'Top Chef Master' recap: Skydiving and tumbleweeds

Hands up, knives down ... pull that parachute cord now? The fifth season of "Top Chef Masters" got underway tonight with 13 new chef-testants, a major plot twist and one of the more unusual chef-ly challenges of this franchise. Hello, sky diving! The cast is a high-octane baker's dozen that includes Healdsburg's Douglas Keane, from the now-shuttered, Michelin-starred Cyrus, and Bryan Voltaggio, who vied against his brother Michael in "Top Chef." Fellow competitor Sang Yoon, from Los Angeles' Lukshon restaurant, describes Voltaggio's entrance as "an 8.0 earthquake. He's a methodical, stone-cold killer." Once the hugging and intros are over and host Curtis Stone explains the big twist -- a parallel "Battle of the Sous Chefs," whose outcome impacts the master chefs -- it's on to the first elimination challenge: Chefs, you're going to Paris! Er, Perris, California. To feed the Skyhawks parachute stunt demonstration team! And here are your parachutes! (What is it about sky diving and reality TV this summer? Last week's "Project Runway" launch had sky divers too, although they didn't make the poor designers jump out of planes. Timothy "I don't believe in electricity or makeup, just bedazzled high heels -- for me, not my model" Westbrook would have fainted dead away.) Airborne chefs Chefs who arrive at the cooking site via parachute get two hours of cooking time. Drive and you get one. "I'm going Advertisement to need an hour of therapy after I land," Yoon says. Chef David Burke calls it "blackmail." It's effective blackmail. Twelve out of the 13 chefs decide to do it, but nothing will induce Keane -- whose fear of heights exceeds even his great fear of snakes -- to exit a plane in midair. Here comes the sous chef twist: Fortunately for Keane, his sous chef, Drew Glassell, has triumphed in the first "Battle of the Sous Chefs" and won his boss immunity. "I don't think he was proud," Glassell grouses afterward. "He was just happy he didn't have to jump." The other 12 chefs suit up in blue jumpsuits, amid much nervous joking -- "You look like Captain America. The couch potato version." -- and head into the clouds. Then the back of the plane opens and whoosh, they're gone. Back on the ground, the windswept, whooping chefs are absolutely euphoric until they see the cooking setup -- wooden tables on a hillside. Yoon is shocked. He was expecting an actual kitchen with running water and electricity. Dude, have you ever seen this show? There is always an unconventional kitchen challenge. Just be glad you don't have tumbleweeds rolling thr-- oh look, a tumbleweed. The sous chef effect Each chef is given whatever ingredients his or her sous happened to use in whatever their challenge was. For some chefs, this is a happy thing. Others are a bit mystified. Voltaggio wishes he had a protein to work with; his sous chef went vegetarian. And doom descends upon the three chefs whose sous chefs came in last: Richard Sandoval, Lynn Crawford and Richard Burke have no knives. They'll be filleting steaks and deveining shrimp with butter knives and scissors. There's a resounding chorus of "I love my sous chef! I love my sous chef!" from the other chefs. When the timer finally dings, the chefs have turned out an impressive array of dishes: Delicately poached halibut, a clam ragout, spice-crusted pork chops and Voltaggio's vegetarian carrot dish, which wows the judges. Keane delivers kombu-cured scallops. But Herb Wilson, the New York chef competing for the American Heart Association, has plated a disaster: oyster shells and gazpacho. His deep-fried oysters are still in the pan. The results The winner: The top three included Voltaggio and Neal Fraser, but it was Odette Fada and her Italian-inspired cold roasted lamb with cauliflower salad that took top prize -- and earned $10,000 for her charity, Doctors Without Borders. The packer-of-knives: That "Battle of the Sous Chefs" twist sure packs a punch. Two of the chefs in the bottom three -- Sandoval and Burke -- were working with butter knives. But it was Wilson and his oyster-less oyster shells who were sent home.



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The Last Stand of Walter White

The Last Stand of Walter White

YEARS AGO, in another lifetime—long before the hat, the goatee, the shaved head, before He, the Unholy Ghost, came into Bryan Cranston's life—the writers on the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle used to play a game in which they invented increasingly violent, absurd, and physically humiliating stunts for Cranston's character, Hal, to enact. They called it "What won't Bryan do?" When the game culminated in Hal covered by thousands of live bees, with no protest from Cranston forthcoming, it was deemed unwise to continue. Instead, a second, corollary game sprang up: "What can't Bryan do?" Here, too, the writers' imaginative powers proved inadequate to the task, whether the challenge was roller-dancing or using his body as an enormous nude paintbrush. Even they, though, might have been surprised to know what we now know about what Bryan can do: how he's transformed himself into Him. He, of course, is Walter White, whose journey from depressed, terminally ill chemistry teacher to murderous meth manufacturer on Breaking Bad begins its final chapter this month. In an era rife with seductive antiheroes, Walt White's transformation from, as creator Vince Gilligan likes to say, "Mr. Chips to Scarface" has arguably been the most harrowing—in part because we've watched the creation of Heisenberg, as White is known on the street, step by mostly well-calibrated step. "When I first read the script, that's what struck me: I thought, 'Tony Soprano, Dexter, Vic Mackey. When we were introduced to them, they were already that kind of person,'" says Cranston. "But I'm not sure this has happened before: Where we take one kind of person—bright, depressed, just turned 50, dying of cancer—and say, 'For the next two years, he's going to go on the greatest roller-coaster ride of his life.'" He smiles wryly and adds, quite unnecessarily, "Greatest meaning biggest. Not necessarily good." Indeed, Breaking Bad's most impressive accomplishment has been the ruthless commitment with which its creators, Cranston included, have stuck to prosecuting the series' original mission. One by one, Gilligan and his fellow writers have taken away Walt's justifications, starting with the cancer, which went into remission, while also giving him something Tony Soprano never had: an adversary and victims you care about with equal depth and fervor. The former is White's DEA-agent brother-in-law, Hank, with whom White appears to be locked in a zero-sum game; the latter, his family, including his partner and former student, Jesse Pinkman, to whom he plays a poisonous surrogate father. White has emerged as a monstrous distortion of the American fetish for self-actualization, a natural answer to Oprah's demand to "Live your best life." What, Breaking Bad asks, if your best life happens to be as a drug kingpin? We're all sophisticated people here. We understand the profession of acting, the concept of make-believe. And yet eyes are eyes. Visual data is visual data. And sometimes the eyes are more powerful than the brain. People who do Cranston's job count on that; it's part of what makes acting work. So one hopes it's forgivable to sit here in the living room of Cranston's Los Angeles house, across from the intimately familiar face that is also Walter White's, and to look for signs. To stare and to wonder: Does it leave a mark? ··· LORD, BUT THE MAN would have made a handsome cop. Almost did, in fact. He was first in his class with the LAPD Law Enforcement Explorers, pointed toward the academy and a career with the police force. Watching him now, at ease, it's impossible not to see it. The Scotch-Irish features; the lithe, compact body: They would have been perfect for some twinkly-eyed kindly officer, walking his beat in blue. It's been a couple of months since Breaking Bad wrapped and the hair has come back, salt-and-peppering but plenty thick for a 57-year-old. The cheeks, hollowed out for Walt, have filled in. He's wearing a gray T-shirt and worn slip-on shoes. He is relaxed. Cranston has spent his professional life tamping down his good looks, if not always his charm. The poor man has never been allowed to wear decent clothes on-screen—from the brocaded shirts of Tim Whatley, his recurring smarmy-dentist role on Seinfeld, to Hal's short-sleeve dress shirts, which one imagined coming in a ten-pack from JCPenney. It is safe to say that no other great American actor has spent as much time appearing in his tighty-whities. Actually, he's insisted on appearing in them. While shooting the Breaking Bad pilot, Vince Gilligan had a crisis of conscience watching his star thus dressed in the freezing New Mexico desert. "I wimped out," Gilligan says. "I took him aside and said, 'Would you be more comfortable in sweatpants? Or boxers?' He said, 'Yeah, I'd be more comfortable. What's your point?' 'So you're okay with the tighty-whities?' 'Well, what's the most pathetic thing I could be wearing here?' I said, 'Tighty-whities.' And he said, 'Well, what else do we need to talk about?'" "I genuinely could not care less how I look," Cranston says now. Such is the attitude of an actor who spent almost twenty years racking up lunchpail gigs—from Preparation H commercials to Murder, She Wrote—before achieving anything approaching fame. Moreover, he is the child of actors: a mother who gave the profession up to raise her children and a father, Joe, who was handsome and talented but struggled to keep his head above water. "He'd get a job and say, 'Oh, good!' and then no job and, 'Oh, no.' Ultimately it was more 'Oh, no' than 'Oh, good.' And he couldn't take the uncertainty of it." When Joe left the business in frustration, his son learned the lesson well: "It doesn't matter if you're good. If you're just good, you won't succeed. If you have patience and persistence and talent and that's it, you will not have a successful career as an actor. The elusive thing you need is luck."


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