Friends, family, leaderboard riders, lend me your ear. I've been telling you week after week that Cody was going to make it to the Dancing With the Stars finale, thanks to his continuous improvement and, more importantly, the Peloton family. And sure enough, on Monday night, he did. (Cody's "ride or dies" roll deep.) But the question now is if Cody Rigsby deserves to be in the DWTS finale. It's something many fans of the dancing reality show are asking after Monday night's semi-finals.

Cody was at the bottom of the leaderboard last night. That's a fact. Another fact, and let's remove our Boo-colored glasses for this one, is that Cody is probably the weakest dancer remaining on the show. (That's not to say he's bad, but just comparatively.) So when Cody made it into the finale on Monday, some Twitter fans felt that it was undeserved considering the show is a dance competition.

But really, this isn't a dance competition. The premise of the show is certainly to see "stars" learn how to dance and improve each week and get better and better and progress throughout the competition, yada, yada, yada. You get it. But the way the voting works is based on a popularity contest. If the show was meant to only move forward the best dancers, the voting would be based purely on the judges scores and/or America's votes would only be counted after all performances have been completed.

The latter is why there is such a hard push on the contestants' social media accounts to vote even before they have danced. By leveraging their hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions, of followers, the stars are able to get votes from people not only before they perform, but from people who probably don't even watch the show.

The show is, at the end of the day, a popularity contest disguised as a dance competition, but it's never pretended that it wasn't. It's also the reason that we lost some very talented people earlier on in the competition, like Olivia Jade, Mel C., and Kenya Moore.

But aren't all competition series that take into account audience votes the same way? Look at singing shows. The best singer isn't always the most popular singer. It's all about who the audience likes, and who the audience connects with. And by these standards, the standards the show has set up, Cody 100% deserves to be there.

Plus, you can't deny that Cody has been killing it the last couple of weeks on the show. He had the roughest go in the beginning of the season and rose above a quarantined performance and a COVID performance. And he still managed to improve week-after-week and get higher and higher scores as the season went on. He's earned his spot on the show the same way Iman has, Amanda has, and JoJo has.

OK, I'm off my soap box. And now here's my honest critique of Cody's performances:

• I loved seeing this salsa in the ballroom!
• It had some great moments: the side by side choreo and the tricks. This is probably my favorite Cheryl choreography I've seen.
• But honestly, Cody looked a bit lost a lot of the time.

• Cody nailed the technique on this one.
• The choreography didn't move around the space as much as I would have wanted, but that is not Cody's fault.

We have just one more week to get our Cody that Mirror Ball trophy!

Images: ABC