In our first breakdown of this weekend's Skate Canada International, we have strong opinions about this messy pairs event. We discuss chaotic, acrobatic programs, the potential skates needed to win the Olympics, PCS disparity, and we have lots to say about a contentious (and wrong) call on a lift, including all the rules actually laid out in the pairs technical handbook.

We wrap up recapping Skate America with the dance event, which was a bit of a disappointing one for us. We discuss rules for lifts, and a lift that wasn't quite what we expected it to be, why you should always choose the music for the pattern dance first when creating a Rhythm Dance, and why we are fully on board with a consistently harsh tech panel.

The women were much more consistent than the men at Skate America, and we discuss why fewer quads and triple Axels being attempted can allow for some more confident and clean skates, why we really hope that the next ISU Congress will really look at changing how judging is done, particularly for components, and why you should be very careful in using voice-overs in a program to avoid condescending to your audience.

We continue our discussion of the first Grand Prix of the season with the pairs event, and discuss our excitement over the potential rise of pairs skating in Japan in the future, lament that consistent struggles with a single element could potentially threaten the Olympic chances of any Russian pair, and shout out one of our favourite programs of this season and last that we haven't seen get much appreciation from judges or fans.

The senior Grand Prix is here, and we're back with full recaps of all the skaters in each discipline! We start with the men, who had a really rough short program and a number of guys skating injured, and discuss the huge risks that can come with trying to compete injured, the importance of careful editing and choreography to prepare an audience for a big musical transition, and how hard it must be to try and land multiple quads with the immense pressure of an Olympic season on you.

We wrap up our final JGP recap of the season with the men's and dance events in Linz, and discuss the trend of messy dance events we've been seeing this JGP season, some strong technical skating and performances in this men's event that really excited us, and discuss the importance of changing your competition mindset from getting dismayed over lost points on an element to focusing on thinking of places in a program where you can salvage those lost points, even if it's just a bit at a time.

We've finally caught up with the final JGP event of the season, and we start off this recap by discussing the very late announcement of how spots for the JGP Final are being decided, and our annoyance that the number of pairs who will be going has been cut down to just four. We also break down our thoughts about two very similar skaters at the top of the women's event and what small things differentiate them in the standings, and a really exciting pairs event with teams breaking technical barriers and showing some exciting potential for the discipline in countries outside of Russia.

We conclude our recap of Finlandia with the women and ice dance, and discuss some high scoring that will probably only get higher as the season goes on, skaters from smaller federations who had a great event here, and the ever tightening battle for the lone Spanish ice dance spot, plus we call on the ISU to make a real effort to condemn outward homophobia in figure skating.

We had a stacked field of entrants at Finlandia in the men's and pairs' events, and in this first part of our recap we discuss why it would never be our first choice to skate to music you know someone else is skating to, some inconsistent scoring of new pairs teams, and some possible indications of who might get the coveted Olympic spots for countries with multiple skaters trying to qualify for just one or two available spots.

This week's JGP featured a pretty enjoyable men's event and a pretty rough dance event, and we discuss the men who were able to make skating with multiple quads look easy and those who were able to perform to the fullest because they weren't including quads in their programs, and a whole bunch of silly mistakes and rule violations in the dance event that made it a bit of a tough one to watch.