The first last chance
The episode starts with some team spirit: Issa touts the ‘Blue Buzz’ while Pettifleur asserts that ‘Red are FIERCE!’. Alright, here we go! Bring it!
The teams are straight into the service challenge. Marco changes the team duties again but everyone’s prepared this time. Issa leaves the terror of the pass to work desserts and entrees with Debra. She is instructing him how to cut the salmon and he describes the shape as a rhombus. I definitely feel like this is an underused word and Issa says it very nicely (albeit rhombus is a very specific shape and I’m not sure salmon is a precise enough medium to strictly achieve a rhombus. Issa does acknowledge this though so why use rhombus in the first place?).
The Caesar salad is being prepared and it honestly looks about 90% lettuce. I would definitely be disappointed if I ordered that. We get a brief glimpse inside the large pot that was briefly featured yesterday at what needs such a large whisk to prepare it. I’m still not sure, but it’s pale and goopy.
Then: disaster! There is a leak in the red team’s kitchen and they cannot use their oven. Marco gathers Willie and Pettifleur, who are both on fish-steaming duty, and explains that they will have to share the blue team’s oven. This will mean that they will need to coordinate putting their fish in at the same time. This sounds straightforward. I am sure it will not be.
David has been cut loose from salmon preparation and drives Jess and Lincoln crazy asking detailed and repetitive questions about how to prepare the beef. They are not convinced that he is absorbing any of the answers.
It’s time for diners and Marco tells the waiters to “let the clients see Hell!”. I’m not sure if this is an improvement on the previous episodes’ “Open the doors to Hell’s Kitchen!” but it’s nice to have variety. Issa says the stakes are high, and it is once again clear that he has watched MasterChef, deploying one of their (many) clichéd catchphrases.
The contestants seem more confident in the kitchen but Marco keeps telling them to run to bring their food to the pass. Sam sassily voices everyone’s concerns with a sneaky “not allowed to run in the kitchen”.
Marco wants a time estimate on when Debra and Issa’s entrees will be ready. She blurts out ’20 seconds’ as an estimate and Marco calls her on it, strutting around the kitchen counting down from 20. But Debra has the last laugh and manages to finish everything. It appears that Debra is doing all the food preparation, and Issa is just transporting everything to the pass.
Willie is preparing his fish. This involves him putting fish fillets in a tray and going all saltbae on them. It’s almost oven time (the cooking time has mysteriously increased from four minutes last night to five minutes) and Willie is stressed that Pettifleur will not get her fish ready in time. She does, but only because she has forgotten the salt, the all-important second step in a two-step process. She opens the oven to rectify her mistake, letting all the precious steam out and Willie’s brain goes into overdrive trying to calculate timings in order to ensure the fish is cooked properly. Apparently there isn’t a timer on the oven. After some confusion about whether there is one minute or twenty seconds left, Pettifleur says that Willie is confused about time, but her blasé attitude to opening the oven at random intervals suggests it is she who does not understand the concept of cooking.
One of the diners decides to challenge Marco and tells the waiter that there is a mysterious pod-looking thing in his meal that tastes like battery acid. Marco puts the waiter in the awkward position of having to return the rejected plate to the diner and deliver an acerbic riposte on his behalf (“ask him when was the last time he ate battery acid”) but the dutiful Glenn undertakes this with only the faintest hint of embarrassment.
David is struggling with understanding chefspeak and Lincoln helps him differentiate between ‘on order’ (get the stuff ready) and ‘away’ (give it to Marco at the pass). The red team are very patient with David but he seems unaware of the stress he is causing them.
Issa and Debra are having a great time preparing desserts when there is an unexpected request from a diner for a lactose free dessert. Debra wanders into the pantry in search of lactose free sweet treats. For some reason she picks up an enormous knife and slices her hand open with it. We don’t see this; apparently there are no cameras in there. Debra emits an expletive. To the viewers this whole scene is represented by a shot of the doors to the pantry and a beep sound effect, which has the amusing effect of making it appear that the doors are swearing. The next we see of Debra she is being treated by the on-site medics. “Whaddaya reckon? Vein?” She queries. She seems to almost be enjoying herself, even when an ambulance is called and she is sent to hospital for stitches. The fact that there is no footage of her cutting her wrist makes me think that maybe she has deliberately injured herself to get out of the last chance cook-off.
Gaz (or ‘Gary’ as Marco prefers, as if he’s perpetually in trouble) grabs some berries and shoves them in a glass with some syrup and a nice leaf garnish on top. The lactose free diner then gets her five seconds of fame with a shot of a raspberry falling out of her mouth as she attempts to peacefully but uncoordinatedly eat her dessert on national television.
It’s points time and the red team has scored seven points but the blue team has scored seven point five so they are the winners. At this point I must question the points system. Is it an average of the diners’ scores? I’m sure the results of 60 diners’ feedback do not result in an exact point or even half point score.
Pettifleur tells us how much she helped everyone and is therefore surprised when Marco tells her she will be in the last chance cookoff, as she is not a team player; she was a butterfly and there are no places for butterflies on the team. It’s also because she didn’t push. Apparently pushing is important.
Candice, Jess and Pettifleur stay in the kitchen while the rest of the contestants retire to the back of house lounge where they can watch the action on the television.
Marco reveals the dish that they will have to replicate: skewers. He calls them brochettes (I have googled this word and it is legit; Marco has not started inventing words yet). The three last-chancers get to taste the skewers but have no recipe; they must identify the protein, vegetable and spice used in the skewers by sight, taste, smell and touch alone (I guess they could listen to it, but I’m not sure how effective that would be). As a mere viewer confined to sight, I guess chicken and spring onions (I’m not guessing the spice; I’m not a magician).
Pettifleur is nervous about creating a Marco Pierre White dish without a recipe. Although Marco has technically set the challenge, I’m pretty sure a three ingredient skewer snack would not be classified as a ‘Marco Pierre White dish’.
The three last-chancers all pick up chicken and spring onions (Pettifleur also grabs a red capsicum to add ‘pettiflair’ but quickly abandons this idea after a withering look from Marco), but have chosen three different spices: Pettifleur has Madras curry powder, Candice has cumin, and Jess has three random spices that are not revealed to the viewers. Pettifleur also puts salt and pepper on her chicken.
At this point, Marco reveals that there is only one spice, so Jess quickly reassesses her choices and goes back to also select Madras curry powder. Marco reinforces the importance of flavour, which makes Pettifleur think she has to cook her skewer in butter, as she knows Marco has a penchant for it. Spoiler: she is not meant to cook her skewers in butter.
Time is almost up and everyone has left cooking to the last minute. The other contestants are screaming at the television in the lounge. Candice is wondering why her chicken isn’t cooking, but a quick shot of her pan reveals that there is no oil in it. She attempts to remedy the situation by wiping a small amount of oil on her skewers with her fingers instead of just putting it in the pan as per the general method.
Time is up. Candice’s chicken is not cooked, which probably means she’s going home. “Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman,” Pettifleur sniggers under her breath to the others as Marco trundles menacingly over to them, which is confusing as it appears she is implying that Marco is a scary giant, but as the only Englishman present that would mean he is smelling himself.
Marco reveals that the ingredients were chicken, spring onion and Madras curry powder. It is now obvious that Candice is going home, as she has undercooked chicken and the wrong spice. There is an extraordinarily long time while Marco tries all their dishes in an attempt to create tension about the result that anyone else is going home, including identifying three flaws with Pettifleur’s dish (overcooked, cooked in butter, too much pepper). This gives Candice false hopes that she is in with a chance but, alas, Candice is dismissed, leaving the kitchen with her ever-bouncy ponytail. Even playing ‘who can get more emotional’ with Pettifleur doesn’t sway the cold, dead heart of Marco Pierre White.
The preview for next episode includes another diner with a complaint trying to take on Marco and failing to get a result, Issa being visited by a fan which appears to result in potential romance, and David getting distracted singing Happy Birthday to a diner. In fact, the preview is so detailed I hardly feel I need to watch the next episode.
