‘Ink Master’ season 7, episode 4 review: Did Matti Hixson’s return spell trouble?
So far this season on “Ink Master,” there has been a little bit of an interesting tradition: The veterans show up, and almost right away they struggle with delivering on the same challenge they designed. It happened with St. Marq, and it happened with Cleen Rock One. There was a break in the action last week with Sausage, but tonight it seemingly came back once more with Matti Hixson.
Things started to go wrong for Matti when Cleen, thanks in part to an alliance he has with Sausage, decided to give him a canvas asking for a rather-difficult tattoo to pull off. He did his best, but it was clear from the jump that there were problems thanks to everything that this guy wanted in there. While there were other struggles on the night (Picasso Dular, Megan Jean Morris for really the first time ever), perhaps the biggest surprise for us was the identity crisis St. Marq seems to be suffering from. Why is this guy drifting from his typical black-and-grey when that what suits him? He’s a rule-breaker, and it feels like he is almost caught up in actually trying to play the game by the rules so far.
Cleen ended up winning Matti’s Venetian mask-themed challenge, and then we had a total battle among the newbies as to who was going to go home: Megan Jean, Picasso, Alex Rockoff (fresh off of fighting with St. Marq), and Anthony Michaels, who was only there because of the human canvas jury and was decent … he just didn’t implement a lot of detail. Despite some of his issues, Matti was able to do enough to avoid being sent back down at the end of the episode.
The elimination really wasn’t too much of a shocker here: Picasso is done. He really feels like the sort of artist who really thrives in his own shop doing work, but probably isn’t suited for this environment where there are strict guidelines. As a whole, though, at least the episode was fairly entertaining, tired as we are of seeing newbie artists sent home. Grade: B.
Interested in getting some other news when it comes to “Ink Master”? Then be sure to head over here right now for other news, including a preview for what is coming up next! Also, sign up over at this link to gather up some other TV news on everything we cover, sent right over to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: Spike.)