So You Think You Can Dance: "Top Four Perform"/"The Winner Is Announced" 

There’s a lot of discussion among So You Think You Can Dance fans—and, this season, even among the judges—of how much choreography factors into a contestant’s success on the show. Do (relatively) undeserving dancers ride the coattails of memorable routines to stay longer in the competition than they should? Or are the routines memorable because of the dancers?

Little from column A, but more from column B, as evidenced by tonight’s remounting of the judges’ favorite dances of the season. Mia Michaels’ “butt dance” is a clear case of the dance outshining the dancers. (Can you imagine that routine with, say, Jeanine and Ade instead of Randi and Evan? Yowza.) To a lesser extent, so is Asuka and Vitolio’s waltz. Caitlin and Jason’s Bollywood routine was exhilarating the first time around, but as their somewhat lackluster performance of it tonight showed, maybe the excitement stemmed more from the material than the two of them. You could argue that Melissa and Ade’s Cancer Dance saved them from elimination that week, though I maintain that no one else could have danced that routine like they did.

But other routines that were revisited tonight—specifically the disco and paso doble—could have failed spectacularly in the hands of less skilled dancers. So it’s unsurprising that our final two, Brandon and Jeanine, were featured more than any of their fellow contestants on tonight’s best-of-the-season show, with three routines apiece. Of course, that could have been planned by the producers—the next-day revisit of last night’s paso doble, which just happens to feature the final two, is especially fishy. (But not really, because that was a spectacular routine that made me a believer in the paso doble once more.) But the fact that Kayla—and, more tellingly, Jason—had two dances to Evan’s one, despite the fact that he placed higher than her, tells another story.

It’s fitting that Jeanine and Brandon were featured an equal numbers of times tonight, because they’re each equally worthy of the title. As my roommate put it, “Brandon’s the best dancer, but Jeanine’s my favorite, so either way I’ll be happy.” Though I have to admit, I was especially excited to see a girl get the title again this season—ya know, even up the gender distribution in that SYTYCD winners’ circle a bit.

That said, I did shed a single, glittery tear for Kayla when she was announced as the fourth-place finalist. White Lightening was the dark horse going into last night’s show—though there’s no way Evan deserved, on a technical level, to beat her—but hot damn if the girl didn’t bring it in every single thing she danced, even that corny-ass jive. Granted, she can’t hold a candle to Jeanine in terms of personality—in fact, in week five I believe I said that her “personality seems to be mostly derived from how much makeup she is or isn’t wearing” (because I’m mean). But tonight’s endless montages and her samba with Max (and of course, EAWMM’s Emmy Grab, a.k.a., the Addiction Dance) served as a reminder that she’s been a force onstage from the beginning. Last night the judges kept talking about how Jeanine had peaked at exactly the right time in the competition, and they were right; but Kayla seemed to be riding right behind her on that wave. Her final dance last night, the country-Western jive with Evan, may have been a bit of a flop, yes—but not because of her. In fact, that was the most magnetic I’ve seen her all season. Too little, too late.

But the real reason that jive tanked was Evan. He was outmatched by every single one of his partners last night, and each of his pair routines highlighted a different one of his weaknesses. He came across weak and puny next to the strong, captivating Jeanine in their Sonya contemporary routine—she was literally throwing him around. His boys routine to “Nasty” with Brandon was just embarrassing: When you can’t match Brandon’s level of masculinity, you know you’re in trouble. (Again, can you imagine that routine with Brandon and Ade? Lauriann Gibson and her hot-pink headphones deserved better.) And that jive showed how he can’t bring the energy in genres he’s not comfortable in: Broadway and jazz, he’s all over; ballroom and hip-hop, he makes look like work. The judges did plenty of ragging on him last night—clearly doing their best to prevent an Evan win—so I’ll just leave it at that.

I was struck tonight by how much better certain routines—specifically the group numbers—came across on the Kodak stage. (I think SYTYCD gets $1,000 knocked off its fee every time it name-drops the venue. Which just about covers the confetti costs.) Whether it was the stage or the fact that the pressure of elimination was gone for most of the dancers, Tyce’s “The Wiz” routine and especially the NappyTab/Dmitri “water dance” felt 10 times more exhilarating than they did the first time around. The Rage Boys Crew guest performance was exactly as pandering as it was the first time around, but hey, at least we got to see that kid chucked through the air again.