Episode Recap: Covert Characters

Focus Challenge time! Where the judges won't be looking at anything but the face. Or, as we affectionately call it, the My-Eyes-Are-Up-Here Challenge.

You know that part of Mission: Impossible where Shaun of the Dead makes rubber faces for that guy from Top Gun? That’s a real thing. Spies actually put on prosthetic faces to disguise themselves while undercover. Who knew?

Answer: Michael Westmore, because he actually made some of those faces! He can't talk about a lot of them, but he can tell you he made a great many disguises for the likes of Michael Jackson, just so he could leave the house unrecognized ... oh, and there was that one time he made a disguise for a dude who ended up going to Vegas and robbing a casino. Honest mistake! Since the artists are tasked with making their models unrecognizable this week, he tells them to really think about bone structure and expression –- that's the key to fooling the eye.

Njoroge decides to do a race/gender swap combo, turning his blonde female model into an Asian male. Mr. Westmore suggests he make the eye fold a little more pronounced, a move that makes Njoroge feel pretty confident … maybe too confident? Melissa, who has disguised her own self more than once as Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, feels pretty good about her disguise (a young woman posing as an older intelligence agent, bent on discovering the corruption in her agency), but she's not getting ahead of herself on the whole jinxing tip. Mel is moving forward apace, secure in her work in naturalism, creating subtle but dynamic forms.

Robert is practically whistling happy tunes –- except that he probably can't whistle, and we're pretty sure the only tunes he knows are severe -– now that he gets to work on his own. He gives his creativity free reign as he makes a really understated scrawny dude out of a slender lady model. On the other end of the spectrum, Rob is longing for the comfort of a teammate to bounce ideas off of ... and maybe share the blame with. But he doesn't let his unease undermine his progress.

Kaleb is not feeling good come application day –- his relatively simple disguise involved changing the race of the model from White to South Asian, and the brown tones are looking like smeared chocolate. He knows he's in trouble, and isn't surprised when the judges call him out for it. Katie layered on too many colors searching for the right tone on her model and can't get rid of the glossy cast on the skin. She kinda disguises it by making him look sweaty, but the fact that a subterranean worker looks like he has a bad spray tan (to paraphrase the artist) puts her on Bottom Looks. But it's Njoroge's drab face appliance, crude facial hair application and general unawareness of the shortcomings of his makeup that send him home tonight.

Melissa is sort of in Top Looks, since the bottom half of her face is stunning –- those wrinkles! those liver spots! that waddle! –- but the top half, with its out-of-place eyebrows, is a clear miss. Robert made his female model into a completely convincing man, so he's for sure in Top Looks. And Rob, who was so worried about flying solo, wins the game! He made a humdrum vacationer, totally bland and unremarkable; the challenge was to make a spy forgettable, and he did that. Not only is the makeup warm and human, it's no one you would ever want to get a beer with. Snoozeville. Way to go, Rob!