Hands down the oddest episodes are always the two episodes right before and right after the girls go abroad.  Right before, because it's kind of cruel to hang the carrot of going abroad in front of girls only to tear it away at the last second.  Right after because, my god, to literally only be in a new country for a couple days before being sent home in shame is just mean.

The drama for this episode was a long time in coming.  Although in the past, Marjorie had been the one to suffer the most from claiming French as her background, this episode she and Elina started whining in the van about how persecuted they were for being European.

As aggravating as Sheena can be and as not-quite-Top-Model she is, she's the one I was rooting for this whole episode.  Whenever someone asks someone else a trufax question like, "Yeah, but didn't you guys move here when you were like 8 or something?" and then doesn't back down about it, I have to give them props.  She then went on to ask, "So, do you like living in America?"

While Elina and Marjorie chose to interpret this as Sheen saying that they should go back to their native lands, I was with Sheena when she seemed to feel that the question really asked why they were whining instead of looking forward.

The challenge was to model in a green suit so that they were invisible while showing the outfits.  Elina won and the bitterness was palpable. I think that the reason they have Sam narrate so often is because she's likeable and, unlike Elina, her cattiness in confessionals doesn't make me roll my eyes.

Elina! You're white, beautiful and 18!  Get over your drama!  We've all moved on!

Commercial challenge time! I guess that they got bored of having a series of really bad commercials every cycle so they decided to give the girls the crutch of a teleprompter.  Which actually really helped most of the performances.

Midway through shooting, we got the awesome audio/visual of Joslyn actually vomiting into a trashcan.  I think that the ever-prepared sound effects people had to have added that vomiting sound after the fact.  It was a little too staged sounding to be real.  However, for a couple minutes, Top Model resembled Fear Factor and lo, models everywhere were horrified.  And it was good.

I want to talk for a second about the secret importance of the Covergirl commercial shoot.  The commercial shoot is really the only time in the competition where we get to see whether the models can actually act.  This is far more important than they judges want to acknowledge because of one fact: acting in Covergirl commercials seems to be all that any Top Model winner does after the show.

With an allusion to the shoes from cycle 6 that made the recent Prada show look like a cakewalk, the girls were forced to walk down the runway in clogs.  Because they're going to Holland!  Amsterdam, to be specific.  Personally I didn't know that the city which boasts the Anne Frank House and the De Wallen red light district was such a fashion capital of the western world.  But the girls seemed to like the idea of clogs and windmills and looking like a milk maid.

I wish that Tyra had gotten a chance to cosplay as a milk maid.  Alas, this was a serious judging.  Unlike the other judging-panels where she dressed up and then read her judgments in iambic pentameter.

The commercial shoot is the chance for the judges to pull out their really, really cruel comebacks in judging.  Even Michael Kors would be horrified at the utter meanness of the commercial shoot commentary.

However, this episode took cruel judging room behavior to a new level.  Tyra's inflection in the judging panel has always ranged from really bad Lifetime movie to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.  After stringing through Elina and Joslyn's faults and good points she went on about how much Joslyn could survive and then said, "And you'll survive this, too," in the exact same way she usually says that someone survived the judging.

Only Joslyn didn't survive.  Elina did.  And with that sort of a judging, I wish she hadn't.

I want to pause here to reiterate that Tyra doesn't have that many different inflections, but even she would have to be cruel and unusual to inflict that sort of emotional torture on someone who'd been throwing up in a trashcan during shooting.

In between my lack of excitement over seeing the girls in Pollyanna pigtails and clogs and Tyra's random acts of cruelty, I'm only lukewarm about next week's episode.