Clyde Goes Home

This week’s "Dancing With The Stars" performances inspired very different responses from last week’s performances. Specifically, the judges disliked almost everything last week and complained about the work ethic, but this week, they highly praised several dances and started giving out 10s in a manner not quite so stingy. This didn’t apply to everyone, though, meaning that somebody would go. Probably someone tall. Very tall. Maybe an athlete. Any ideas? How about NBA Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler! Finally!

Of course, it didn’t take a genius to know that the encore dance would be Apolo Anton Ohno and Julianne Hough’s samba, considering that it got a perfect score — the first perfect score of the season. As is often the case, the dance on second viewing was even more fun than it had been the first time, because it seemed so relaxed and comfortable without scoring to worry about.

During a backstage chat with co-host Samantha Harris, Heather Mills explained that the reason she fell on Monday night was that she was supposed to raise her artificial leg and stand on her real leg, and instead, she tried to stand on the artificial leg. As we’ve learned in the past, she can’t balance on the artificial leg, so that’s how she wound up tumbling down.

The first couple ushered to safety was Laila Ali and Maks Chmerkovskiy, which surprised no one. The second couple ushered to safety was John Ratzenberger and Edyta Sliwinska, which surprised everyone. John sat in the bottom two last week, and he didn’t dance all that much better this week, so it was clear that someone else was going to take a serious dive from previous scores.

It wouldn’t be a filler show without Jimmy Kimmel and “Guillermo” offering a demonstration of a dance planned for next week; in this case, it was the swing. After Jimmy was a little mean to Guillermo, Guillermo sought solace in the ladies’ room in the arms of Joey Fatone. If you are thinking that this could not possibly have happened, you are wrong. Host Tom Bergeron deftly remarked that this represented Joey’s “misguided attempt to prove his masculinity.”

Anyway, after a bunch of filler, we moved on to the actual results referred to in the phrase “results show.” Joey and Apolo were both declared safe. This left Ian Ziering, Heather, Clyde, and Billy Ray Cyrus, none of whom had ever been in the bottom two before. And after a ho-hum segment inviting the contestants to complain about how stressful judging is, it was time to learn who was in the bottom two. Ian managed to stay safe, then Clyde was finally sent under the Red Light of Doom, after many weeks of being saved by the audience. He was joined in the bottom two by Heather, who was faced with the prospect of being the fourth consecutive woman to be eliminated since the beginning of the competition, which would leave Laila alone with six men.

Finally, after several weeks of deserving to go home, Clyde finally did, meaning that NBA fans aren’t quite as powerful as NFL fans, or that NBA fans have their limits as far as voting for people who are very, very bad dancers. The good news is that now, everyone who remains seems to be really trying his or her hardest in the competition, and that can only be a good thing.