There were 3 ties in the final leaderboard so the bottom placed couple ends up with only one point less than the couples in places 3.4 and 5. BBC, that is ridiculous. I don't want Mark out though, so that may help him !!!!!

And Pixie, 2nd with the judges, is no better off than the three tied in 3rd equal, since the public vote takes precedence.

The public vote order will be the final overall order for Pixie, Simon, Jake and Frankie.
And Caroline only has a little leeway ( nor is Mark as you say far behind, but I doubt the public will save him )

At least this will give a proper indication to particularly Frankie and Pixie's popularity with the public. Seems a bit daft to have two dances each and still have three people tied.

On the contrary, I think it's a very good thing - for the first time we'll get a real indicator of who's in a with a proper chance of winning this series. It's always interesting when some of the good ones have a bad night, and there's only so much the judges can do about it.

If Mark is in the dance off ( as I think he will be ) it will be very interesting to see who is in the dance off with him.

1) Whoever it is will not have had a very good public vote tonight.

2) On the other hand, if they then win the dance off, could they benefit from sympathy / bounceback votes next week ?

Interesting result. If we were to take it as the judges protecting someone that would be Caroline. Why? Is she so low in public votes? What does seem apparent is that they have engineered a three way tie above Mark. Now that could be an opportunity to save Mark, as he'll avoid dance off if two above him are behind in the public vote.

Alternatively, they are confident Mark is going to be bottom, and he was in the dance off last week. In which case it's a popularity vote between Jake, Frankie, Simon and Pixie who joins him in DO. Intriguing to see who that is, I suspect Simon and Jake have built a public following, so Pixie or Frankie? Whatever, Mark to go but more data about the relative public voting than we've had for a while.