‘American Idol’ results: Did Lazaro Arbos, Janelle Arthur survive first live elimination?

After weeks of waiting to get to this point, Thursday night’s new “American Idol” episode brought us the first traditional results show of the season. This brought us the return of Phillip Phillips (performing the goodbye song for the year in “Gone, Gone, Gone”), Bon Jovi rocking out the place, and of course the first elimination of the season to happen in the ever-familiar studio.

So who ended up falling victim to the red lights before going out the door? Be sure to stay tuned for that, but for now we’re going to talk about something else that made this results show worthwhile: a battle for a spot on the live tour. Both Charlie Askew and Aubrey Cleland returned to try and get that spot, with the former really being able to overcome his disastrous performance in the top 20 (which he has already seemingly learned quite a bit from). To be honest, we actually think that Charlie’s original song here is the best thing that he has done on the show, and we hope for the sake of his personality alone that he gets to go with the rest of the contestants.

Before we get to the bottom three, can we also say that we hate the idea of the show introducing the rankings for all of the contestants along with the bottom three. Why? This eliminates the sort of surprises that we had a la Pia Toscano or Jennifer Hudson, since we will have known already that they had voting struggles in the past. Plus, when does this show need to take cues from “The X Factor”? With that being said, it’s hard to really be upset about seeing Candice Glover, Kree Harrison, and Lazaro Arbos all in the top three. The only real surprise that we had in here at all was that Lazaro Arbos finished fourth, which

Now, we turn to the singers who were in danger. Paul Jolley was spared from being in the bottom two, and we were thus left with Curtis Finch Jr. along with Devin Velez. Was this the right choice? In a word, yes and no. We thought that Devin could be in trouble since he’s not the most electric performer, but he is better than a few other singers this season. Meanwhile, Curtis doesn’t always come across well on TV.

For his “save me song,” the guy seriously chose “I Believe I Can Fly,” which only about 10% of the voting public seemed to like. While Nicki Minaj said that she would “go home” if he did (which would mean the rest of the season would be like the first fifteen minutes of Wednesday’s show, right?), the judges couldn’t risk not saving him so early in the competition. Thus, he was sent packing.

What did you think about this episode? Be sure to vote in the poll below, and you can see whether or not we got our prediction right this week by visiting the story over here.

Photo: Fox