It’s that time in the season for another conceptual challenge, with exotic birds serving as the designers’ inspiration for a high-fashion look — no wait, two; no wait, just one after all. There’s a salmon-pink cockatoo who can caw “make it work” in cockatoo-speak, a playful Amazon parrot called Sweetie, a Game of Thrones-esque raven, and a poor overlooked owl who nobody’s inspired by. (Flamingos and ostriches were also snubbed.) Tim spends a good portion of the episode psyching out the final six contestants with mindless twists that may have sounded good in a late-night brainstorming session among crotchety producers but play out as just plain cruel: The first is that everyone is broken into teams of two rivals, each inspired by one bird and competing to produce the superior runway outfit. So basically, not teams at all.
Yes, the judges probably are overpraising her a little, but until her competitors are ready to vocalize that she actually has to cut her models out of her clothes after each runway, the judges won’t know about it. That’s not to say it’d make a difference at this point, because they all love her, but a little fighting spirit’s going to be required.