You know, usually with Top Model cycles I fall prey to some sort of Stockholm Syndrome by the last few episodes, and end up kind of liking the bitchy contenders despite myself. Not so with this group – their meanness and racism isn’t amusingly outrageous, it’s just unpleasant. CNTM isn’t even a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure this cycle. It’s just so bad. So very bad.
I’m getting tired of recapping the minutiae of Nikita’s nastiness. Just assume that whenever she is onscreen she is saying something bitchy (and not clever bitchy, just asshole bitchy) and making a sour face. (To be fair, the sour face thing is just how she looks – as Ann pointed out, you get the face you deserve.) Maryam bears the brunt of the bitches this week – the other girls (well, mostly Nikita and her little Prairie sidekick Meagan) constantly make fun of Maryam’s limited English and engage in classic mean girl exclusionary behaviour. Later on, Meagan is upset about her photoshoot and Maryam tries to comfort her, and Meagan has the gall to bitch about how Maryam was being too nice to her. I can’t tell you how happy I will be after the finale tonight, when I don’t have to look at any of these stupid faces again. Sheesh.
There’s some ridiculous manufactured drama about dresses made out of toilet paper – for a challenge, the girls have to walk a runway in them without tearing the toilet paper at all, an impossible task, of course. Maryam, trying to help Linsay get her dress done up, tears a bit of toilet paper. Everyone freaks out at her. It’s incredibly stupid and designers shouldn’t waste their time making dresses out of toilet paper anyway. So Linsay wins the challenge and gets to buy a bunch of shoes at Holt’s.
CoverGirl photo shoot! Meagan freaks out and takes a terrible shot, which surprises everyone because she’s got such a natural girl-next-door CoverGirl look. Maryam’s picture is far and away the best, but she never figured out how to walk the runway without staring at the ground, so she’s sent home. So the final three is Prairie Ditz, Nikita Badanov, and Linsay, who I don’t have a nasty nickname for because she seems like a reasonable human being and actually looks like a model.
One more episode. Oy.
