So anyway, it sucked that Nick went. The mention on four four about "short term memory" judging is another take on something I was talking about with Sarah over the weekend, after we'd watched all of Season 2-to-date. What's interesting and infuriating about Project Runway is the situational ethics they apply to judging each week. Sometime's what you've done previously counts against you (Zu. getting voted out) and sometimes it counts for you (Santino staying around after he's failed because, perhaps, he's succeeded in the past). It can seem very arbitrary and random. Just like real life. For me, one of the more striking examples of that was in the show sequence of Lingerie challenge/Nicky Hilton challenge. In the lingerie episode, Santino's team is spared, even though they turned out hideously ugly work and Daniel Franco's team is booted for turning in uninspired work. (digression: oddly, Daniel F. was auf wiedersehn-ed this time for basically the same reason as last year, for coasting instead of challenging himself). The following weak, Marla was spared, even though her work was not just uninspired coasting, it was flatout plagiarism. You look at the season as a whole and expect it to "make sense" or be consistent and it can be pretty frustrating. But you look at any individual episode and it usually does work out. So, yeah, there were problems with ALL the designs last week and you could probably make a case for any of them going. But you can't really say that Nick did a great job and got booted anyway. So it wasn't nearly as horrible as last year, when Austin (amazingly talented but as unresponsive to judges' urging that he break out of his box as Santino has been) lost out to the starkly untalented and unpleasant Wendy. Nick was talented but the outfit he lost on was not particularly well done. If, like me, you assume that Chloe and Daniel V. are the class of the field, then it was down to Nick, Santino, or Kara. Kara's outfit for Santino was uninspired but competently done. Santino's was probably as bad as Nick's but (1) the freaky Gary Coleman-esque judge actually liked it (check that man for crack!); (2) his construction problems, while more dramatic, aren't necessarily worse than Nick's problems (bad choice of fabric, bad design, bad sewing).
But yeah the rest of the season won't be as much fun without Uncle Nick...