Screeeech! The runaway freight train to fame that Brooke Burke was riding just stopped. Instead, the new true star of Dancing With the Stars is ... Lance Bass? My fingers can hardly type the words, but eyes don't lie.

The first mistakes frontrunners Brooke and Derek Hough made were the costumes they wore "dawncing the jive," as the posh announcer put it. He had a pizzazz-free zoot suit; her usual sweet nothing of an outfit was light on the sweet and heavy on the nothing. Their routine was gimmicky: mimed groin kicks and stagey falls. Inexplicably, they committed a blatant lift, which predictably transmogrified judge Carrie Ann from her usual kindliness into her bad self, the livid chief of the Lift Police.

Brooke missed a step right away, and was lost for the rest of the number. Her hair got caught somehow, and instead of shaking it off, she was visibly shaken. Her bubbly confidence went flat. She couldn't have blown it worse if the Mob had paid her to throw the contest. The judges gave her an all-time low score of 21, but even that was a gift. I thought she was going to burst into tears when she got the news (and was disappointed that she didn't).

OK, she and D. came back with an infinitely superior salsa after that -- and how clever of her to wear flapperishly fringed pants to disguise her besetting sin, flexing her legs instead of extending them. But even their better dance was spoiled for me by that perfectly horrid pouty-mouth she does. It makes her look like somebody failing a porn-flick audition by overacting. She's like Julia Roberts: only pretty and crowd-pleasing when she smiles.

Brooke's and Derek's sartorial sins were a trifle compared to others'. I thought Cody Linley's back-from-surgery dance mentor Julianne Hough's stewardess-ish outfit made her look like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (or maybe the USSR). Then I got a load of the still scarier steel-gray military uniforms they donned to do their paso doble. I'm surprised they didn't turn it into a goose-step revue. The judges made jokes about giving them their marching orders, and their striking resemblance to the March of the Wooden Soldiers. They were remarkably stiff, but I'll bet the judges might have been nicer if they hadn't been traumatized by the sight of all that war-wear. It may also be that wearing warrior's duds somehow psychologically makes one's dancing more martial. Or maybe that was the whole idea, to soldier up their lightweight youthful image -- a dumb one, in that case. They got a 22, nosing ahead of disgraced Brooke and Julianne's crestfallen brother Derek.

Warren Sapp and Kym Johnson didn't offend in the costume department. I actually kind of liked her square-dance-like jutting skirt with the roulette wheel design. But I'm getting sick of the favoritism the judges have shown them all along. She dances as hard as a dervish, while he just ambles and strikes poses -- they both get by on massive personal charm. "You have such a super-sized sense of fun, you get away with murder," warned judge Len. Could it be that the honeymoon is over, and the judges will actually do some judging when it comes to the Winsome Twosome, and do them in? Their lackluster mambo earned a 24, their admittedly livelier jitterbug a 25, making a not-fully-deserved 49 (which, Warren pointed out, was the number of his jersey in high school). It's also Brooke and Derek's score for the evening. Some say Warren could actually win this thing. It would be a crime, like electing Phil Spector NFL linebacker MVP.

It pains me to admit it: Lance Bass and Lacey Schwimmer completely deserved to steal all the thunder in this crucial, down-to-the-wire episode. She may look like an overhastily wrapped birthday present with all those blue and green ribbons sprouting out her derriere, he may look like one of the crasser Snopeses of Yoknapatawpha County, and the pair of them may be the antidote to human desire. But damn, can they dance, and the drama of his improvement is why we watch this show instead of watching real dancers. They brought on some actual pros in this episode to show the stars how dancing is done; impressive as the interlopers were technically, they didn't register at all as personalities. The instant they quit moving, you can't remember them. Lance and Lacey and the rest do register, and they develop, in a way few reality-show characters can.

And it didn't hurt the drama that Lance's dad and veteran jitterbugger Granddaddy came up from Down South to cheer him on. Inspired, his mambo got one ten, his jitterbug two. Lance got grief from judge Len for dancing barefoot, so he started to wear shoes; he danced so hard for his granddaddy, one white shoe flew right off his foot, and he kept right on jitterbugging in his floppy sailor suit, better than ever, to deafening applause. You'd never see a scene like this in a movie, because the screenwriter would die of shame before he could write it. Thank God for reality TV!

There was another bang-up moment in the episode: Len's Master Class, starting with an amusing dream sequence, then on to conscious Len imparting useful tips to the contestants in the rehearsal room. Practically every non-dance interlude on DWTS is sheer contrived misery featuring young beauties, but tonight we got two humdingers featuring old farts, Len and Granddaddy.

So who's not long for this world on DWTS? I'm guessing Warren will be the next one place-kicked through the goalpost, but that could be wishful thinking. In any case, DWTS has gone into sudden-death overtime.

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