'Dancing With The Stars' Recap: A Very Spooky 'Mash'-Up, Nikki Bella Gets Eliminated
It's the pre-All Hallows Eve episode of Dancing With The Stars, and you've been warned: bad Halloween puns ahead. (You should have gotten the hint with the candy corn-y title, but who knows how fast people catch on these days...)
In keeping with the spook-tacular holiday, this week's episode featured Halloween themed dances, and needless to say, our ghoul Nikki Bella — who's been holding her own all season — had the opportunity to do not one, but two, dances this week.
The first dance was per usual — the couples competing as they normally would — but the second dance featured the couples competing in sets of four (four couples per team), so they had to learn to be good dancers in double-time.
So, Nikki Boo!-la was tasked with a jive, to which she and professional partner Artem danced to the Hocus Pocus version of "I Put A Spell On You," and the result, of course, was a howl-arious good time.
The dance was set in a "Spellbucks" (no, seriously, they did that one, not me!) and while the female wrestling fans, naturally, went crazy for their bae-kween-Jesus, the judges were a little more deadly in their judgments.
Len Ghoul-man, who is one bread pudding away from making friends with Marley's Ghost, said that Bella's routine "lacked oomph." while Boo!-no Tonioli was a little more forgiving and took the "eh, it happens" tack.
For her individual dance, she scored a 24 out of 30 — which Boo!-no suggested that would be enough to keep Nikki safe from elimination.
It hasn't been her best score, but it wasn't her most ghastly, either. (We're gonna do this all night, kids...)
For the second half of Dancing with the Stars, Nikki joined Jordan Fisher & Lindsay Arnold, Lindsey Stirling & Mark Ballas (who had a bit of drama of her own this week when she allegedly hurt her ribs, but she was ultimately cleared for competition), and Terrell Owens & Cheryl Burke on the Team Monster Mash.
Now, some people in the Dancing with the Stars Tweet timeline are accusing the judges of playing favorites, but it's not like Nikki can't dance, or she hasn't been consistently good for all the weeks she's been on.
And then — in a shocking twist — both Nikki Bella and Vanessa Lachey were cut from the competition. Now, it was no surprise that Vanessa was cut from the competition — after all, she'd been performing pretty badly throughout the weeks leading up to this final elimination — but Nikki's cut was a shock.
The way the judges were going on about the opposite team — Team Phantom of the Opera, with the gangly Drew Scott as the team leader — you would have thought that they'd reinvented dancing itself. They got a perfect 30, besides. Shenanigans!
And to say that the Monster Mash — which was the theme of Nikki's team — was "messy" was hilarious, because it's not SUPPOSED to be anything but.
And you promised us that Nikki would be safe, Boo!-no. YOU PROMISED! You mean to tell me Drew Scott is still flailing his gangly arms all over the place and calling it dancing — he got one of the lowest scores of the night — but Nikki Bella is going home?
Wait a minute...isn't Total Divas' seventh season premiering tomorrow? Ah. Makes sense now.
Oh...and if you're going out for Halloween, buoys and ghouls, be safe out there. (Had to get one last bad pun in there.)