I thought that too with the prop. Just as a guess, I wonder if the blades aren’t geared in such a way that when the first blade dug into the runway it “unfeathered” and forced the other three blades to rotate to match.
With regard to the key position, I’ll give him a pass there. In a previous life I flew a single engine aircraft we’d take to a high key position before we started trouble shooting a problem. That would give us 360 degrees of turn during the descent in the event we lost our engine. That gives you a little more wiggle room to work a problem and not have to focus on maintaining the perfect position for an engine out approach. I think in this case he didn’t necessarily trust his engine, but it was still given him power and so his first priority was working the gear problem. Climb up high over the runway and try to fix the gear. If the engine quits, higher is better. He bled off the extra energy with some S turns, but as often happens, that last effort to sweeten your position can turn it sour if you’re a little too aggressive. I used to tell my students I’d rather slide off the far end of the runway at 15 knots than land short at 140 knots (it was a really fast single engine airplane).
My current single engine airplane has a parachute, and I notice people who fly them get very lazy about practicing losing an engine in the traffic pattern. “I’ll just pull the chute” is a bad option if downwind and base is over Compton CA.
