Masterchef Recap: What Fresh Hell Is This?
Previously on Masterchef, Mimi, who was still on the show, suddenly wasn’t. We will miss her, I guess. Theoretically.
But with the final episode of finals week, we put all that unpleasantness behind us and put a whole new kind of unpleasantness in front of us. To wit, a Masterclass, which means an entire episode of complete meaninglessness. Nobody will be eliminated, nobody will be rewarded, nobody will gain pins or advantages or even vague inspiration — it’ll all just be concentrated pissfarting around the whole day through.
And if that’s not bad enough, all the eliminated contestants are back and for some godawful reason Matt asks them what they’ve been doing since they left. Con is preparing to open a restaurant in Hobart, so that should do wonders for the tourist trade down south. Zoe is working with Peter Gunn — catching spies I guess. Also she has some painful burns on her arm, which causes everyone to applaud as they enjoy seeing evidence of Zoe’s pain. And then there’s Nicolette, who is working with Anna Polyviou, the pastry pervert.
And that’s all the stories we get to hear. Nobody else has done anything worth talking about, obviously.
Matt then drops a bombshell: the kind of bombshell that bounces harmlessly off your shoulder and dissolves in water. Today it won’t be the CONTESTANTS doing the Mystery Box…it’ll be the JUDGES! Who has ever HEARD of such demented shenanigans! This is so wacky the B-52s might show up at any time.
It’s not all the judges, of course. Matt isn’t cooking because although he likes to keep it quiet, he’s actually never cooked anything and has no sense of smell or taste. So it’ll be George and Gary and Shannon, who of course isn’t actually a judge: he’s more a sort of vagrant who lives in the garden.
I can’t stress enough how HILARIOUS all the amateurs find the idea of watching the judges cook. I can’t stress enough how ANNOYING this is. The judges are all pretending to be incredibly nervous and stressed out and the amateurs are pretending to act like the judges and they think it is DELIGHTFUL. There is enough self-satisfaction floating around the kitchen to asphyxiate a bison.
And if you thought watching amateurs push themselves to their personal limits and beyond in an attempt to transcend their humble beginnings was entertaining, you have no idea how tedious it is watching professional chefs do what is for them an extremely easy thing.
George pretends he doesn’t know how to get the lid off a blender. Haha, because you’re a hoity-toity judge and you don’t know how the common people cook! Well played! Matt the Amateur helps him out, and the amateurs ROAR with laughter. It’s like someone’s put a powerful electrical current through the spinal columns of the Have You Been Paying Attention audience.
George carries on this grotesque perversion of theatre by getting amateurs to help him open more things. Matt gives him a yellow card, which means he risks getting a red card, which means he’ll have to sit out the rest of the cook, which means…nothing. It means nothing. There are no consequences for this. If they got them to cook wearing sumo suits, or suspended above a shark tank or something, that’d be something, but this is just literally watching professional cooks cook. This is what they deliberately hide from you when you go to a restaurant because they don’t want to bore you. So I guess it’s a bit like if you went to a restaurant, but you had to sit in the kitchen, and a large group of strangers were standing next to your table laughing at nothing throughout your meal.
Matt the Amateur tells George he might want to think about the amount of salt he has in his dish. The eliminated losers on the balcony all laugh as another gust of nitrous oxide is pumped directly into their lungs by the producers. “If looks could kill!” Matt the Amateur guffaws, just before a shot of George grinning broadly. Yes, M the A? If looks could kill, what? If looks could kill, we would all immediately go out and try to find the ugliest person possible to put us out of our goddamn misery?
Some guy with glasses says it’s amazing watching the cooks cook. I don’t know who he is, I guess he used to be on the show. I think he thinks the glasses make him look like Chris Hemsworth.
Time is up, and the judges have cooked their dishes, and what those dishes are is far too uninteresting to describe.
Oh the guy with glasses is Charlie. He’s the golfer. I bet after getting eliminated he just went back to playing golf.
“What are you worried about with this dish?” asks Matt of George. George for some reason doesn’t reply, “Nothing, this dish means nothing to me or anyone else and has no consequences whatsoever.” He does say something about “me on a plate”, though, just to make clear how obnoxious and contemptible he finds the amateurs with their snivelling “food journey” bullshit. George hates his job and he hates all of you and he isn’t even bothering to hide it.
All the amateurs say George’s dish is great in very wanky ways. They do the same with Shannon and Gary. Basically they’re just saying stuff they’ve heard the judges say before, about crunchy elements and smokiness and sweet balances and cauliflower and crap. It’s absolutely agony to watch. This is reality TV reimagined as an insistent skin rash.
“Food we expect to see at this stage of the competition,” says Matt, but this isn’t the competition! It’s the judges! That’s why it is funny! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PREMISE YET? CAN WE PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE WITH IT A BIT MORE?
We’re twenty-five minutes into the episode, and about forty years closer to death. One of the judges “wins” the “challenge”, and I’m not even going to tell you who it was, because this episode doesn’t deserve to have its plot developments elaborated.
Unbelievably, someone thought this travesty should continue. Now it’s going to be the amateurs cooking against the professionals in a cooking relay, that thing where the cook is passed along like the time when Brett screwed Harry over with his trifle. It’s Elena and Elise and Harry versus the three professionals, while Matt the Amateur joins Matt the judge as a judge, because Matt the Amateur likes being a judge and has suddenly realised he hates cooking.
So, who will win? Who are the best cooks? The judges are of course, that’s why they own restaurants and stuff. Again, in case you haven’t got the message by now, this means nothing, in a very literal and aggravating sense.
The ingredient chosen for the relay is mandarin, and why not? There are many reasons why not, but none of them have occurred to anyone, so off we go.
The action on screen is aggressively bland but it’s a good time to relax and reflect on the fact that Shannon Bennett’s head is much larger than it used to be. He’s starting to resemble a goblin. The kind of goblin who steals babies. Which is weird because usually it’s George who you imagine stealing your baby.
Gary’s thinking Asian flavours, such a cliche. He describes what he’s doing but it doesn’t help. “He’s all about the flavour which I think is always key in this kitchen,” says Trent, as if there are other kitchens where people don’t give a shit about how their food tastes. Like it’s a real horses for courses thing, like Gary, as one of those rare cooks who places significance upon the flavour of dishes, is incredibly well-suited to this flavour-friendly terrain. “Ooh, Gary’s really trying to make it taste good, that could stand him in good stead in the current climatic conditions.” Piss off Trent.
The relay continues. Gary hasn’t finished deboning his quail. Zoe thinks it’s quite important for Shannon to get all the bones out. Hmm, yes, I see her point.
Jesus wept.
The amateurs’ team is making a dessert because this is 2016, the Year of Amateurs Making Desserts No Matter What. Elena’s crumb’s in the oven, and sadly I mean that literally. There’s cream and chocolate and star anise and she’s putting things in bags and stuff I don’t know I have genuinely lost the will to live, let alone to pay attention to technique.
Heather informs us that Shannon is poaching the quail in Gary’s stock, in case we forgot the time we saw him do that three seconds earlier. Zoe didn’t see Shannon take any bones out of the quail, so Shannon might be in trouble or Zoe might just be inattentive. God knows I am while watching this trash.
George is unconvincingly faking competitiveness, and all the amateurs are describing how competitive he is in a vain attempt to fool us into thinking anyone in this kitchen today gives half a shit about any of it.
George says his inspiration is Harry, but I don’t see how that can be true given that George has no hair.
Anyway if George’s inspiration is Harry then George will probably be fucking everything up soon, because Harry has fucked everything up. His ganache is a fluid. This is a problem, possibly related to the prostate. It’s a moment of high drama. You can cut the tension with a crayon.
Meanwhile Zoe is still banging on about the fucking wishbone.
The ganache is set. Crisis over. Also, crisis never started. “You’ve got a minute to win it!” yells Matt the Amateur, the smarmy goon. Heather is impressed with how much Harry has improved and I’d be interested to know who asked for her damn opinion.
The Matts taste the amateurs’ dish, which I guess is a bunch of things with “mandarin” put in front of their names. Matt the Amateur talks some utter bollocks about it. Matt the judge does likewise.
The Matts taste the professionals dish, which is also some mandarinny thing but with extra quail bones. “Could cost us, that bone,” says George in the genial voice of someone who absolutely one hundred percent deliberately left a bone in his dish. The plan to put a bone in to somehow make it seem plausible that the amateurs could possibly ever in a million years cook a better dish than the judges is so obvious and transparent that it fits perfectly with the theme of today’s episode, which is “intolerable shitfuckery”.
Finally it’s over and I didn’t even get paid to watch that. What a farce my life is.
Tune in next week when with any luck something will actually happen.
You’d be well advised to buy my book to cleanse the palate after that horror show. Buy it now, dammit.
