I
was right! (I don’t get to say this
often, so let me gloat), I was right!
Chubby guy was sent packing at the start of this episode. Whether it was because he couldn’t cut it, or
because Ramsay viewed him as a liability when it came to employing a stroke in
waiting (which sounds dirtier than it is) I don’t know for sure, but it was
probably a combination of the two. While
everyone was surprised that someone from the winning team was going home, no
one was really sad to see him go, especially those on his own team.
To
compound all of this madness, there is no actual reward challenge this time
around, just a dinner service later in the day.
Before they start prepping, everyone heads up to the dorms to relax and
come down from the high-stress morning they just had. The boys give squeaky voiced girl a hard
time, picking on her a little bit, but it seems to be just good natured fun,
especially since they start by praising her for sticking up for herself in the
face of getting put up for elimination.
She takes this completely the wrong way and goes off whining to the rest
of the red team about it, to which fat black girl gets incredibly butt-hurt. I can understand and appreciate the act of
sticking up for one’s teammate, but fat black girl nearly starts a rumble in
the dorms because of squeaky voiced girl being a little oversensitive. It’s just more unnecessary drama that you
didn’t see as much of in earlier seasons, especially since this goes absolutely
nowhere in terms of an actual plot development.
Everyone
starts to prep for the dinner service in a couple hours and we get our next bit
of drama: squeaky voiced girl might be pregnant. She’s very late and all kinds of worried
about it. Then she takes a test and
finds out that she is not. That’s
it. Drama over. Seriously, I understand that this makes for
good television in theory, but the entire thing, aside from the actual test
result was basically shown last week in the promotional spot for this week’s
episode. It feels like the producers
know that they have a weak crop of chefs this time around and are trying to
manufacture drama to retain viewers because what hooked people in seasons past
(chefs cooking and showing their skills in the kitchen) just can’t carry the
episodes this year.
Dinner
service is terrible for both sides. Not
only are they a man down because one individual needs to act as waiter/waitress
this evening, the remaining chefs just can’t get their heads out of their
collective asses. The waiter for the
guy’s team is douchey sideburn guy that I discussed last week. He complains upon hearing that he has been
chosen to be the waiter because he has to do his hair now (put it up into the
spiky Mohawk from the first episode) and it takes a half hour to complete the
process. I’m sorry, but if your hair
takes a half hour to prepare, then something is wrong with you and
it might be time to choose a different hairstyle. Tickets are late getting to the kitchen
because both members of the wait staff find it difficult to write legibly. Douchey hair grand champion states that he
will have to “write like a bitch” which I guess is supposed to mean write like
a girl, which would imply that just because he has a penis (solely an
assumption at this point) that he can make illegible marks on a piece of paper
and pass it off as writing.
On
to the cooking! One of the younger
blondes was tasked by Ramsay to “take charge of the kitchen” as she was on the
app station and she dictated the movement and the pace from the outset. Of course, being on the risotto, it was her
job to tell lip ring girl when she needed the scallops cooked to complete the
dish. This she failed to do time after
time, and even went so far as to say that it wasn’t her job to tell lip ring
girl when to drop the scallops. Uh, yes,
yes it is. Not only because you’re part
of the dish has to be started before hers, but because you are tasked with
taking charge of the kitchen, which would mean that you have to ensure that
everything comes out together. How are
you going to run a kitchen that is larger than this if you can’t even manage to
tell one person that your risotto is three minutes out? Sometimes I just wish for a big grease fire.
The
guys’ kitchen fared no better as old guy was having a bit of trouble with his
scallops. The main problem came from one
order of three halibut for an entrée however.
The guy on the meat station that was cooking the Wellingtons for that
same table kept sending up perfect food after perfect food, while old guy and
his partner snooty stringbean one kept messing up the fish. First it was the fact that he cooked bass
instead of halibut. Okay, a
miscommunication, not your finest hour but if you bounce back it will work
out. Does he bounce back? Hell no!
Old guy sends up fish two more times, once overdone, once underdone (if
memory serves me correctly, regardless they were wrong both times). Ramsay has had enough at this point and just
kicks everyone out. Now, to be fair, old
guy was primarily responsible for the fish station while snooty stringbean one
was in a support role, but he did keep getting in the way instead of really
making himself useful, so a lot of the blame has to (and did) fall on old guy
for the failure. The best part is, when
everything was unraveling, you cut to loud guy in the “confessional” or
whatever it is you call the spot where they talk directly to the camera, and he
says “We’re going down in flames, the Titanic ain’t got nothing on us.” Seriously.
First of all, he shouts it at the camera, like he does with everything
else, and I guarantee that if you turn your back and play a clip of him and
then a clip of Tennielle from two or three seasons ago, you would not be able
to tell the difference. Second, loud guy
clearly makes a Titanic and a Hindenburg reference in the same sentence. He either doesn’t know that the Titanic was a
ship that crashed into an iceberg and sunk, is not aware of the Hindenburg at
all , or was fed a couple lines by the producers and instead of choosing one,
put them both together. Either way, he
comes off looking like a dumbass.
Over
in the ladies’ kitchen, things are going relatively fine (and I say relatively
because in the guys’ kitchen it’s apparently the Titanic-burg boat-blimp
massacre) until squeaky voiced girl tries to cook porkchops. Pork, is another meat that needs to be done
to be edible. There’s an extremely hard
line between done and not done with chicken, with pork it’s a little less
so. I actually read an article a couple
months ago that said that pork, while not as safe as cow when undercooked, is
not nearly as dangerous as chicken because of advances in agriculture and
chemical additives. That’s all well and
good, but squeaky voiced girl’s porkchops, when cut open, looked like they had
just fled from the Big Bad Wolf. These things were raw! Not only that but they were raw more than
once. Ramsay is not known for his
tolerance, but generally if you make a mistake and then fix it with the refire
you are ok, it’s when you continue to make the same (or similar) mistakes that
he goes bananas. After seeing the second
set of raw pork (which comes after the colossal failure in the boys’ kitchen by
the way), he kicks everyone out of the kitchen.
Minutes later he calls
everyone back down to the kitchen.
Before they get there though, he stops them in the stairwell and tells
them that he and the other chefs are still cooking but that each team needs to
go back to the dorms and nominate two people to go home. This brings up a couple interesting thoughts
in my mind.
1.
Ramsay must be incredibly pissed at this
point because I have never seen him actually call the teams back and have such
an impromptu meeting like that before.
Stopping them in a stairwell?
That is the actions of a guy running hot on emotions.
2.
I never realized that when the teams are
kicked out that he and the chefs actually finish out the dinner service. I mean, it makes sense, these people pay good
money to come here, and while a lot of it may be just to catch a glimpse of
themselves on TV, they also come for a high quality meal and don’t want to
leave empty-handed. No wonder Ramsay
gets so pissed when he has to kick people out.
The girls nominate fat
black girl and squeaky voiced girl (who were both involved in Raw
Pork-gate) with very little trouble, to everyone’s surprise I’m sure. The guys on the other hand are just a
mess. Old guy and snooty stringbean one
get into an altercation because old guy is calling him out (and keeps calling
him a bitch, as if that’s the only insult he can come up with) and snooty
stringbean one isn’t going to take that from an old guy that wouldn’t let him
help. I can understand old guy being mad
because he’s responsible for the great boat-blimp crash of 2013, and I can also
understand snooty stringbean one not wanting to be lumped in with old guy
because he didn’t have total control of his own destiny. That being said, don’t be dumbasses about it. If you can’t get control of your emotions enough
to not start a physical confrontation, you will not be able to run a
kitchen. Surprise, surprise, both old
guy and snooty stringbean one were nominated from the guys’ team. Ramsay then calls all four nominees up one by
one and asks them to all take off their jackets. He says that he is going to do something that
he has never done before and then…to be continued.
Now, I have seen him
send home multiple people at once, but never four people. While the producers screwed up again and
showed old guy in the promos (so we know he is safe if no one else) the others
may be destined for expulsion. Here’s a
couple reasons why Ramsay might go off-model and start tossing two/three/even
four people at a time (starting with at least three people here):
1. I have rarely seen him this angry, and I’ve
been watching Hell’s Kitchen for years.
He has never stopped a group in the stairwell to tell them to nominate
someone. It feels like he just wants to
get this done and over with, that he doesn’t want to deal with these people one
minute more than he has to.
2. It
is well documented that this season of Hell’s Kitchen had more chefs at the
outset than ever before. I don’t think
that it has any more episodes ordered than previous seasons, which would mean
that if he was going to stick to the same formula of weeding it down to a final
two, he would need to start shedding dead weight more frequently, or in
groups. This would be the perfect time
to start.
3. Each
of these offenders is not new to criticism from Ramsay and have done anything
but fly under his radar up to this point, so none would really be a surprise to
see go home individually.
4. This
would be a great way to send a message to everyone else to quit fucking around
and start doing your job. Nothing says
get your heads in the game like extreme terror of being fired at any second.
This week we get to
learn who is sent packing and we get more VIPs that come to the restaurant and
sit in the always entertaining chef’s tables.
One of them actually walks out on his meal as well, which, if that’s not
a death knell for someone you haven’t been paying attention.
See you next week!
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