I have never been happier to end a cycle. And yes, there is an implied double meaning there. And yes, it’s completely true.

Weird Girl/America’s Next Top Petite Model would like to welcome you to this enormously picture heavy recap.

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The girls are way excited that they’re in the top four. And watching their excitement is actually less exciting than reading about it.

They go to their challenge, which is learning hula hip hop dance fusion and then telling a story about their lives through hula and then hip hop and then hula again. These totally cut hula ladies do the same routine where they hula and then rip off their skirts, like, ten times, so it loses a lot of its wtf impact pretty quickly. Also, Lazy Eye Too seems to think that crunking is pronounced “fronking”. So, they’re taught the routine and then taught some basic hula sign language and are sent off to create individual routines. A few years ago, there was a hula workout routine on Comcast On Demand, and we used to watch it on fast forward because the woman looked like she was floating back and forth across the screen. Memories.

Erin was a cheerleader, and she’s the only one left with any rhythm, so she offers to help the other girls by yelling “ONE TWO THREE FOUR” and clapping at them like she’s the jv cheerleading coach in a lifetime movie. Laura and Lazy Eye Too don’t seem to even be paying attention to her, but Weird Girl needs the help because when she dances she sort of falls into this habit of spreading her legs and squatting a little, staring off into space, and then waving her arms around. Erin is particularly hard on her, and Weird Girl kind of desperately needs the help, but she also wants you to know in an interview that she doesn’t appreciate someone helping her at all.

Miss J and the main hula lady judge the girls, who each dance the routine with the other real hula dancers and then do their little hula life story. Lazy Eye Too is kind of crappy, but they give her props for trying. Erin does the routine okay, but isn’t that great. Weird Girl looks like she’s having a seizure and when Miss J actually flatteringly imitates her, she whines that she doesn’t think she was all that bad, but she was actually worse. Laura is not too confidant, but says that she’s gonna fake it till she makes it, and ends up winning the challenge. They are all impressed with her booty shaking skills, for which she praises Jesus, and present her with an all-expenses paid trip back to Maui to stay at the Four Seasons Hotel. The catch? She has to go with one of the girls left in the competition. That’s so lame. If left to her own devices, she probably would have taken her Grandma, but instead, she takes Lazy Eye Too.

Back at the house, Erin is both angry that her supreme tumbling skills didn’t help her to win the challenge, and also that Laura didn’t pick her to go back to Hawaii after all of the selfless help that she gave the girls before the challenge. Although, now it’s pretty obvious that she helped them so she could a) say she won fair and square if she won and b) guarantee a ride-along on any other girl’s win. So, boo hoo. Her complaining to Laura about how she doesn’t want to hear about the challenge anymore is met with a chipper, “WhatEVER!” from Laura, because Laura is the nicest contestant that has ever been on this show.

At the photo shoot, they meet Mr. Jay and his short shorts on the beach, where they find out that they will be posing as the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. This makes Lazy Eye Too flip her shit like crazy and stare open-mouthed at Jay like he just told her that they’ll all be posing as Lazy Eye Too herself. Like, I’m so sure that Lazy Eye Too had any clue that there was a Hawaiian volcano goddess. Also, Jay tells them that the recession has hit again and Cover Girl can’t take care of the costs of shooting three girls for a commercial in the finale, so there will be no final three this year and two girls will go home tonight. Everyone’s shocked, especially Lazy Eye Too, who, it turns out, might have ptosis of the mouth as well.

Speaking of Lazy Eye Too, she doesn’t do a very good job. She’s seen statues of goddesses “start out” with their hands in a praying position, so she tries it, and the photographer very bitchily tells her that that’s a nice idea for, like, two frames, but now he’s bored. And after being told a hundred and fifty times by both Jay and the photographer to not try to stand on jagged volcanic rocks on her tippy toes so that she’ll stop tumbling forward in every shot, she finally listens somewhere around her very last frame.

Erin is pretty sure that she’ll have to do better than everyone else to secure a spot in the top, since she’s been in the bottom three weeks in a row. Deductive reasoning is a skill I did not think any of these girls possessed. She also used deduced that a goddess in charge of something destructive like a volcano would be kind of wrathful, but apparently goddesses that spew fire are supposed to be soft and pretty. So, Erin just thought of one of those pop songs the teenagers listen to and started singing it in her head. No, seriously, that’s a quote. “I thought of one of those pop songs the teenagers listen to and started singing it in my head.” When she was returning to her underground hobbit cave last night, she passed some children on the beach listening to a boom box, and filed the song away for a rainy day. Then she killed them with her teeth and made an entire wardrobe from their skins.

Laura is super nervous because of the double elimination and says that she doesn’t want to be sent home with nothing at this point, and ends up psyching herself out. Jay doesn’t like that she keeps posing with her mouth open, which is kind of annoying, because there has never ever been a picture of Lazy Eye Too with her mouth closed ever, and no one ever seems to notice it.

Weird Girl, meanwhile, does a great job per usual, and then spends her interview time saying that she’s gone from being awkward to awesome and then blasting all of the other girls’ skills. Because, now that it’s turned out she’s a pretty good model, she can stop trying to be nice to people and start acting stuck up.

Tyra must have an entire room filled with jumpsuits. Did you know Tyra lost 30 pounds? For health reasons? Well, she’s got the clingy jumpsuit to prove it. Atoosa’s troll successor from Seventeen is on panel yet again. I’m surprised Tyra didn’t make a big deal about using her again like it was this exciting surprise and not just a budget cut. Anyway, they like Weird Girl’s picture, natch. Lazy Eye Too’s picture is met with some jeers, but she then makes this big deal about how she did interesting poses in the beginning, and if they had just seen the other pictures, they’d totally love her, but Tyra calls her out and says her face looked like crapola in those pictures. It kind of looks like crapola in this picture, too.

I love that reality show convention, btw. Like, on Project Runway this season when this guy made a horrible looking dress out of newspaper and Tim Gunn said it looked like someone had bled out in it, like, literally bled everything out of themselves and died in it, and the guy crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage and started a new dress, but when that dress was blasted by the judges, he was like, I had made this other dress that was totally beautiful and Valentino-like and you would have absolutely loved it, but I was trying to iron it and the iron spit water out on it, so I’m simultaneously saying it’s not my fault and also blaming FIDM for putting malfunctioning steam irons in the room during a challenge where we were using newspaper as fabric. Or, on Chopped the other night, where this guy was making an appetizer out of turkey breast and the turkey breast was burnt and a judge was like, My turkey breast is burnt and burnt turkey is too gross for words, and the guy was like, Yeah, well, I dropped one of the pieces on the floor, and that one was cooked to perfection and if I hadn’t dropped it on the floor, you would have gotten that one and you wouldn’t have complained, but there was a camera on the one that had dropped on the floor and it looked even more burnt than the one he was defending. Or on Ghost Hunters Academy last night where this girl had left her investigation early and they asked her why she left early and she was like, You guys told me to, and they were like, We didn’t tell you anything, and she was like, Or, someone told me to over the walkie talkies, and they were like, We didn’t hear anything but anyway who told you to leave, and she was like, Ohhhhhh, who was it again, um, wait, what were we talking about? They just never remember there are cameras on them.

Laura ended up looking like Rachel Hunter in her picture, like, exactly like Rachel Hunter in her picture, but she didn’t look that tall. And Erin is sort of praised but also sort of torn down. During judging, Tyra explains once again how she wanted to get a bunch of short models together who can look just like tall models so she can break down barriers in the industry, and everyone else on panel silently nods in agreement like Tyra is such a civil rights movement leader, but no one ever seems to notice that hiring models who can pass as tall and thin and everything the industry is built on isn’t tearing down barriers; it’s putting up even more barriers than there were to begin with. It’s like hiring more black models as long as they’re willing to bleach their skin and appear white in pictures. But, at least they’re getting hired, or something?

They put Weird Girl through immediately and Lazy Eye Too, Laura, and Erin end up in the bottom three. Lazy Eye Too had a couple of bad weeks, but a good body of work. Laura has basically never had a bad picture, but they think she doesn’t have fashion sense or whatever. And apparently, Erin’s picture has magically turned from not too bad into the picture that totally turned everything back around for her. But, Laura gets through because they probably couldn’t rationalize not putting her through, because Laura’s the best contestant on this show ever (tied with the Ukrainian mail-order bride).

This just looks ridiculous. Like an alien from the future (credit to Sally).

I’m having trouble remembering anything that happened on this episode, because it was really boring.

There’s a lot of blah blah blah’ing in the beginning about how all of the little models want to be there to win and how they all think the other models are going to try to take their spot and that they don’t want to be eliminated now because that would mean they wouldn’t win, so thanks for explaining the basic premise of any reality competition to us.

Lazy Eye Too has been getting hammier and hammier each week in her interviews, and it’s getting to the point where she’s punctuating everything with one of those fake choking laughs, and I was REALLY hoping she’d do a crappy job this week so that I wouldn’t have to hear her COMPLETELY OVER THE TOP PHONY TAKE ON EVERY SINGLE MUNDANE THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE HOUSE OMG I POSED FOR PICTURES TODAY AND SO DID THE OTHER GIRLS AND I WANTED TO DO WELL AND WAS HOPING THEY’D DO NOT AS WELL UH HUH HUH GASP! This week she’s particularly annoyed with Weird Girl because Weird Girl is pretty much the best model in the competition and everyone knows it. And now that the girls have all seemed to find their own level and stop hating each other for no reason (especially since the most heinous contestants have gone home and have left us with the most boring + Laura), they know that they have to find drama so that they won’t be the only silent one on the couch at the Tyra Show next month. Lazy Eye Too has decided to scream about how great she thinks Weird Girl is and how much she wants to gnash her with her teeth every time she sees her specifically because she’ll probably win due to sheer talent.

In other news, Sundai was adopted, I guess, and that is where all of her problems stem from, but we won’t know her problems unless she makes it to top four, which means she’s so obviously going home tonight. She also says that if she doesn’t make it to the end and win this fake modeling contest, then her life is essentially over. Like, if she can’t be a model specifically through winning a competition that exists entirely inside of Tyra Banks’ head, her life is over. She’s 18, btw. Maybe her top-four-reveal would have been that she’s in the witness protection program and that, if she left the competition before the final week, the feds wouldn’t be able to protect her any longer and the bad guys would find her and kill her right outside of the Hawaii house. It’s a possibility, I guess.

Also, it’s Laura’s birthday, and she gets birthday spam.

The girls go to the beach and a boat rows up to them with an actual real model (for once) on it, and the girls scream and scream that they think it’s Marissa Miller and it is!!!! but it takes the boat, like, an hour to get to them, so by the time Marissa Miller steps out onto the sand, they’re all just sort of staring at her like they’ve forgotten who she is. MM teaches them to pose in a swimsuit, and they all do fine, I guess, but then they have to put on sneakers with their bikinis, which is so awk, and go up to a cliff where Nigel Barker emerges from his tanning bed to tell them to jump into the water and have their pictures taken on the way down. The prize is the extra frames telephone game, where the winner picks a friend for some extra frames, and then they pick a friend for some extra frames, etc., until the last girl standing gets the razz. The winner is Weird Girl (which causes Lazy Eye Too to FLIP OUT IN AN INTERVIEW LIKE WHAT A SURPRISE) and the old maid is Erin, who everyone declares didn’t get extra frames for being bratty. Erin makes a stank face, like, whatever, bitches, I’ll just do really well with my pitiful amount of frames.

Back at the house, they all prepare a birthday celebration for Laura. While icing the cupcakes, Erin does that thing that some people (in high school, one of those people may or may not have been me) do to be funny where they fake yell at people all, “If you touch that cupcake one more time, I’m gonna kick your ass!” but all of the girls (minus Laura, who gets the joke) are convinced that Erin’s being dictator-like with the cupcakes, but I think she was just unsuccessfully trying to be a laugh riot. Laura is appreciative of all of the love and care that went into the party, because Laura is the nicest person that’s ever been in Tyra Banks’ orbit. I kind of hope she gets kicked off soon, because I’m scared of Tyra trying to crack her open to feed off of her niceness for the next season of the Tyra Show.

The shoot involves getting pictures taken underwater, with a photographer who was a judge on the (sadly) short lived reality competition “The Shot” from VH1 where photographers competed for some kind of big commercial photography prize, and which gave us the amazing line, “The concept for this shoot is ‘Hair Dance.’” Laura goes first and flips out underwater immediately after taking away the oxygen. She got extra frames, so she gets to come up onto the boat and get some tips from Mr. Jay, who is, once again, totally surprised at how good her pictures are, just like he is every week, just like the panel is every week, because they have that amnesia like from Memento where Laura’s consistently good pictures will just never register in the memory part of their brains. The other girls all do fine, except Sundai, who complains about her asthma, water that got in her ear from the earlier competition (where she dove into the water on her side, like a big dope), and water that goes up her nose. Also, Erin blows it because she takes all of her pictures too close to the surface of the water instead of diving down, which she would have been told to do by Jay halfway through if it weren’t for the fact that she didn’t get extra frames. Wah wah.

At panel, Laura has on a blazer over a dress, and Tyra once again, with a disgusted look on her face, conjectures that her grandma made it, and while Laura explains that she saw a designer jacket in a magazine and loved it and told her grandma and her grandma made a copy of it and sent it to her for her birthday, Ms. J seems excited in that way that he seems to be excited by anything outside of his own reality and Marissa Miller says that it would look “good with jeans, too”, and Tyra continues to try to swallow down the bile. But, worse than normal, Tyra says for her to take it off and give it to TYRA and then puts it under her judging table, like Laura brought in a toy to class and the teacher had to confiscate it until the end of the day. I hope Laura’s grandma really hates Tyra.

The pictures are all fine, I guess, but Sundai and Erin end up in the bottom three. According to Tyra, the fact that there were double the amount of chances for Sundai means she should have taken a better picture than Erin, but Erin’s a ringer, so obviously she couldn’t get kicked off. So, she doesn’t. And Sundai starts weeping, just like that girl last week whose name I’ve already forgotten because they obviously both figured Erin wouldn’t be saved so many times in a row, but they were wrong. Hey, also? Maybe Sundai got kicked off because she’s FIVE FOOT THREE. She’s a shrimp. We’ll never know what her back story was, but at the end she does mention that she’ll just have to go on doing what she was doing (guarding her pot of gold?) the best she can since this model thing isn’t gonna happen.

Next week, the recession hits again, and there will be no final three this year. Oh, well!