Watching The Show this year has been kind of a grind. There have been a handful of the of achingly awful performances that make it all worthwhile — can you say, “Carry On, Wayward Son,” anyone? — and one of the contestants is starting to remind me a little too much of Big Bird, but these performances/performers have been few and too far between. Even the clearly poorest remaining contestant, who is tortured week after week in a way that might take years of expensive psychotherapy to repair, is a perfectly decent singer.

And so we push on, week after week. We’ve got your future luau singer, we’ve got your Damien, we’ve got someone who actually thinks a vocoder is a good idea (do you feel like we do? No.), we’ve got Vainglorious, and we’ve got a guy who I am really inclined to like — but he ruined it all last week by pulling out a harmonica and playing it badly (as if there’s any other way — and by the way, that’s a Hohner Golden Melody you were playing, pal, and it’s tuned to accentuate individual notes, not for playing chords like you were doing).

Train wreck, baby — I need me a train wreck. We almost got one last week when a potential finalist came out in a muumuu and gave us a sap-fest. Then she almost sobbed as she explained how deeply she felt every word of the song.

She finished third-to-last. Soooo close.