Clearly, Adam Rippon is a skater with much better skating and presentation skills than Mura and Oda, and more musicality and artistry than Javier Fernandez. Adam was *** heavily underscored on PCS! If Adam can just master that quad cleanly and not make any other minor or major mistakes, he should definitely move up in the scoring (and he could have placed second or third here in the sp, IMHO). Fernandez made a mistake and his sp is underwhelming (the costume confusing). Javi skated the program with no real relation to the music. It's a shame he picked that piece of music too without being able to come close to doing it justice (since Robin Cousins skated a memorable iconic exhibition to it). I agree there is reason to have Javi slightly behind both Oda and Rippon, and at the least he should not be ahead of them by 2 points. But once again, rep points come into play. Oda has great knees and he's a jumping machine, but he was not skating to or even coming close to interpreting the music. Oda's PCS skills are over-rated IMO because of his great jumping ability.
I'm not sure I agree with this. While Adam's skating skills are noticeably better than Oda's, I think Oda has a good program that I personally found more memorable than Adam's as a whole, and he skated it well. I think Mura's skating was on par with Adam's. I seem to like Javier's program more than most posters (I'm not familiar with the Robin Cousins performance, maybe that's why?); it wasn't a great skate for me and he scored higher than I expected, but again I found the program itself more memorable than Adam's and I thought he had interesting choreo and performed it well whereas Adam's program has great musicality and he is a beautiful skater but he had visible errors like the big stumble on the step sequence...
I also think that Max Aaron deserved some higher scores to reflect the improvement he is showing in presentation. It is just not being recognized.
Well, he did get a personal best in the short program last night IIRC? ETA: Oops, my bad it was a season's best! But he's only two points shy of his personal best with some points on the table still! I definitely see the improvement, though. I really like that program for him.
To be honest I was pretty happy with everyone's skates last night. I reallyyy hope they keep it up for the long program! *fingers crossed*