On a scale of 1 to “hearing Moldova twelve times in a row”, how excited am I to review the second semi-final? Somewhere around “being held captive by angry Waylon fans and forced to watch the entire semi over and over for 24 hours”, I think.

Anyhow, I survived. I even guessed eight qualifiers right, which meant I did better than my random guess, but more about that elsewhere. Time to stop procrastinating and find things to write about last night’s show.

Starting with Norway, which was considerably more underwhelming than I expected it to be, and not because I watched this song so much I got used to it – I’ve been ignoring it since it was chosen – but because somehow, despite all Alexander Rybak’s effortless charisma and presence, it just didn’t work. Well, I suppose that song didn’t help matters.

I still don’t remember how Romania goes, and with it not making the final, I will never remember how it goes. I will remember her dress fondly, although the rest of this performance, not so much.

Serbia was impressively effective for a performance that has to present about 325 different songs in three minutes. Apparently the way to distract from that kind of hindrance is come across as competent singers and do a staging that is both dynamic and cohesive enough. It did look exactly like the dictionary definition of Balkan staging, but in a good way, and for all of my issues with the song it was one of the few performances I actively enjoyed last night.

The robots from San Marino were the best achievement of any robotics team that has ever participated in Eurovision. Otherwise the performance was highly entertaining for many wrong reasons, but the song in itself – while not unoriginal, despite the whiff of “Heroes” – never sounded unpleasant enough to turn it from silly fun to active torture, and I am willing to bet Jess and Jen even got a somewhat decent televote score.

Denmark‘s Rasmussen continued in his life mission of making me deaf while conquering the foreign shores inside the arena. He is also such an uninteresting performer that I found myself watching the backing singers instead, and they actually look quite lovely. Seriously, maybe we can just accidentally lock him in the dressing room and have them perform it alone? Or perhaps instead of making him the face of this, just make them into a Viking boyband. I still doubt I’d like the song then, but I do think it would work better on screen and if I have to watch it again in the final, they can at least give me that.

It was easy to worry that Russia would somehow still make it, despite what we saw in the first semi-final when it comes to countries with 100% qualification records, but I was always confident that they wouldn’t. In their favor, I will say that they tried to make things as pleasant as possible. And let’s be honest: if this entry was from a country that wasn’t Russia, it probably still wouldn’t qualify, but we also wouldn’t bat an eyelid at it. We’ve seen worse. Credit to Julia, also, who actually looked sympathetic and emotional in all the right moments, which was a first. We now get to have a second consecutive Russia-free final, but I suspect that means they will come back next year with a vengeance.

The biggest achievement of Moldova was that their performance managed to be so incredibly clever and so incredibly tacky at the same time. As fun as it was, though, I think the overall impression of it was too old-school to really get the televoters going as much as many of us thought they would. I’m sure the kids who survived Romania without running away screaming had a blast, though, and hopefully they were young enough to have certain parts of the choreography go over their heads.

I missed the part where it said Netherlands at the beginning of the postcard and, instead of checking, I spent the entire time trying to remember who the guy in the postcard was. Which shows how much time I’ve spent looking at Waylon’s face recently: absolutely none. I still didn’t quite understand what he was trying to achieve with the concept of the performance, but knew he would go through and didn’t really bother to develop any expectations when it was down to the last qualifier and the Netherlands still hadn’t been called.

Australia was an odd one. Things my brain registered: the stage (and staging) weren’t great, Jessica could have gone for a better fashion choice because that particular fabric wouldn’t make anyone in the world look classy, and at times she did look like she just wandered around Lisbon, saw a stage and mistook it for an open mic night. But she did it with so much charm and enthusiasm while singing one of the more decent songs in the line-up, and in this semi-final that combination was more than enough.

I really wanted Georgia to make it through, and totally put it in my prediction realizing it probably wouldn’t but I wanted to try and will it to happen anyway. It was still three blessed minutes of zen and meditation in the midst of this headache-inducing semi, and I say that as someone who got to enjoy a somewhat condensed version of the show, as I only watched a recording and happily skipped all the breaks.

Poland, however, was three minutes of bad vocals drilling into my head combined with some highly questionable arm dance choreography choices. “Light Me Up” always felt like a song I should like, except whenever I actually heard it I realized there wasn’t a song, and last night was so bad on all fronts that there was very little to make the experience pleasant. The only silver lining is that we’ll get to see the baseline vote of the Polish diaspora when the full results are published, because I really doubt anyone else voted for it.

Really, Malta, really. I think they have the right intentions and they do try, but they have the tendency to go rather overboard when it really doesn’t serve the song – or my eyesight. The 2018 iteration of this tendency looked more like an audiovisual display in a very artsy art gallery than a Eurovision song, and with the music itself and Christabelle’s vocals being harmless, it served as three minutes of screen decoration but nothing you’d actually vote for.

Having watched the semi-final on delay, I had already seen messageboard comments about the magnificent three minutes that were Hungary‘s performance. I should have known better and expected nothing of the kind, because what I got was still three minutes of this voice screaming, with decent yet not particularly outstanding camerawork. It looked competent, for the most part, which is what it needed to do; it got slightly upgraded with some very nice use of lights in the last minute of the song; and then it was downgraded to a rock parody with the last few bits. I always assumed it would make the final, but I really won’t be sad hearing it for the last time on Saturday.

Apparently the main mistake I made with Latvia, having skipped the national final and only seen bits of Laura’s rehearsal, was assuming that she could actually sing. She started out OK, to balance off the really distracting camerawork that was supposed to be sophisticated and different but mostly detracted from the chance to get to know her while she was still in tune. By the time we’d got used to the visuals, Laura had given up on the singing part and gone for a nice stroll through melodies and keys from faraway lands. Funny girl? Well, this staging combined with this vocal performance was funny, but probably not in a way they intended.

Sweden looked less impressive than I thought it would be, and much like Norway, that isn’t because I am already used to it – I watched about a minute of “Dance You Off” in the Melodifestivalen final and never bothered with the performance again (or the song, really). Similarly to Estonia, the novelty of it gets tiring very quickly, although at least here the main singer is very much the front and center of this and not the other way around – he actually gets to do things during the performance and interact with the audience, unlike poor Elina. I still find Sweden very flat in terms of anything actually interesting happening during its three minutes, but it does have the usual Swedish slickness which should be enough for it to do pretty well in the final too.

If Serbia was the dictionary definition of how to stage a Balkan entry well, the Montenegro was the dictionary definition of how to stage a Balkan entry really really badly. Vanja is really cool though, and I really hope that, like some other artists this year, he enjoyed the experience and will try and come back one day but with something that is more him and less, well, this.

On the topic of artists who are way too cool for their entries, allow me to introduce you to Slovenia’s Lea Sirk, my official 2018 Girl Crush and this year’s winner of how to perform a notoriously crappy song like it’s the biggest pop banger in the contest. Her personality and great vocals came through the screen, the choreography was interesting all the way through, the fashion choices weren’t distracting, and even if the fake break was indeed entirely unnecessary, it didn’t ruin anything for her. I didn’t have her in my prediction and was delighted to be proved wrong.

Ukraine is now the last member standing in the Perfect Qualification Record club (Australia are still too young to join), and I suppose that if we had to guess – even before hearing this year’s songs – who would be the one to take that crown, assuming we judged purely on merit and not on who we thought had the most friends, they would have been the obvious choice. They have this uncanny ability to balance just enough televote-friendly craziness with just enough musical and vocal value for the juries to appreciate it too, and they also manage to make sense out of a lot of the mad props they bring with them on stage, where for other countries they would feel bolted on. Of course “Under The Ladder” needed a big and scary piano spider coffin and a burning staircase! Why would anyone think otherwise?

In retrospect, I suppose all the results in this semi-final made sense, although I doubt I’ll ever be in the mood to watch it. We now have just one more night left in our Lisbon 2018 adventure, and if I’m being honest, I have as much clue about what’s going to happen as I had two weeks ago. Maybe next time I can just skip the rehearsals altogether.

I shall return tomorrow with a mini-preview and a mini-review of Portugal and the big five entries ahead of the grand final. I  probably still won’t have a clue even after further soul-searching analysis, but I’m sure I’ll find a way to write plenty of words about it anyway.