This week Renee tries to get in touch with her friendly, sensitive side — and fails. She also tries to win a challenge — and fails. Jael tries to go one week without doing something or saying something stupid — and fails. And Felicia tries to stick around another week — and fails. Which means: We no longer have to hear a contestant discuss how her dance training is helping her in this competition.Because there’s not enough hula-hooping to take Jael’s troubled mind off the death of her friend last episode, Felicia decides to teach her … a dance. We don’t necessarily see great success at this venture, but Jael says she feels really fortunate to have friends in the house. Well, wait about 55 minutes, and we’ll see how many are left.Meanwhile, Renee announces that she feels like the girls don’t like her and are offended by her — gee, I wonder why? — so she decides to go on a nice streak. Which she initiates by handing Jael a rather amateur drawing she’s done of Jael … in a straitjacket. (Don’t worry, the straps aren’t tied, she tells Jael, who — being Jael — of course likes it and dubs it "the coolest picture ever." Seriously, how stupid is she? How could they ditch Kathleen but save Jael week after week? (Well, except for the whole photo thing.)The Tyra-size Hummer is pulled over by what is very clearly not a traffic cop, what with the twirling and all. His horribly forced stubble give him a total F2M-transgender vibe, and yet the girls seem genuinely concerned or chagrined, not seeing through such a clever disguise. It turns out he’s Benny Ninja, who declares himself the "Father of the House of Ninja," which sounds like a great Japanese restaurant but is actually a … collaboration? collection? Aw, rent "Paris is Burning" if you don’t know, but basically he’s going to teach them how to vogue. Which is great, because it means we’re back in the ’80s, when vogueing was actually new and exciting, and I can totally relive my life in a different way and see what the outcome is.The girls battle-vogue each other in different scenarios: It’s Felicia vs. Sarah for "face poses," Diana vs. Renee in "shoe poses," Brittany vs. Natasha for "handbag poses" (and luckily my spellcheck caught my mistaken "hand—" just now), Jaslene vs. Dionne for "floor poses" and Dionne vs. Whitney in … face poses again. Maybe we should have saved this for when there were only eight girls left?Back at the house, Renee is braiding Brittany’s hair — apparently no hard feelings after last week — and her BFF in the previous episode, Diana, snarks about how Renee is very manipulative, looking for a girl in the house that she can be friends with/control. "I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it," Diana says in a very singsong tone that totally made me laugh because it made me remember — tangent alert! — this (ahem) adult movie a friend of mine had seen and at one point the female "star" stops what she’s doing and decides it’s the perfect time to sing out, "I’m on fire, I’m on fire." And the male "star" looks down and says, in the same tone, "I am too, I am too." Ah, flashbacks to then-uncomfortable moments that we can laugh about now. …Jael wakes up the next morning and no, that’s not a hickey, it’s a burn with a curling iron. The girl’s got a Mia Farrow haircut. What was she doing with a curling iron? I like to think it was actually inflicted by another girl in the house during a spiteful moment. (Renee?)They arrive at someplace where they are greeted by … Willy Ninja again, this time dressed in some sort of "Kill Bill"-inspired outfit, only in leotard form. Anyway, the girls will have to pull out their "Mission: Impossible" (Miss Impossible?) moves to make it through a "crazy maze" of lasers — all the while posing/voguing at the same time. The winner gets a really atrocious $40,000 bracelet.They change into silver leotards and begin. Dionne’s all "what the HAIL?" when she has to go first, but when she started out with a split, even my eyes bugged out a little. Brittany’s packed into that leotard — but rocks the whole course, keeping eye contact with Willy the whole time. Jaslene even pulls out the classic "hands framing face" bit Madonna popularized in the music video. Felicia points out how as a dancer, the challenge was "very easy to me." Natasha takes it down to the wire … Everyone gets through except Renee, who cries because she wanted to win so she could sell the bracelet and pay off bills. Whitney is declared the winner.Renee goes home and since there’s no cat to kick to make her feel better, she gets on the phone with her husband. "You wanna come pick me up?" she snits. "I shouldn’t be here with all these stupid girls." Her husband, showing his brilliant deductive reasoning, asks, "Did you have a good day today?" She stays on the phone for so long, the other girls ask to use it and she shoos them away — she’s no Monique from Cycle 7, but we do get a couple of F-bombs and implied threats of violence. So much for that kindness streak. Someone drop her a copy of "How to Make Friends and Influence People" so she can see that threatening to beat someone down might not be the best path to follow.The next morning they end up on the roof — or, as Dionne refers to it, "the 12th floor" — of the Alexandria Hotel, which clearly was hoping for some product placement. They’ll be posing for photos as crime scene victims. But wait, there’s more: The girls will have been killed BY OTHER MODELS. (This last part makes Renee clap.) I’m not sure why being killed by the other models makes that much of a difference from, you know, just being dead. Maybe it’s more glamorous? Renee has been poisoned and does very well, which surprises Jay Manuel, who calls her photos "editorial and high fashion," which apparently is the highest compliment he can give. She says she won’t tell the other girls how well she did, but Jay runs in and tattles. Jaslene says, in a not-at-all-rehearsed sort of way, "Intimidation is my motivation," which — huh? Is that like a Successories poster or something? However, she does do well on her pushed-from-the-roof shoot. (Jay to Jaslene: "I know you’re creative; why don’t you find a pretty way to fall?")Brittany asks if she can heave herself out of the tub where she’s been electrocuted. Unfortunately, this means she’s on the floor of the bathroom, which looks kind of nasty, really. When her shoot is over, Jay says, "Get this girl a towel — and a tetanus shot." There’s your product placement, Alexandria Hotel!Diana’s had her organs stolen and then was stitched up again in the … hallway? That’s quite a sewing machine there. Everyone knows that organ thieves always leave their victims in a bathtub full of ice! So fake, this show.

Sarah got pushed down the stairs. Jael was strangled but doesn’t do well on the shoot — or so the editing would have you believe. We get a close-up photo of her, and she’s got pretty bad skin, which I’d never noticed before. A decapitated Felicia keeps croaking "I’m going to get you after this" and has decided to stare blankly into the clouds, ignoring Jay’s credo of "bringing life to a dead pose." Whitney reclines against a sofa as a stabbing victim — what, on this show they didn’t even have the idea of stabbing her in the back? Natasha is a drowning victim and Dionne was shot in the head. Most of their photos are pretty good, which, yay.Judging! After her Sherlock Holmes photo is tossed up there, we see Tyra with her headwrap and giant weave again. Natasha has unwisely parted her hair in the middle, obliterating any bangs she had. But Dionne takes the grief for the way she dresses outside of the challenges.At this point I have in my notes: "Felicia is going home. Who will be the other one called?" (I guessed Brittany, just for the offhand [but sage] comment that J. Alexander made about how it’s a great photo but you can’t see the clothes in it — who’d have thought the ugliest Pierrot doll in history could pull out something that smart?)Wrong: It’s Felicia vs. Dionne, who "lacks presence," which is just about as lame as "losing your personality." How great would it have been if they had to do one last battle-vogue? Instead, Tyra calls Dionne’s name and says that at all times, Dionne should be dressed like she’s walking down the street in Paris on go-sees. Again, I would suggest Tyra create a clothing allowance for the show, then. And what happened to last week’s spiel about how this was the one time it was OK "not to be a model"? Tyra then gives Felicia way too much advice, when all she wants to do is say goodbye to all the girls. Which she does, and then packs her bags, and slaps up a big ol’ piece of spiral-bound paper up on the wall next to Tyra’s face. It says: "Felicia Mail," which I think is awesome.

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