Losers become winners become losers again with this week's Masked Singer reveals

If you’ve been following our coverage of this season of The Masked Singer, you’ll know how prominent a part of the show’s mythology the Ding Dong Keep It On Bell has become. Carrying with it the same metaphors of redemption as oh so many bits of religious iconography across the centuries, the DDKIOB has knelled salvation for multiple competitors who’ve failed during the show’s Battle Royale segments this season, allowing them to keep their identities hidden and sing another day.

But the butcher’s bill must come due, and so it has at last tonight, as The Masked Singer deployed “The Battle Of The Saved,” pitting unlikely survivors Medusa, Gargoyle, and Mantis against each other in a fight for survival. With their ding-donging patron finally silenced, the trio would have to fight on their own merits at last.

Anyway: Lou Diamond Phillips was in the big bug costume.

That was the first reveal of the night, as Phillips’ rendition of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” wasn’t enough to allow the La Bamba and Longmire star to persist in his insectile obscurity. Medusa, meanwhile, passed to the second round with Shawn Mendes’ “Mercy,” while Gargoyle got by with Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love.”

Their reward? A second shot at salvation, in the form of a Battle Royale performance of Fall Out Boy’s “Centuries.” Which proved to be the downfall of The Gargoyle, who was forced to join Phillips in the “Reprieved, and then un-reprieved” club, despite it clearly being unconstitutional for one performer to be eliminated for the same musical crimes twice. Beneath the mask: Los Angeles Chargers player Keenan Allen, who will now have to live outside the Ding Dong Keep It On Bell’s light for the rest of his tortured existence. (In his exit interview, Allen said, “I was trying not to go home, I didn’t want to go home.” Truly, heartbreaking stuff.)