Dance Moms: It Was The Human Cork Screw Vs. The National Champion. Get Your Freak On With Your Squeak On As Sophia Spins & Wins This Round.

He’s on your side. And He’s on your thighs. Halleloo!

Forget the roofy in her drink. We should dye those roots all one color. That’ll mess with her head.

Seriously. If she mentions Lion King one more time I’m gonna have to get all Simba on her a**.

I know you see me, you little squeak toy. You take on my kids, you take on Mama.

54 pirouettes? That is just f***d up.

Yeah, we see you honey. You don’t need to raise your hand every time someone uses the word “pretty.”

Shut. Up. She goes to school two days a week? The freakin’ mailman probably spends more time in the building.

I swear, sometimes this show just makes me dizzy.

Maybe not 54 pirouette-dizzy…but still dizzy.

Sometimes there are so many people coming and going and screaming and crying and getting angry at things they brought on themselves that I just need to go out in the ALDC parking lot and lay in a pothole for a few minutes to escape all the madness.

Dance Moms…both the Original Recipe versions and the Replacement Team…were all back this week, tripping over each other in the studio as Abby Lee Miller tried to thin the herd and regroup before the next cattle auction.

After last week’s fairly unproductive 1960′s mini-van sit-in by the first string of Moms, the second wave draft players were back to see if they had made the cut or not.

Pulling together an entirely new team of dancers one week before a competition hadn’t really worked out quite as well as Abby had hoped it would, and the girls only came home with some Indiana State Fair souvenirs and a 2nd Place trophy.

Which in AbbyLand is really just the 1st Loser trophy.  So thanks, but no thanks.

Luckily, Abby had salvaged some street cred with the last minute additon of Cartoon Network’s own dancing phenom Sophia Lucia (…whose name can only be spoken while doing that raised Italian hand thing that Grandmamas do when they tell you to “Mangiare!”…) and the newbie was already the buzz of the Dance World.

As the new Moms all streamed into the building, the old Moms were pulling up in the parking lot like a Secret Service convoy doing a sweep of a news conference site.

The only Mom MIA from the new batch was Shelly and her daughter Ally.  They had both returned to New Orleans after the weekend’s competition, thanks in part to Moms Marcia and Gloria getting all Mean Girls on them and trying to blame Ally for the group coming in 2nd.

Shelly didn’t need that s*** and took her kid and her Mardi Gras beads back home, leaving Abby already short one dancer in the first two minutes of this week’s episode.

By the third minute, Ms. Miller had also kicked Marcia and Gloria out to the curb for not playing nice with others, which left squeaky Sophia sitting there all by herself to contemplate Life, and how her MomJackie gets her hair to look like that.

Seriously.  Mom’s hair is a lot work.  It’s blonde if you’re looking from the front.  It’s blonde and brown from the side.  It’s all blonde in the back unless she has part of it up, and then it’s all brown in the back.

By the time she does those two curling iron ribbons in the front (…which are clearly reserved for Competition Days only…) there is just way too much going on there.

While Kelly stayed outside leaning on a van like girls do in mall parking lots when they refuse to go inside to the Food Court because they know the boy they just had a texting fight with is still in Macy’s somewhere, the rest of the original Moms  headed into the building to try and finagle their way back onto the team.

As Holly testified that she had God on her side, Abby noted that she probably also had Him somewhere on her thighs, which was so oddly inappropriate and nonsensical that it has already inspired me to write a new hymn for next Sunday.

Gimme an organ, a choir, a bucket of the Colonel and raise your thighs to the skies.

It’s a work in progress.  But trust me…it’s gonna rock some pews.

Fry it and Testify it, mmmkay?

After some front desk drama, all the Moms signed another one of those annual Blood Contracts that Abby makes them sign and then everyone filed into the studio for the season’s first Pyramid of Shame.

Except it wasn’t really a pyramid.  Psych.

It was just Sophia’s headshot from that Alvin Squeakquel movie (…”All The Single Ladies”…) and then a bunch of other people all taped in a pile at the bottom.

Chipmunk:  One.  Everyone Else:  Thanks for playing.

And then, no lie, Oprah came running in and surprised everyone in the audience.

“You’re on probation!  You’re on probation!  You’re ALL on probation!”

That’ll teach you kids for having crazy Moms.  Gail, take me home.

The gang was headed to Ohio this week for another In10sity Dance Competition, and it was going to take a lot of work to get everyone back up to speed, since the only dancing the rest of the girls had done all week was that Flash Mob in front of The Limited.  Time to put your shopping bags down and get cracking, kids.

Sophia got a solo.  Natch.  But so did Chloe, which made Christi complain about something or other.

What?  She complains when Chloe doesn’t get a solo, and she complains when she does get a solo?  Not really sure where the middle ground would be on this one.

Christi wasn’t very happy this week and there were multiple Christi Moments, which we may or may not get to discuss in any depth.  We’ll see.

As the Moms all hit the Mom Perch, the girls got down to some actual dancing, which was a nice change of pace.  The new girl squeaked and smiled herself all over the studio walls, while the old crew just kind of moped around and went through the motions.

You could tell the last week really sucked it out of them quicker than a drag from Sophia’s helium balloon.

Upstairs, the Moms all learned that Sophia could do 54 pirouettes in a row without stopping, which I guess must be good for at least one or two Show & Tell Days and some Guinness World Records bragging rights.

As someone who can barely spin around in a fitting room to check the back of my pants in a 3 way mirror without blacking out, I do have to bow to the little tyke on that one.  My psychic powers also told me that at least half of those spins would be showing up on stage at some point this week.

In a zinger to their unemployed Dance Moms: Miami sisters, Christi then called out Jackie for talking smack about Florida’s own Mia Diaz.

Little Mia didn’t actually show up on DM:M very often, except for that night when a fire on the complete opposite side of the city turned Stars Dance Studio into a scene from the Apocalypse.  But it seems that she’s a pretty big dealio in Boca.

You remember that scene, right?  The smoke didn’t even come across the highway and yet you would have sworn that one of the boys was about to give birth on camera.  I may have to dramatically flip a scarf over my shoulders tonight in tribute to Victor and Angel.

All gone too soon.

Keep being Fierce, boys.  You might also want to update your website, or just shut it down.  And you spelled “contemporary” wrong.  But I digress.

As the girls rehearsed and tried to get back their mojo, Christi and Kelly tossed around some potential freshman hazing options for Jackie.  Everything from battery acid on her fake eyelashes to slipping a roofy in her water bottle.

It was refreshing to see Kelly actually draw the line at blinding someone, no matter how much she couldn’t stand her.

But if anyone was going to take out Jackie in the parking lot, it was probably going to be Holly, who almost flat-lined when she found out that Sophia only went to school two days a week.  For two hours each of those days.

And 2 + 2 = 4.  You can check my math.

There’s nothing a doctorate-holding school principal likes to hear more than a story about how a home schooled child is done for the day by 11am on Mondays.  That didn’t go over too well, especially when she realized that Sophia spends more time stretching each day than she does doing her fractions.

I’m not touching that one.  It’s all yours, dancing chat room people.

Realizing that she had somehow gone from feast to famine and then back to feast again, Abby now had too many dancers for the group number, so somebody had to get cut.  After a drawn out casting call lesson with all the Moms (…and one delightfully ghetto spray painted bus stop bench that Jill seemed afraid to sit on without protecting her Louis bag from thugs…) Abby cut Brooke, who left so quickly that you know she already had something better planned for the weekend.  Girlfriend does love her cafetorium school dances, and the getaway car was out back by the dumpster.

During the lesson, Abby once again uncomfortably saluted Sasha Nia‘s ethnicity by implying that our little dancer was destined to wear a gigantic puppet head and sing Hakuna Matata for her rent money after graduation.

Holly has the best WTF faces ever.  Period.

Finally, it was Showtime!

Now that the ALDC is such a big deal, they tend to enter each venue like it’s Release Day for some official Justin Bieber limited edition iPhone 5 or something, with a million little girls all screaming and posting pictures on the fly to their Facebook page.

It’s deafening.  I don’t even think it’s safe.

Backstage in the makeup room, Abby focused all her attention on Sophia while Christi began a slow boil.  Jackie had her Game Day curls in place, while Maddie wandered aimlessly, wondering how she had lost Top Billing status in just the short time she was gone getting those new clear braces put into her face.

Sophia and Chloe banged out their solos.  Sophia was Mrs. Roboto in her Superstaaaah routine, complete with at least 51 of her patented 54 jet spins.  Chloe did great as well, but Sophia’s magic unicorn dust was still floating around the stage by the time she had to perform and it freaked her out a little bit.

The group dance was a timely Red Carpet number, complete with red carpet but minus Ryan Seacrest, and once mini Mackenzie figured out how to unroll the Slip & Slide without poking her own eye out, they made it through the song.

That one really wasn’t MackAttack’s fault.  The carpet was one of those wedding aisle roll-out deals, and the poor kid was ratted up with about 3 feet of XXL Jersey hair setting her off balance, so she did the best that she could.  You try it, haters.

Sophia took top spot.  Chloe came in 2nd runner-up, which I guess is worse than 1st runner-up, though I’ll never understand why they don’t just call it second place and third place.  It’s not like this is Miss America and somebody is going to have to step in when Sophia stubs her toe or drills herself into the Earth’s core.

But, whatev.  That’s another chat room problem.

Chloe also got a special Expressive Heart award which they give to dancers with…well…expressive hearts, I guess.

The group number then took first place, and everyone was happy for a brief moment until Kelly started missing Brooke, and Christi started being Christi.

She and Abby went another round, since each episode is required to end in a chick fight.

Melissa showed her full support by turning her back on everyone and letting Jackie freshen up her makeup.  Did you see it?  How odd was that in the middle of all the dramzz?

Christi then accused Abby of taking credit for Sophia’s dancing expertise, even though she had just imported her from wherever less than two weeks ago, and the whole thing started up again.

And again.  And then one more time, before the whole thing was over for the night.

Thanks for joining us for the Red Carpet arrivals.

Seacrest out.