The second featured C Group is twin sisters Liang Qiao, and Liang Jiao ranked 31 and 32. This cute pair chose Hmph! by WJSM Chocome for their performance. The song showed off their acting and performance skills, but they were vocally terrible. Nevertheless, they got away with style points. No top nine candidates were chosen from this unit.
The following series of C Groups did not fare any better. In fact, they sucked so bad that Mnet just grouped their awfulness into a montage of short clips and reaction shots from the masters.
The masters did not seem pleased with the performance levels of what they saw. The vocals were terrible, the dancing was terrible. It was just all varying levels of awful to terrible. However, it was enough to awaken them from a long shooting day because of the anger built up from watching steaming piles of shit drop in front of them.
The best the C Group could get from the masters was a thank you for their attempts and for learning the Korean lyrics.
What followed next was a look into the struggles of the C group as they come to a foreign land, learn another language become accustomed to pursuing the dream of becoming a K-Pop idol. Which lead to a group of fierce-looking girls from C group called the Real Fierce Sisters taking the stage. Their ranks being 6, 12, 7, 28 and 5. The expectation from the other girls as they may have a good performance based on their looks.
The group intended to not smile on stage to put the scare into the audience. Their intro seemed to reinforce that. The song chosen by Real Fierce Sisters was CLC’s Helicopter. A bold choice with one of the members of that group sitting among the competitors. Their leader Fu Ya Ning proclaimed they could do better than the original version when egged on by the masters.
That statement got some strange looks from the other competitors. When the masters asked Fu Ya Ning to say something to the CLC’s Yujin, she got the claws out and dissed her rap battle style. That also triggered a lot of “Oh no, you didn’t!” responses from everyone.
With the tension, high Real Fierce Sisters started their performance. And the group backed up their leader’s bravado by putting on the only decent performance by a C Group in the episode. Of course, that’s not saying much considering the quality of performances from them so far. But it’s a small victory in a poor showing overall from C Group in this episode.
The masters praised the group for the energy but pointed out some flaws such as imbalance issues and weak vocals from the lead vocalist Wen Zhe. On the other hand, Cai Bing was complimented on being alluring by Sunmi. The top 9 candidates from this unit were Cai Bing, Chia Yi and Fu Ya Ning.
K Group’s next performer was CLC’s Choi Yujin. She was solo and felt pressured after being challenged by Fu Ya Ning and mentioned that she tends to buckle easily in such situations. She is ranked 6 in the K Group. Her song was Hyuna’s Bubble Pop. Which, of course, was teased but not shown. Instead, there was information on how to vote shown and then previews of what was to come in episode tow and Choi Yujin crying after her performance.
And that brings a close to episode one. As expected, it was full of filler but started to become watchable once the performances began. It seems like the C group will be set up as the underdogs in this show based on the first episode. It’s hard to judge the small sample size right now, and perhaps episode 2 will have more answers as to what countries girls will have the edge going into the actual competition.
