Episode Recap: Things Get Harry

Oh, Face Off friends, how we missed you! Alanna, Corinne, Robert, Scott – so good to see your shining faces. We’re not going to think about the part where you summarily get voted off, but focus instead on the happy part where we watch you wrangle a fish from a tank as inspiration for the first challenge: a fish/human hybrid.

Alanna chooses the spiny pufferfish, and finds a prosthetic that perfectly matches the fish’s silhouette. She struggles briefly with the paint job, but pulls out something cute and sleek at the same time. Scott works with a fish that’s orange and blue, because he knows his kids would enjoy the bright colors, but he paints some accents that look like a beard and mustache (on a female model) that sort of ruin the beauty aspect of it. Corinne scores a prosthetic that captures the creepy anonymity of her zebra eel, but the paint job lacks the characteristic stripes. The wacky and always entertaining Robert from Germany swings for the fences with many prosthetics and a practically neon orange paint job, but he can’t realize his vision in such a short amount of time. Auf Wiedersehn, Robert!

Up next is demon possession! The three remaining artists choose Victorian-style letters that vividly describe pleas to the church for intervention and exorcism. Corinne tries to exemplify the translucent skin described in her letter, but muddies the paint job, instead. Alanna finds a face prosthetic with scales (per her epistle) and goes for the bull’s eye demon: big horns, nasty teeth, redscale paint job. Scott attempts to evoke the bat-like qualities from his missive, but the porcine snout on his prosthetic, and the monochromatic paint, send him back to his family. Could be worse! At least he gets to see his kids.

That leaves Corinne and Alanna to battle for the $10,000 by creating the most awesomest Harry Potter-style spells gone wrong. At random, Corinne chooses a duplicating spell. Being a superfan, she knows that garden gnomes in that world feature a lot of foliage on the face, so she adds a mossy prosthetic to the brow and splits a nose prosthetic in two to make it look nice an’ wide an’ gnomish. The judges don’t read “gnome”, but rather troll – this is a problem. Perhaps Corinne’s otherworldly skill at application will counterbalance that.

Alanna’s spell is all about ropes binding someone down in a suffocating way. When she finds a face piece with ropy muscles, some of her worry over how to do this without literally wrapping her model in rope dissipates. Now is a good time to mention that Alanna’s recovering from a broken leg – she has one of those walking casts – and this intense day on her feet is taking its toll. She’s not letting her energy flag, however, and she does a minimal but excellent paint job, adds a few rope accents and voila! That’s time. The judges wish she had gone further with the rope, but her skill through all three challenges earn her the win! She’s gonna use the money to pay down some of those medical bills, and the pride to keep learning and grinding in her career.