The pairs were a bit up and down, but we discuss confident skates from Tarasova/Morozov and Della Monica/Guarise, the resurgence of Ziegler/Kiefer with a strong final lift, and the struggles American pairs are having with their throw jumps this grand Prix season.

There were a number of pairs skating back-to-back events at NHK, but it was a much stronger event overall. We break down the classical Russian and classical Chinese pairs who booked their spots in the Final, the battle for the bronze and for side-by-side jumps, and our annoyance over Basic level death spirals in the short program.

The men at NHK had a really rough week, and we break down all of the pops, falls, and under-rotations. We cover Shoma Uno's continued struggles with his combinations, the great consistency of Sergei Voronov, and discuss the strategy of including multiple quads in this new scoring system.

With the withdrawal of Papadakis and Cizeron, this dance event was wide open, and we break down the continuing Tango Romantica issues faced by the majority of teams, the continued rise of Fear and Gibson, and discuss just how difficult Christopher Dean's choreography is.

We begin our recap of NHK 2018 with the strongest ladies event so far on the Grand Prix. We speculate on how Rika Kihira might handle the pressure of her next event, what Mai Mihara can do to make the leap onto the Japanese national podium, and what we can hope for from the rest of Alena Leonova's season.

Our final recap for GP Helsinki is the ice dance, and we have a lot to talk about. We discuss our excitement over Stepanova and Bukin's new free dance, Mary's love of Mozart and her childhood dream skating music, and of course Guignard and Fabbri's time violation and music issue in the RD (and a request to the ISU to give everyone an official statement about it).

The pairs at the first GP Helsinki were kind of a mess.

Was it the ice? Just a bad day? Who knows entirely? We sure don't.

There were definitely some highlights, but mostly we just hope for better skates for everyone going forward.

The ladies were definitely a mixed batch. There weren't a ton of amazing skates, but definitely a lot of good ones, but these ladies really shouldn't go for that 3Lo+3T combo in the short program...

This men's event had it all! The good, the bad and the ugly.

We finally got to see Hanyu's 4T+3A sequence, we had great skates from Michal Brezina and Junhwan Cha, but a lot of the other guys struggled. Not quite Cup of Disaster, but this weekend was a rough one.

The Skate Canada men's event was a really exciting one, and we have lots to say about different skaters' quad success rates, our excitement at seeing so many skaters have a strong short program, and why Kevin Aymoz was dramatically under appreciated by the crowd and the judges.