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Episode Recap: Maritime Monsters

The competition tightens as the six remaining artists create original sea monsters in this week’s battles, with the help of an industry expert in next week’s elimination challenge on the line.

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Ahoy, mateys! We’re going exploring this week to find out what lives at the edges of the Earth and the bottom of the seas – or at least, what 16th century superstitions said lived there. Using images from maps from centuries ago, the artists will create a sea monster to scare, stun… and swim! It’s an underwater challenge, landlubbers!  

How to Watch

Catch up on Face Off on Peacock or the SYFY App.

Walter and Matt face each other for the first time, and a little heat builds as Walter realizes Matt’s team came out victorious in his season’s water challenge. Matt has a ton of confidence as he sculpts a goblin fish-inspired face with unnatural appendages protruding out of every angle, but Walter is determined to show his might with fins, tusks, and a strong feeling of menace.  

Mr. Westmore delivers some intense advice on his visit to the lab, urging Mel to step away from black as the base of her paint scheme, and wording Derek up to the fact that his aquatic monster looks way too much like a bat. As far as Derek knows, there are no aquatic bats, so he works the clay until an unnerving monster starts to appear. Mel also reworks her face sculpt on day two, realizing that her inspiration for this creature – land horses and seahorses – are a few steps shy of scary. It’s better to lose time by starting over than move forward with shapes that don’t strike fear into the hearts of the judges.  

The most intimidating aspect of this challenge is, of course, the possibility that all appliances and some paint could come off when the models hit the water tank. Come application day, the artists spend hours prepping their appliances to be waterproof. Damien has lots of small fins with quills and webbing, and prepping each piece eats into his painting time. When the buzzer dings for last looks, he finds his paint job lacking about two layers, and he doesn’t feel good about his chances.  

His battle partner, Jordan, used the anglerfish as an inspiration for a creature deprived of light whose flesh spans the gray scale, and whose jaw features a nasty underbite and snarling fangs. His vision was clear from the beginning, and his appliances went down smoothly, making his work a top look, along with Matt’s. Though the adventurous shapes of Matt’s shark-finned creature were impressive, Jordan created a truly frightening and otherworldly monster. He wins this challenge!  

Damien’s makeup lost most of its appliances and much of its paint when submerged. He finds himself on bottom looks along with Mel, whose suggests her sea monster makeup “could be a beanie baby.” (She said it, not us.) This isn’t an elimination week, so neither contestant is going home, but they both feel the sting and pressure of being bottom looks this deep in the game. They leave the reveal stage determined to rock their work next week and make it to the finale.