The Morning After: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond

Jason Castro performs... from the future! / Frank Micelotta / FOX

My reviews of last night's American Idol, Neil Diamond Night edition, are up at time.com. As you know if you watched, however, all 10 performances were outdone by Paula's strange episode in the middle of the show, in which she began critiquing Jason Castro's second performance before he sang it, an excruciatingly awkward faux pas which was the most awesome thing on American Idol ever.

At last we have an explanation for Paula's sometimes bizarre behavior over the seasons: she was exposed to high levels of electromagnetic radiation and has become unstuck in time. Her uncontrollable flashes and premonitions of the future have made her increasingly confused and rambling, and if she doesn't find her constant soon, she's going to end up like Minkowski. Either that, or she was reading from her scripted notes based on the earlier rehearsal, but feel free to offer other theories.

Who's going home this week? I'm going to say Syesha, simply because it's her turn and she was neither memorable enough nor bad enough to mobilize sympathy votes. Jason, who should go home this week, probably was bad enough to mobilize his sympathy vote, while Brooke rounds out the bottom three. (I should note that I made all these predictions before peeking at dialidol.com; click here if you want to see if their busy-signal-measuring predictionbot agrees with me.)