‘Ink Master: Rivals” season 5, episode 12 review: Did Mark Longenecker get robbed?
After last week’s shocking (and unfortunate) elimination of Joshua Hibbard, it seems that Cleen Rock One is easily going to sweep up the win this season on “Ink Master: Rivals”. We admit that it was going to be a close race between Joshua and Cleen in the finale, but for us it was always between these two for the win, so now Cleen just has to keep up what he’s doing and he will be crowned “Ink Master” without much worry.
Flash challenge: This week the artists are being tested on “placement” and the guest judge for today’s challenge is running back for the Carolina Panthers: DeAngelo Williams. He is credited for being the player in the NFL that pushed for players to be able to wear pink during breast cancer awareness month and revealed an incredibly sad story about his family. His grandfather had 5 daughters and all of them died from breast cancer including his mom.
The challenge is to design a tattoo for DeAngelo in honor of his family, but there’s a catch: He doesn’t want a stencil used, he wants the design free handed on his body. Each artist gets a body double to show DeAngelo their idea for him to pick a winner to freehand the design on his skin… then he will decide if he actually wants the design tattooed or not. If he chooses no one to tattoo him, then no one wins.
DeAngelo is very vague with the design of what he wants, giving the artists another challenge to face. All of the artists put a lot of thought into the pieces they were designing, but the only one that took into account the pieces that DeAngelo already had was Mark. There were a lot of generic cancer ribbon tattoos that were presented and some that just didn’t fit his style, but he liked Mark’s idea a lot (and so did we), but for some reason he picked Cleen’s tattoo after saying that it looks like a tattoo he’s seen a million times. Not only that but he actually had Cleen tattoo him with an altered version of that design! We thought Mark had this for sure and we think he got robbed.
Elimination tattoo: Placement is still the name of the game when it comes to this very difficult challenge: Tattooing skulls on the human canvases skulls. Aaron battled another tough canvas that seemed to actually go into shock at one point, but after the medics checked her out she finished it like a champ and he gave her a great tattoo. There were some really great designs tonight, but for us Cris really stood out as a clear winner for us. Cleen had a really great tattoo that blew us away as well, but we felt Cris deserved this win.
Judging: The judges were pretty hard on Jason and a few of the other artists, and as much as we loved hearing DeAngelo’s story and seeing him get tattooed we thought he wasn’t the greatest judge and his critiques didn’t make a lot of sense. Jason and Don were sent back to the elimination room after Cleen won tattoo of the day over Cris and Don ended up going home as we lost our last rivals left in the competition.
Nothing that exciting happened tonight: Now that all of the instigators are gone the tattoo artwork will really speak for it’s self. Episode grade: C
If you are looking for more news on “Ink Master: Rivals” then head over to the link here where you can check out previews, reviews, interviews with eliminated artists (Caroline Evans, Elton “LT” Duarte, Jayvo Scott, Tim Lees, Ryan Eternal, Robbie Ripoll, Ty’Esha Reels, Angel Bauta, Julia Carlson, Emily Elegado and Joshua Hibbard) and podcasts all about the show (or head here if you want to download our podcasts from iTunes).
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