Episode Recap: Angels and Demons

Realizing your dream of bringing a cosplay character to life is heaven, but when you don’t have the time or money to get it right, it’s hell! Which is why this week’s theme, angels and demons, is the perfect fit for the cosplay world.

Yvette has the contestants blindly choose a feather from a set of angelic wings – dark means they’ll create a demon, light means angel. Lisa whispers a silent prayer for demon, and her prayers are answered! Unfortunately she’s the only contestant who gets his or her wish – Marty will make an angel, Garrick a demon, Jesse an angel.

In just eight hours, these players will create a set of wings for their character, and one contestant will be eliminated. Lisa is smack dab in her element: she’s made wings before, and goes for the PVC pipes to make four bony, sparkly wings for her servant of pestilence. Marty has no experience making wings, but she doesn’t let that stop her ambition from running wild: her wings, featuring pages of a “Bible” (not really a book of faith, just kinda looks like it) as feathers, span about 12 feet. Take flight! Garrick struggles for a while with his demon character, until he realizes demons are simply angels fallen from grace, and makes mock metal wings. Jesse’s notion of an angel who sacrificed her wings, and was rewarded by humans with a set of stone wings, is cool – but the weathering and detailing weren’t as thorough as the others’. She heads home after round one.

Lisa put so much detail and heart into her wings that she wins round one (LeeAnna recused herself from judging Lisa since the two have worked together in the past). In round two, they’ll make their wings move… and Lisa gets first choice at the motivating mechanism. She chooses springs, while Marty chooses the pneumatic actuator and Garrick chooses the linear actuator. If you don’t know what those things are, don’t worry! Neither do Garrick or Marty (gulp!).

Marty and Garrick both spend Day One trying to connect their devices to make their wings move – no mean feat! Lisa has a definite advantage, here: the springs she chose fit easily into the joints of her wings, and she attaches a bit of wire to her fingers to make them flex. This gives her more time to show off her seamstress skills on her character’s costume.

At last Marty discovers thin metal rods with holes already drilled in them. She sees how this gives the structure and flexibility needed to bring her actuator and wings together, and immediately shares this secret with Garrick. Look at that! Cosplay bringing competitors together.

Seeing Marty’s wings pop to their full 12-foot wingspan is pretty impressive! But now she and Garrick have only moments left in the day, which means they’ll have roughly half the time Lisa did to catch up to her level of detail. No pressure! (Other than the pneumatic pressure in the actuator.)

Marty is the first to hit the runway, and it’s clear she took the judges’ critique of adding more detail to her wings to heart. The texture, shape, and color of the feathers are captivating. Not only that, but her breastplate (worbla heated over a mannequin body; hard plastic molds; expert-level airbrush paint work) looks like it has weathered millennia in the heavens (with a few illicit trips to purgatory and beyond…)

Garrick’s armor work is nonpareil, and his story is clear in his non-traditional, bladed wings of metal. Some of the faux metal work is a little haphazard, however – it doesn’t look weathered in a logical way, and the materials don’t feel as blended as they could.

Lisa’s transformation is breathtaking – she has the hiss, the growl, and even the grotesque avian feet of a demon at the behest of pestilence and plague. She blended black, purple, and green with exposed bones and plenty of fake bugs to create a character at once gross and gorgeous. Once again, LeeAnna recuses herself from judging, but Christian and Yvette agree: Lisa is the winner! Take those dollars and make ‘em fly in your cosplay, Lisa!