MASTERCHEF DRAMA: The Show Rips Our Goddamned Hearts & Kicks Out A Ledge

PREVIOUSLY ON MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: A scorching hot day in the middle of summer displays the full extent of the MasterChef production budget as they somehow manage to shut down Little Bourke Street for an entire day in the exact middle of the Chinese New Year festival.

Also a clearly fame-hungry pedestrian sneaks into multiple shots and threatens to steal the spotlight.
Calm down, m8. This isn’t the line for X-Factor auditions.
AND NOW, LAST NIGHT.
As more and more of these elimination nights wear on, it’s inevitable that some of our favourites will get the boot. This is the reality of reality TV. All change is death.
But god damn it you would’ve thought the show could’ve waited at least a couple of more weeks before shoving a four foot dagger straight through my goddamned heart, right?
Right away we begin focusing in on Miles, initially because apparently he cannot sleep without a human alarm clock near him to wake him up like a 5-year-old on Christmas morning.
DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD, etc.
Because we’re now down to 13 contestants, it’s the 7 from Chinatown Challenge’s Team Yellow who make the march into the black (sidenote: You lot have no idea how long it took for me to realise that the teams on Wednesday night were in Red & Yellow because those are the colours on the Chinese flag. You have NO. BLOODY. IDEA.)
Chloe sheds bulk tears and experiences almighty pangs of regret over the literal easiest decision she’ll have to make in this competition and plays her Immunity Pin. Again, I wonder aloud, why on earth is this such a big choice for people? It’s literally being made to choose between doing something and doing nothing. It’s a point I rant about at great length in my living room, and it’s a point my housemates absolutely agree with 100% by congratulating me on being so smart. They did not, in fact, get up and leave the room one-by-one. They did not do that. At all.
*dramatic music sting*

Confirming the “Champion Team vs Team of Champions” rule, today’s elimination challenge is full of quite legitimate contenders for the competition: Mimi, Matt, Elena, Zoe, Miles, and Harry.
On the judge’s end of things, Matt and George produce bags and dare each contestant to reach in and fumble around, and they’re not subtle about the gag whatsoever. The cackling idiots even hold them at waist height.
If they managed to get through all this in anything less than 20 takes, I will eat so many hats.
Each cook has to pick a card from each of the bags; one for key ingredient, one for region.
Miles grabs out “Japanese” and “fish” in what absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, be pure luck. Elena, somehow in her first elimination challenge of the series, scores “Spanish” and “pork,” and immediately wonders how on earth she’s supposed to cook a Spanish dish if she’s never been to Spain. Which, if true and applied globally, immediately invalidates 99% of the Mexican restaurants in Melbourne.
Harry picks up “Indian” and “shellfish,” whilst Matt scores “Lebanese” and “beef.” In fact, the only two big question marks come from Zoe and Mimi.
Poor Mimi gets saddled with “Thai” and “lamb,” which might as well have been “fairy floss” and “The Moon” in terms of two things that have never seen each other before.  Zoe gets the should-be home run pick of “American” and “fruit,” but decides to make things exorbitantly difficult for herself by looking at the word “fruit” and claiming pumpkin on a technicality. Pumpkin is a fruit in the same way that Rush are a great band: It’s only nerds who actually give enough of a shit to say it (I MEAN THAT AS A GOOD THING GEDDY LEE FOREVER).
SAY IT WITH ME, ZOE. AMERICA + FRUIT = APPLE FREAKING PIE.
The cook begins and Mimi is absolutely at sea, wasting the first 30 minutes before she even decides what to do. She quips “I’m like a sheep in Thailand, I have no idea what to do” which is a gag that I feel like I would’ve written had she not said it, and now I’m shitty about the Minority Report-style joke theft.
But, oh god, it’s Miles who’s in it up to his neck. He hacks away mercilessly at a salmon to the point where George has to intervene and inform him that is, in fact, already dead.
Such is the botch job that Miles has run on that poor fish that George gives us not one, but two GIFable knee-jerk reaction faces.
Trouble. Big trouble. Uh oh.
The whole challenge is a tale of two sides: On the one hand, Matt, Harry, and Elise all glide through like they’re all background talent in a 90s exercise video.
But on the other hand, Miles, Mimi, and Zoe are struggling.
Zoe’s remembered to get everything sorted for her pumpkin tart apart from, y’know, the pastry, which with limited time remaining is looking like the Debbie Harry of tart shells: It’s blond(i)e.

Mimi only manages to get her act together when George and Gary drop her the blank stare to end all blank stares.
And Miles has to pare back his expectations for his salmon dish from a spicy 3-way to a pedestrian 2-way, inadvertently providing the food equivalent of a bored outer-suburban couple hitting the youth bars in the hopes of finding another handle for a potential wheelbarrow who wind up having to go home alone together *again* because once more ambition has outstripped ability.
In fact, Miles spends a hell of a lot of time concentrating on things for his dish that aren’t fish.
And that’s why, despite Zoe’s gritty pumpkin, and Mimi’s lack of crunch, it’s Ranger Miles who gets the chop today and my HEART IS SHATTERED INTO A MILLION PIECES.
NOT MILES. NOT NOW. NOT EVER.
There’s no tears, though. Only joy and smiles and jokes and this SUPER TOUGH AND MANLY HUG between Miles and Matt.
You’ve got to hit him hard on the back. That’s how you let him know that you love him.
And just like that, he’s gone. Out of the kitchen. Back in to the real world. Off to do a range’a stuff.
Domo arigato, Miles. You absolute bloody ledge.
NEXT TIME: The POWER APRON returns to transform one amateur chef into a power-mad megalomaniac who usurps control of the kitchen in a glorious bloody coup, turning the rest of the competition into a communist production line that functions only for the good of the state.
FORWARD. ALWAYS FORWARD.

Photo: Channel Ten.

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