‘Ink Master’ season 2, episode 3 review: Something old, something new
Only on “Ink Master” do you think that an actual fistfight is going to break out during the judging panel, and in many ways, this is precisely what we love about the show. It’s frightening, intense, and also appealing to anyone’s artistic point of view … even if you are not a fan of tattoos.
This week, we are going to focus on what was actually interesting to us: the elimination challenge, mostly because we find the “flash challenge” (or quickfire, if you’re a “Top Chef” fan) was something rather silly involving shaving people’s heads. Since when do tattoo artists need to do this? Kay Kutta nonetheless won this task again, and he had the challenge of having to pick canvases for all of the rest of the contenders. This is where we saw something interesting that we’ve never seen on the show before: a canvas actually more or less force someone into picking him. Since these people were veterans, Kay couldn’t say no to the request despite him being both older than everyone else and a tattoo virgin.
The challenge was was American Traditional, and this means one thing and one thing only: follow the rules, and keep things clean. Kay actually did a great job all things considered, and we’d love to root for him if he was a little less of a crazy person. We do really like Steve Tefft and Sebastian Murphy, though even with them, it’s too early to say that either one of them is necessarily a favorite. With the judges, they really couldn’t pick a favorite, either. There was no “winner” this week, and instead we had a bottom four of Tatu Baby, Roin Givens (whose tattoo looked painful), Trey (who actually works with this style often), and the oh-so arrogant man with a mohawk known as Clint, who we do want to stay just for the purpose of creating crazy drama. Ultimately, the judges made the right decision here in sending home Ron. He wasn’t a horrible artist by any means, but he was just too green and had too many excuses for everything.
What did you think about this episode?