Ink Master season 10 episode 15 review: Who made it to finale?
At the heart of this season is a central twist: Anthony Michaels, DJ Tambe, and Steve Tefft are the three coaches, and with that, it makes some sense that the show would want to use all three in the finale. With that in mind, we saw Roly T-Rex make it into the finale over Jason Elliott. The decision that the judges made here was very much dependent on one of the central themes of this season: Artistry versus application. Which is actually better?
From an art standpoint, we point out the controversy of the Jason vs. Roly battle simply because of the fact that Jason’s two drawings were significantly better. His first, twelve-hour design was an absolute thing of beauty. Meanwhile, Roly’s second, six-hour tattoo (a pin-up done without tracing) had a number of issues from a design point of view and didn’t look quite like it should. The issue here is that Jason suffered some skin trauma with his tattoo and that’s been a theme of this season: People have been docked significantly for skin trauma issues. This about artists judging other artists rather than just viewers judging artists, and the artists/judges may feel like having a tattoo without trauma is more important. Or, you can ring the conspiracy bell that Ink Master just wanted an artist from each team in the finale.
Our opinion, ultimately, is that it really doesn’t matter all that much given that this finale is really all about Juan Salgado versus Josh Payne anyway; both Roly and Jason seemed to just be competing for third place and a spot to tattoo in the finale. Juan and Josh have been the season’s best artists by far and they killed it with their designs tonight. Juan made one issue with a pupil in his tiger design but otherwise, he was pretty bulletproof through his tattoos tonight.
The coaches are also facing off…
And doing head tattoos! It’s an interesting challenge for them to do in the finale but in all honesty, it’s hard to get super psyched about it. They’re all great artists and they’ve all already won before. We’d be a little more interested if they were competing on some sort of full All-Stars or all-champions season and they’d made it to the final three. We’re probably rooting for Anthony just because we’ve enjoyed watching his coaching style the most this season and he came very close to having two artists in the finale.
CarterMatt Verdict
A controversial finish entering the final three for sure, but there was absolutely some great art displayed in this episode! While it seems to be a two-way race for the title at least there is some genuine drama as to who is taking this home.
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