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| MasterChef recap: Child's play in the kitchen |
We begin a shiny new week of MasterChef with a sigh of relief at the end of the Battle of the Sexes, the contestants now able to relax and be incompetent and stupid on an individual basis.
Tonight it's Kids' Week, but "it's going to be anything but child's play," says the announcer, and we all see what he did there. The episode begins at the contestants' house, where the women are busy wielding the power they won last week by forcing the men into servitude. They demand foot and shoulder rubs on demand, adding sexual harassment to this spicy MasterChef casserole. Then Lynton gets sent to his room, and Kelty says he refuses to touch anyone's foot but his wife's, and look I honestly have no idea what's going on. I think they're all rehearsing for a very bad play.
Thank god it's time to get back to the kitchen, but Neha is feeling anxious, and…nope, that's the entirety of her feelings. On the kitchen benches are children's lunchboxes, indicating that yes, the show's budget has been cut. Gary greets the contestants, and we discover that that thing where Lynton gets sent to his room is actually an official thing so I guess it's just that old "stupidity equals ratings" adage.
Christina is sick, so she gets to skip this challenge, and everyone else gets to wish they'd thought of that.
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The challenge itself is to cook for children, which George says shouldn't be boring, but it's a bit late for that now. Apparently children are incredibly difficult to cook for, but this is pretty obviously a lie: you can just give them chips.
Kelty reveals that he has children yet again, and that his cooking style is homely, as is his family. Andrew reveals that he hates sandwiches because he's weird. Lucy reveals that she's English and therefore her entire childhood was taken from an Enid Blyton book.
They open the lunchboxes, the contents of which cause Emma to suffer some kind of stroke. Kelty is thrilled: so thrilled he's "smiling on the inside". Not thrilled enough to smile on the outside, but pretty thrilled. The contestants must use the lunchbox contents – sandwiches and yoghurt and fruit and that kind of crap – to make something truly delicious or at least that will not give the judges the plague.
Almost immediately Clarissa begins begging everyone for a strawberry jam sandwich. Possibly she wants to cook with it, but equally possibly she just wants to eat it in the bathroom and cry. Typically she asks Noelene, who is using her strawberry jam sandwich. Everyone is using their strawberry jam sandwich, but Clarissa doesn't have one, which is a bugger, because the only dish she knows how to cook is a strawberry jam sandwich pie.
Meanwhile Kelty smiles on the outside and we see why he prefers to keep his smiles on the inside.
Vern has extra cream if anyone needs it. "Yes please!" enthuses Pip. WA-HEY!
Andrew is making a crumble, of both his ingredients and his life. He tells Gary and George he plans to make a chocolatey yoghurt sauce, and Gary laughs at the horror writ large on George's face.
Elsewhere, Noelene is eerily calm, having long ago stopped caring about anything at all. She tells us that she is making two different things. Matt approaches to beg her, in the name of all that is decent, not to. She agrees not to. The kitchen bursts into flames. Sherlock Holmes is in the snow. Rhys Badcock is making a pavlova with a Sunbeam mixmaster. The circle of life turns.
Back in the kitchen, clouds are passing unusually quickly overhead. Faiza explains the challenge again for those who came in late, and tension arises as it turns out that she and Neha are both making paratha. OMG how embarrassing! One of them will surely have to go home and change, but instead Faiza asserts her superiority by noting that she is Pakistani AND Indian, mocking Neha's inferior monochromatic heritage.
Meanwhile, Samira is taking advantage of the fact that Liliana is standing next to her telling her how to not stuff everything up, and Andrew's crumble is bubbling, if you know what I mean. "School bell's about to ring!" cries Gary, and geez Gary, yeah, we GET it.
Time's up, and Neha and Andrew share the awkward hug of two people who have never actually met before. Andrew is quite confident that he has made a crumble which his dogs would eat, and really that's the best he can hope for.
Tasting time. Lucy and Pip congratulate each other on being the first to bring their dishes up, acting like that counts as an achievement. Pip's bread and butter pudding and Lucy's Eccles cakes – named for their resemblance to Spike Milligan – are both successes, to the point where Gary starts doing comedy accents and George jumps on a popper out of pure joyous insanity.
Next are Andrew and Noelene's crumbles. In a neat metaphor for life, Noelene's custard is too runny, but Andrew's dogs turn out to have an excellent palate, as his crumble is a success.
Up step Samira and Kelty, burning with nervousness and repressed rage respectively. Kelty tells the judges his quiche is "full of cheesy eggy goodness" – seriously, he literally says that – because Kelty is that guy, you know the one, who nobody likes? And Samira has also done well and so far nobody has been poisoned and it's all a bit boring. But not for long, as Gary prepares to announce the winner and explodes.
After being doused with foam, Gary gets back to announcing the winner, who is Lucy, so there you go. Everyone applauds and there is a distinct sense of magic in the air, as if something vaguely distracting has just happened. Her prize is the ability to choose the key ingredient for the invention test, which is that advantage that they always pretend is a really massive headstart but never actually benefits anyone who has it.
At this point three children enter the room and everyone claps as if they've never seen children before. The kids are carrying three ingredients which kids hate: Lucy must determine which cloche the human flesh is under.
Actually one ingredient is liver, one is Brussels sprouts (the kid says he "brang" the Brussels sprouts, which is a terrible lapse in standards on the part of Channel Ten and his parents) and the last is anchovies. With these disgusting foodstuffs, the contestants must cook something disgusting for the children, and the top five will cook for immunity on Monday.
And then we discover Lucy also gets to choose the nine contestants who she will be cooking against. And she will get to choose which ingredient they have to cook with. She will also get to choose what they wear while cooking, how their hair is cut, and what form of ritual suicide they must commit if they fail.
Lucy makes her choices. Kelty and Clarissa have to cook with liver, because liver is best cooked by someone who knows how to cook, so Lucy knows she has an advantage there. Lucy herself chooses anchovies, and among the rest, Noelene is given Brussels sprouts to match her personality, and Lynton is chosen because we like looking at him.
Neha happily announces she's decided to make Brussels sprouts chicken spring rolls, her eyes flying haphazardly out of her skull at the sheer audacity of this stupid decision. Meanwhile, Clarissa has decided to mash some potatoes and lose her mind.
Lynton is laughing. Oh god I love the way his eyes look when he laughs. George is telling him to be careful when frying anchovies. Shut up George, Lynton knows what he's doing.
What does Rhys mean, "Sunbeam: designed to help when it counts"? As opposed to what, the mixers that are designed only to work when you don't want them to?
Anyway, they're all cooking away and the people who weren't chosen are yelling pointless rubbish from the balcony as usual. George confides in the other judges that the ingredient he would least like to be cooking with is the anchovies, because they're like headphones. Apparently. I guess George is a bit…you know.
"Feeling confident?" Samira asks Kelty. "I've got as good a chance as these guys," Kelty lies. Matt pops along to remind Kelty that he failed last time he had to cook liver. Kelty is definitely the kind of guy who needs reminding of failure as often as possible.
Meanwhile Clarissa is sniffing her frypan curiously, wondering what it is.
Lucy is making a puttanesca sauce. She and George exchange idiotic facial expressions before he moves on. Rishi is cooking something or other but sadly nobody is interested in what Rishi does.
Meanwhile Clarissa is discovering that when you make meat hot it starts looking different. She is fascinated by this.
Up above Vern makes devil horns with his hands and hisses at Lucy. I'm not sure there is anyone in this kitchen who is not drunk.
Noelene reveals that she knows how to hide Brussels sprouts: we suspect that she tends to secrete them in various bodily cavities. Gary pops over to her bench to let her know once and for all that he thinks she sucks, then moves on to Emma to tell her she's had a great idea and give her help that he's not giving anyone else. Emma takes it on board and then shares with the audience the fact that children are stupid and she hates them.
Rishi is almost done and he's so happy but honestly who cares.
Time is up, and everyone has done very well in making things to force children to eat against their will. Except Clarissa, who celebrates the end of the invention test by recognising how disgusting her dish is.
"I hope you've remembered who you're cooking for today," says Gary, and it's a valid concern, since there's been an inexplicable absence of contestants repeating what we already know every two minutes.
Emma's is the first dish to be tasted by the kids. The kids like it. Neha's is next. The kids like it. Neha offers to do a Bollywood dance. The children are disgusted by her ethnic stereotyping. Noelene's is next. The kids don't like it. Imagine what Noelene's own children had to live through.
Up comes Clarissa, who, as Rishi notes, doesn't have a clue what she's doing. On the other hand, Rishi has made liver lollipops, which is an offence against God himself. But the kids like them, but then kids are pretty stupid as we know. Kelty then kneels down and tells the children a story about the origin of San Choy Bow, because he is a patronising pillock. The kids clearly realise what a waste of their time this is. The kids like his dish, but that doesn't make up for his personality. The kids do not like Clarissa's dish, which means Clarissa maintains her perfect record of never pleasing anyone with her cooking since birth.
The kids enjoy Lynton's dish, and probably also his irresistible smile. Pip's pizza is too hard to eat, or possibly these kids are just lazy. Opinion is divided on Jules's spag bol, and on Jules: do we like her? I just don't know.
Finally, Lucy herself, and will her advantage have paid off, or will she have become so distracted by wielding the power to inflict psychological torture on her castmates she forgot to cook properly? The kids like her dish but nobody can taste anchovies in it so I guess she's a failure and a bad person.
Judgment minute has arrived, and the cooks line up to learn which of their personal flaws have cost them today. Gary loves that their future in the competition is in the hands of children, even though this is not really true.
And the five winners are Rishi, Emma, Kelty, Neha and Lynton – oh thank god, Lynton. Lucy does not make it to the immunity challenge due to her inability to make anchovies taste like anchovies. Kelty made it through because he made liver "fun", which just goes to show sometimes people are rewarded for doing really terrible things. Neha informs us that if she wins the immunity pin she will pass out, and not for the first time we hold grave fears for Neha's central nervous system.
And we're nearly out of time. It only remains for Kelty to babble about fighting livers, and then a quick sneak peek of tomorrow's immunity challenge, when the five best cooks from tonight will be forced to choose ingredients in the dark while being attacked by bats. And then a quick sneak peek of everything that is going to happen in the entire series. And eventually, hopefully, this quick sneak peek will end, though no sign of it so far.
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