Face Off: Dragon’s Breath
Finally, a Face Off episode to renew my faith in Face Off. It was everything a classic Face Off should be, leaving me loving the artists and staring agape at the judges’ stunningly stupid decision.
The parameters of the individual challenge are announced out on the beach at Malibu, right where Charlton Heston screamed, “YOU BLEW IT UP!” McKenzie Westmore doesn’t just show them a dragon or something. Nope. She says it like she’s in the wizard mafia or something: “I’m talkin’ about dragons here!” But not just dragons, she’s basically talking about D&D dragons, mentioning that dragons can do more than just breath fire. Some breath ice, or acid, or….slime? Ok. Actually, there are some really cool concepts here that D&D could borrow. Dragons that breath a blast of sand? Excellent. Tar? Interesting. Quills? Ok, let’s run with it.
The first half of the episode had every necessary Face Off ingredient. Contestants being cool and helping each other! Mold drama! Crippling self-doubt! Someone saying, “I’m going home,” at least 15 times. And is there anything better than McKenzie saying, “I’ll stop by later with my dad.” And then she does, and Michael Westmore gives everyone awesome advice. Like he does every time. Adding his mentorship was the best decision this show ever made.
On to the dragons. The winner was Tyler’s ice dragon, and it was indeed very nice. Twisted, creepy wings (the best wings Ve’s ever seen), a vulture inspiration, great vaccu-form icicles. Really nice job. I love Tyler’s enthusiasm too, for dragons and just about everything he’s encountered so far.
Niko’s quill dragon looked kind of catlike and had a terrible muddy paint job. On Face Off, “muddy” is the equivalent of “pitchy.” Dog.
Daniel’s slime dragon was sabotaged by the wardrobe department, but I thought his design was interesting and had a lot of character. We’ll get back to this in a moment.
Tanner’s fire dragon had these huge black plates that he fabricated (despite not being an experienced fabricator, as he observed). The face shape with side facing eyes made it look really inhuman.
Daran made an acid dragon with a detailed face, but no real wow factor.
Rashaad revealed himself as this season’s chief fabricator. I loved his tar dragon, it looked seriously mean and tough, and totally dragon-like.
Cat’s ice dragon used a beauty angle, which set it apart, but it also looked a little too human.
Graham’s slime dragon was one of my favorites. In 30 minutes of judging, it didn’t get a single mention. The slime sacs and copious sliming were excellent touches, and it had super weird eyes, making it look a little spiderlike, but it still felt like a dragon.
George’s fire dragon had gold accents and carried off an amazing Asian look, with swept back horns and a striking paint job.
Chloe. Well. Look, she had problems with her molds, but even before then, her seahorse design felt super weird. The end result was half covered by a hood and had a pretty miserable paint job. Yet somehow Chloe wasn’t even in bottom looks? It was really, really bad.
Corinne’s acid dragon had a very lizardlike feel to it, but an overly subtle paint job.
Tess had some good ideas with her purple quill dragon, but that thing was a wreck. It just looked really amateurish, from the application to the one-dimensional paint.
Matt’s tar dragon just looked like a sand monster, not at all dragonlike.
So the judges put Chloe in middle looks, but Daniel in bottom looks. Weird, but ok. Now my understand is that wardrobe just gives the artists the costumes, and the artists don’t get much say. So you can’t really hold that stupid kimono against Daniel. They complained that it looked more like a sea creature than a dragon. Hey, maybe a dragon could be a sea creature, wouldn’t that be creative? Ve kept saying the scales looked more like an armor plate. How is that a bad thing? It looked really cool. Weird, and sort of non-threatening, but overall pretty neat. I absolutely can’t fathom why the judges sent him home. I can only assume there’s some behind the scenes reason for it. It’s such a mind-boggling, terrible decision it genuinely makes me doubt the integrity of the judging process.
But whatever. The judges wasting half the show is par for the course. But we had dragons! And some great designs! I’ll chalk it up as a win.
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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Tuesday, January 28th, 2014. Filed under Dark TV, Headline.
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Tags: dragon's breath, face off, syfy
