Gibson hangs up her skates on ‘Skating’

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First blood
Kristy Swanson and her mercurial partner Lloyd Eisler skated next, and that's where the bloodshed came into play. They were executing a maneuver in which he flung her around by a hand and a foot — a move they'd been shown practicing so many times during their intro that even someone who hadn't seen the endless previews spoiling this moment entirely would have known something was about to happen.

Eisler conked Swanson's face right into the ice, opening a cut on her chin. Seeing poor Kristy go down in her platinum blonde bobbed wig was particularly sad. Nobody wants to bleed while dressed in whimsical attire; it's just not dignified.

Not only that, but that disaster followed an earlier stumble by Swanson that happened inexplicably while she was doing nothing particularly special. Between those two falls, an exit seemed inevitable.

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Pulling up the rear
Kurt Browning and Deborah Gibson were the last to skate. Swanson and Eisler's multiple difficulties meant that while they've lagged in past weeks, these two should have had a good chance to continue. While they avoided major disaster, Gibson and Browning fell victim to towering mediocrity.

Their thoroughly unambitious program with almost no difficult moves in it was just plain underwhelming. Despite obvious effort, Gibson still skated awkwardly and slowly.

Furthermore, as Browning mentioned himself in their introductory piece, he isn't big enough or experienced enough in pairs skating to throw her around the way guys like Zimmerman and Eisler can throw people around to pick up extra points while using an unskilled partner as ballast.

Gibson and Browning finished firmly in last place, and they prepared for their graceful exit. The evening's most unexpected moment came when Swanson and Eisler had side-by-side synchronized brain meltdowns and initially believed that the scores Gibson and Browning received were higher than theirs, meaning that they themselves would be going home. When co-host Summer Sanders corrected them and said that they weren't being eliminated, their reaction was an odd mixture of relief at not losing and intimidation that they were going to have to keep doing this for another week.

It wasn't clear at the beginning of the season how a format based on judges' scoring rather than on fan voting would affect "Skating" and its odds of success. While the show doesn't have the crazed populist impact of its closest competitor, "Dancing With The Stars," there is something satisfying about eliminations based on judging that, while it can get things wrong like Coulier and Kerrigan, does generally reward skill and doesn't get bogged down in personalities. If Master P had been on this show, he'd have been gone the first week. And that's most certainly a compliment.

Linda Holmes is a writer in Bloomington, Minn.

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