit. The hair work came loose as well, turning the tight dreads into a bushy mess in the back.

Tommy/Joe could have won this challenge if they worked together. They didn’t. They fought the whole time. Joe took control and criticized everything Tommy did. Tommy didn’t stand up for himself except for when he would snap and get passive aggressive. The concept–multiple-eyed alien warrior–would have been great with a complete costume and solid painting. Neither was accomplished. The painting, in particular, looked like a bad finger painting experiment by a pre-schooler. For continuity’s sake, I’d like to point out that this is the second time aiming for “turtle” in a paint job has resulted in a look hated by the judges with prosthetics literally falling apart on the model.

Ultimately, the judges didn’t have to send anyone home. Joe, presumably blindsided by Tommy’s really bad attempt to save himself from the judges, walked off the set in a rage and was disqualified. I began to suspect he quit when there were no talking head interviews with his side of the conflict. Everything was Tommy and that usually means someone isn’t around anymore to record the interviews.

Now that Joe is gone, the studio might be quieter. He was so loud and abrasive that some great moments of trying to pull everyone up went by in a blink. Rod helped the Alana/Nicole team set up their molds for casting when they were overwhelmed by an overly ambitious project. Derek helped his twin brother Eric pull apart a mold that wasn’t cooperating when Eric started to panic. Everyone (but Joe) had nice things to say about Rod/Roy’s creation and Alana even tried to diffuse the tension between Joe/Tommy by saying “life’s too short” when they started fighting over something really stupid.

It appears, once again, the contestants respect each other and want to win for having the best work. They don’t want to survive because someone didn’t finish. They want to survive because the judges preferred their performance to someone else. Where’s the thrill of victory when you win because someone else fails miserably?

I’ll be tuning in this season and recapping in this simpler format. I have more to say about the overall design and backstory than I do about the design process anyway. Unless there’s something super cool–like Beki’s latex cape on the concrete floor last season–I’ll be focusing on the finished work and challenge prompts.

All photos in the post (except the Foundation Challenge) come from SyFy’s Face Off galleries. You should go browse through them.

Thoughts on Face Off? Love to hear them. It’s such a great show and it deserves more attention than it gets. Sound off with your opinions below. Love to hear from you.

When I heard the spoiler that Jessica Sanchez, the now runner-up on Season 11 of American Idol, would be performing a duet of “And I’m Telling You” from Dreamgirls on the finale, I assumed that they would be busing in AI alumna Jennifer Hudson to sing. I was wrong. They brought in Jennifer Holliday.

Holliday created the role of Effie in Dreamgirls, carving out a spot in the history of entertainment. For 31 years, she has been invited to sing the music from that show all over the world. No one sings Effie’s songs like her.

I also can’t think of another performer who is willing to get this ugly to sell the desperation of that song.

The spectacle was not limited to Jennifer Holliday doing what Jennifer Holliday has done for 31 years. This was the first time that I saw Jessica Sanchez actually drop her efforts to be perfect and come alive onstage. You can learn a lot from working with someone who is all about selling the song by any means necessary. I think Jessica did.

And apparently some white guy with a guitar won for the fifth time in a row or something. Who cares? Jennifer Holliday ate the mic onstage and tore the theater down.

Did I miss anything of importance here? Sound off below. Love to hear from you.

This week, the ten remaining queens were challenged to film an episode of a sitcom. It’s the scripted acting challenge and no stunts were pulled. It appears the producers are pleased with the level of drama in the contest already so no crazy “now switch scripts an hour before shooting” tricks are necessary (yet).

But first, the girls are teamed up for a photo challenge. They will be handcuffed together while they apply makeup to each other for their police mug shots. That’s right. It’s the “let’s give Latrice Royale as much screentime as possible” episode. Every time anything related to prison is mentioned, Latrice gets camera time. You don’t hear me complaining. I love Latrice.

It’s also the “let’s give Willam almost as much screentime” episode. That’s right. Since it’s the acting challenge, Willam gets to mention her resume again and again. The other queens talk about her talking about her work in TV and film. Even RuPaul talks about the queens talking about Willam talking about her work in TV and film. You know what? Good for her. If Shangela and Pandora Boxx can parlay their Drag Race appearances into acting jobs, why can’t a trained actor do the same thing? It’s no different than anyone else talking about their experience. Plus, Willam delivers.

Back to the challenge. The girls all seem to make this the “paint each other as busted as possible challenge.” No DUIs in this bunch. We have prostitutes, fighters, drug dealers, and even some grand larceny. It’s Willam’s inspired of bright blue makeup to suggest dye packs going off at a high stakes bank robbery that puts her team on top. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

Willam and Madame LaQueer are team leaders for the sitcom challenge. Teammates are randomly drawn from a hat before everyone is assigned a role. Willam gives the nation a lesson in comedy direction while Madame LaQueer miscasts everyone on her team except for Dida Ritz. These choices include Kenya Michaels playing a butch prison guard and Madame LaQueer having more than one sentence to say. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Madame LaQueer becomes convinced a British accent will give her the edge to win the challenge.

On set, Willam’s direction in the work room paid off as all the girls on her team do well. Latrice in particular channels her feelings over her stint in jail into a great sidekick performance. Madame LaQueer’s team struggles. The only one who comes across well on set is Dida Ritz, who does her best Bea Arthur chastising friend act.

It’s worth watching both completed episodes. They’re ninety seconds each and give you a clear idea of who understood the challenge.

The big takeaway from the sitcom challenge is not how well Willam, Latrice, Phi Phi O’Hara, or Chad Michaels do, but how poorly Sharon Needles takes criticism. I can tell she has some big defense mechanisms built up from the way she acts on set. Nothing is her fault directly. There’s a sense of separation between herself and her mistakes. It explains her blaming Phi Phi on the runway last week and her responses to everything that guest judge Max Mutchnick says to her throughout the episode. She needs to tone that down or she’s in trouble. Just take a page out of Fantasia’s book: shut up and smile no matter what they say to you.

Before we get to the runway, we hit our first big fight of the season. Sharon Needles decides she needs to let Phi Phi O’Hara know about her comments on the runway last week. Everything is fine until Phi Phi hears a single negative word said about her.

There’s another take away from the episode: Sharon may deflect criticism, but Phi Phi thinks she’s actually above it. There was no need for this to turn into a fight. All we got out of it was a fantastic insult not even delivered very well. Maybe Willam could coach Phi Phi on hitting the keywords in a good read.

On the runway, the girls are told to dress to impress. Willam, Latrice Royale, Sharon Needles, and Chad Michaels excel, while Madame Laqueer and Dida Ritz do not flatter themselves at all.

Willam’s team wins the challenge with Latrice named as the MVP. Madame Laqueer’s entire team has to stay on the runway for critiques. The line of the episode is a tie during this session.

Michele Visage, what’s wrong with Dida Ritz’ runway presentation?

If you’re going bare leg, lotion up, girl. Lotion up.

And Max Mutchnick, why has Sharon Needles become America’s sweetheart?

I don’t like the name, I don’t like the look, I don’t want to see a sitcom starring the little girl from The Ring.

I would pay to see a sitcom inspired by The Ring starring Sharon Needles. I guess we’ll have to settle for the video of her Human Centipede-inspired performance number. NSFW

Ultimately, Madame LaQueer is outperformed in the Lip Sync for Your Life by Milan who Swiffers her way to victory. I’ll just pretend they sent Madame LaQueer home for her challenge performance because she did not do poorly on the lip sync at all.. Let’s just say I think the decision could have gone the other way without the puce dress or British accent.

The Latrice/Willam show continues on UnTucked! this week, as they lead a reading contest against Jiggly Caliente backstage. Everything is all fun and games until Sharon and Phi Phi wind up in the same room again.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the remaining contestants are challenged to record an infomercial for RuPaul’s album of greatest hits. They have to write it, costume it, stage it, and perform it in a small amount of time.

But first, RuPaul does a very nice thing for a fan. Piyah Martell was born with Caudal Regression Syndrome. It’s a congenital disorder where part of the lower spine doesn’t develop. In Piyah’s case, she doesn’t have developed legs at all. This has not stopped Piyah from pursuing her dreams to be an entertainer. RuPaul is nothing if not a kind-hearted and caring man. I mean, Drag Race exists to showcase the contestants and introduce a wider audience to the art of drag.

Piyah’s online fans are called Butterflies. In honor of their special guest, the queens are challenged to create a unique headpiece out of rhinestones, glitter and butterflies for Piyah to wear in an upcoming video. The winning team is Phi Phi O’Hara, Kenya Michaels, and Jiggly Caliente.

Since Jiggly didn’t actually get picked for a team, the prize goes to Phi Phi O’Hara and Kenya Michaels. They are the team leaders on the main challenge. The queens of season 4 have to sell RuPaul’s most recent albums. Each queen will be lip syncing to one song and writing a testimonial about how that song changed their life. The teams will also be working on scripts to introduce the infomercial, choreography, and the overall theme and look of the finished ad.

The overriding arc of the season seems to be set already. Phi Phi O’Hara really does not like Sharon Needles. She thinks Sharon is a one note queen who can only do horror. As such, when Sharon tries to add some creative ideas to Phi Phi’s vision, she is shut down and told to put on some white powder and act spooky. Keep that in mind for later.

There are quite a few standouts in the challenge. From Team Kenya, Chad Michaels as the announcer of Team Kenya. She once again is super polished and entertaining in an acting challenge. Kenya Michaels goes completely over the top again with her lip sync concept to “Get Your Rebel On” and it works. Willam excels at finding a personal link to RuPaul’s “Click Clack” and really pops in the finished ad.

From Team Phi Phi, Sharon Needles gives Vampirella-inspired dry wit and proves that she can lip sync with the best in the contest. Phi Phi O’Hara goes for chola realness and makes RuPaul and Michelle Visage lose their composure on set. Latrice Royale takes it to the church and sells her lip sync like the main stage attraction at a gospel music festival.

On the runway, the queens are told to dress in their best gold or platinum ensemble. Chad Michaels, Kenya Michaels, and Sharon Needles all wind up in the top for pulling it together in the commercial and on the runway. Madame LaQueer, Dita Ritz, and The Princess get dinged for either their commercial performance or runway look.

Ultimately, Sharon Needles wins for her spooky wit and severe runway ensemble while The Princess is sent home for not bringing enough personality to the runway or the challenges. That’s two weeks in a row that excellent runway styling wasn’t enough to save a contestant in the bottom 2.

All I want to know is when Willam is going to get her due. She’s kind of gliding through the contest right now without being recognized on the main stage and it’s confusing me. Her runway looks are always polished and I like the intentional androgyny. There’s something refreshing about an un-padded queen exposing her chest but still coming across as a beautiful woman.

I can’t complain too much. Sharon Needles shut down Phi Phi O’Hara again. If they would just team up and cooperate, they would practically guarantee each other a spot in the finals.

I can’t complain about that, either. The fights this season are amazing. Watch UnTucked! to see everyone turn on everyone else this week. That doesn’t include Latrice Royale. She just sits back and laughs at them all.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the queens are challenged to wrestle in front of a live studio audience. The result is one of the best episodes in the history of the show. It really drew the line between the contestants who will thrive on Drag Race and the ones who will be weeded out quickly.

But first, RuPaul challenges the girls to carve out booty pads for their drag look in thirty minutes. The top three most bodacious bodies will win. The queens attack mountains of foam and packing peanuts to cobble together pads like drag MacGyvers.

Phi Phi O’Hara, Willam, and Chad Michaels are the victors.

I’m sensing a trend with team challenges on this show. Every season, the queens are asked to do something ridiculous that can’t possibly end well for the honor of leading their teams. Last season, they had to pretend to be psychic in a blind prop guessing game and throw together a scandalous photo shoot in a few minutes to lead. The year before, binging on fried food was the ticket to directing a fake advertisement. It’s a silly decision that cuts the tension before teams are assigned and it works.

For the main challenge, Phi Phi, Willam, and Chad lead teams of four into battle for Wrestling’s Trashiest Fighters. The teams are split into pairs of faces–good guys–and heels–bad guys–for their ring debut. They are responsible for costuming their fighters, coming up with characters, writing the backstories to the fights, and working with professional wrestlers to choreograph their bouts.

Three of my queens to watch for (Latrice Royale, Willam, and Sharon Needles) all step up in a big way for the challenge. They’re all performers who are willing to throw themselves out there for the sake of entertainment while playing to their strengths in every circumstance. The others who thrive in the challenge are Madame LaQueer, Chad Michaels, and Kenya Michaels–no relation. They preen to the crowd, stay in character, and fight in a way that’s funny without feeling too fake.

Team Phi Phi O’Hara has the best story but are dragged down by the performance of Lashauwn Beyond. It’s a shame, too. The judges make it quite clear that Latrice Royale and Kenya Michaels would have won the challenge if they were on the winning team. Team Willam has a forgettable story but good in-ring banter. The crowd really responds to them. Team Chad Michaels wins the wresting challenge for combining great acting with great wrestling, even if their STI-inspired backstory is crude.

For the runway, the girls are challenged to wear their girliest drag. The queens are all busy preparing when it becomes obvious that Jiggly Caliente is losing it. She’s paranoid that she’s going to be in the bottom two again because Princess didn’t perform in the ring. Seemingly everyone else tries to convince her to snap out of it, but she’s not having it. It’s a pity part for Jiggly and everyone’s invited to suffer.

The other queens do not take the bait. Latrice Royale and Lashauwn Beyond bond over the makeup table while Milan and Chad Michaels connect instantly with Madame LaQueer’s lack of traditional family support. Maybe Dida Ritz wasn’t so out of line last week when she tried to pull the girls together. Even with all the fighting in UnTucked!, the contestants really are forming fast bonds through their shared love of drag.

Chad Michaels and Madame LaQueer are named the co-champions of World’s Trashiest Fighters for their over the top and instantly hateable heels. Princess and Lashauwn Beyond are forced to lipsync for their lives for underwhelming in the ring and on the runway. Ultimately, Lashauwn goes home for not having the confidence to stand up and declare herself a worthwhile competitor.

The judges absolutely made the right choices given the rules of the challenge. The winners had to be selected from the winning team and Chad Michaels and Madame LaQueer made that fight work. Lashauwn Beyond was holding herself back so much that RuPaul didn’t even let her win last week with the judges’ favorite outfit in a runway-based challenge.

But most important of all, we learned that Sharon Needles can do traditional drag.

Now I’m convinced the only thing that can stop her from winning is herself. That or outright sabotage.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

So was the season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race as good for you as it was for me? For anyone confused about the post-apocalyptic/horror angle, Logo is launching a new series of Thursday night programming called Fearce. They’re playing a horror film every Thursday and they used RuPaul’s hit reality show to promote it.

This season, thirteen drag queens will be competing for a bevy of prizes. These include a lifetime supply of NYX cosmetics, the headlining slot on Logo’s Drag Race Tour, and $100,000.

The first thing you missed was the introduction of my favorite contestant this season, Sharon Needles. She is a horror drag queen from Pittsburgh who describes her persona as “beautiful, spooky, and stupid.” The other contestants read her the entire episode because they do not understand her horror style and think she’s completely out of her league.

Taking inspiration from the judges last season, RuPaul brings back Shangela to mess with the contestants. She gets to pop out of a box again and everything. The destruction of Shangela becomes a running gag and it works.

The theme of the week is the RuPocalypse. First, the girls do a photoshoot with Mark Mike Ruiz in a toxic wasteland. The Pit Crew spray them down with neon paint as they pose on a rotating platform.

Since so few girls keep their balance, I’ll pay tribute to the three with the most spectacular falls. Latrice Royale should have won the challenge for making a big fall off the platform work to her advantage as she kept posing while laying on the floor. Willam spends a good ten seconds falling before catching herself at the last moment and staying on her feet. Jiggly Caliente wins the photoshoot even though she falls off fast and struggles to get back up by herself.

Coincidentally, these three are my other queens to watch this season. I’m convinced that Latrice, Jiggly, Willam, or Sharon will win Season 4. They’re experienced, they have well-developed personas, and they aren’t afraid to fight for their spot on the show.

The main challenge is started in an eerie sepia wasteland. The queens are challenged to steal the clothes off of zombies’ backs to make a post apocalyptic couture design for the runway. Poor Shangela, dumped out the back door by RuPaul, doesn’t even have a chance of surviving the attack from zombified past contestants like Shannel, Pandora Boxx, and Akasha.

On the runway, the contestants all managed to pull together post apocalyptic outfits. Whether or not they were good is another matter all together. Sharon Needles wins the competition with a zombie look, complete with a mouth full of blood dripping out on the runway. Phi Phi O’Hara presents a metallic vision of Mad Max proportions that should have landed her in the top 3. The Princess is in the Top 3 because Mark Ruiz loved her Waterworld vision. So did I.

On the flip side, Kenya Michaels doesn’t actually do a post apocalyptic look. Jiggly Caliente looks like a wannabe Harajuku girl at a bad fan convention. Alisa Summers is sent home for…whatever that’s supposed to be.

I can’t disagree with the elimination, either. I didn’t even know there was a contestant named Alisa until she landed in the bottom 3.

The best line of the episode goes to Michelle Visage for critiquing Madame LaQueer’s cannibalistic runway, “The entree of the evening: Filet of Sole.” Brilliant.

I think the season is off to a great start. Even the non-sewing queens came up with outfits that looked like they tried to pull something together. The queens are already fighting in Untucked and the competition is on.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

Season 2 of SyFy’s excellent effects makeup reality series Face Off is here. Much like the climb in quality on shows like Project Runway and Top Chef, Face Off has grown tremendously from its first season with little alteration to the formula. The key to a talent-based reality show is high quality talent.

The worst artist on Face Off Season 2 would have made it further than most of the talent pool in the first season. Why? They know what to expect with the time constraints, they have more experience in the industry, and they know what the judges prioritize. A few of the contestants seem to have been headhunted to represent this or that field (a pair of well-known body painters only just transition to prosethics, especially) for diversity, but even they have skills in their specialty.

Fourteen makeup artists arrive at the Universal Studios backlot for their first Foundation Challenge. These challenges give the winning artist an advantage in the Spotlight Challenge that determines who is eliminated from the competition. This week, the artists have two and a half hours to design a full body character using at least one element from three different trailers. These trailers have specialty makeup, props, and costuming.

There only seems to be one person struggling and that’s Brea. She grabs some heavy denim pants and jackets to rip the zippers from for her makeup design. Unfortunately, the zippers are too heavy to be blended properly and she winds up with a messy skin-exposing design that lands her in the bottom.

More successful is Jerry, who creates a fantasy elf priestess character in shades of purple and white. He even built a prop and tailored the ready-made costume to fit the character. Judge Ve Neill sees him as the obvious choice for the first foundation winner and he earns immunity for the Spotlight Challenge.

My favorite makeup design here is Athena’s human/leopard hybrid. She uses a very basic prosthetic, some torn up pants, a killer wig, and a flawless body paint design to bring her character to life. Unfortunately for her, this is a Hollywood makeup competition, not a body-painting competition. That means the judges criticize her for visual brushstrokes (a texture effect in body painting) that won’t read realistic on film.

The next day, the contestants are brought to Grauman’s Chinese Theater to receive their Spotlight Challenge. They will be divided along gender lines to re-imagine the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The teams will be judged on the cohesiveness of their designs as well as originality and execution. That means even if the best makeup job is on the losing team, those artists will not win the Spotlight Challenge. It’s all or nothing as it should be this early in a reality show.

The woman gel together immediately with good direction and a unified concept. They will do the characters in a “tribal post-apocalyptic,” which makes sense as soon as you see the finished makeup. They split up the work in a logical way and are already sculpting their prosthetics while the men fight over a concept.

The men are a terrible team. They decide to design by committee, which never works. They get so far behind the women’s team that judge Glen Hetrick shows up to critique the workroom progress before they even know who is doing what with the makeup.

Beki demonstrates a technique I had never seen before for costume design. She wants her Wicked Witch of the West to have a very thin black cape. So, she paints a thin layer of latex right onto the floor and peels it off as soon as it dries. Instant durable super-thin fabric.

On the day of judging, the men have to cut corners on every step of their designs while the women stick to their original plans and finish all of the fussy last-minute details.

The Scarecrow from the women’s team is disturbing in the best way possible. The face is a rotting pumpkin with steel holding its working eye together. The crows that tormented the Scarecrow have been absorbed into his body.

The Tin Woodsman is a busted steampunk vision of brutality. It just looks fake. At least the concept of having to harvest human hearts for power is a good one.

The Cowardly Lion features great hair and tribal body painting, but there is no cohesion between the face and the body. You can tell Sue, the sculptor of the facial appliance, spent all of her time on her prosthetic, leaving Athena to do everything else. Athena also seems to have done all the body painting for the other designs, as the tribal patterns on their Tin Woodsman and Wicked Witch of the West are identical.

The Wicked Witch of the West is ready to go on film after three days of work. She has these metallic elements melting into her body, including a crown and necklace. The light up broom/gazing ball and metallic finger armor sell the concept.

The men’s Scarecrow really does look like a Halloween mask. To be specific, it’s practically a Pumpkinhead mask with some extra pulp in the front.

The Tin Woodsman makes no sense. Nix, the other body painter, didn’t even shave the hair off his model’s arms before painting him metallic. The chest piece looks like a baseball catcher’s pads were painted a solid flesh color.

The Cowardly Lion on the men’s team is the best makeup of the challenge. They have imagined the poor beast as a starving creature in Oz. She’s too cowardly to fight for her meals, so bones are close to ripping through the skin. She’s turned gray from sickness. It’s a haunting character I won’t soon forget.

The Wicked Witch of the west is terribly old-fashioned. The paint job is blocky. Ve Neill says it looks like he did it with makeup pencils, which is a perfect description. Imagine using a stick of lip liner or eye liner around your mouth and in your wrinkles. Do you think that looks good and realistic?

The women win the challenge and the judges award Brea for doing the facial prosthetics on the Wicked Witch of the West. Greg goes home on the men’s team for doing the catcher’s pads he called a chest appliance on the Tin Woodsman. I agree with all the judges decisions this episode except for the criticism of Athena’s bodypainting in the Foundation Challenge. The right people won and lost and Face Off seems to be on the brink of breaking in mainstream entertainment culture.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.