Here’s your BuddyTV High Five: The five big moments and questions from tonight’s episode of Master Chef, “Audition #2”
High Five Highlights:
5. Starting with a sob story: Dustin, the 24-year-old pool boy, cooks for his mother, who has survived cancer and, unbeknownst to Dustin, has been flown in for his audition. While all that wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t going to be in the competition, Chef Ramsey has never been so excited about a dish.
4. Joe turns up the heat: Joe leaves the audition room to tell the candidates that their dishes are not about them but about the judges. Bad food says that the judges don’t care. His reasoning might not make total sense, and the cooks didn’t necessarily step it up. But MasterChef Joe Bastianich always looks in charge in his dapper suits, so it was nice to see him take charge for a change.
3. The organic farmer farms the Pacific: We see Bob, the organic farmer from Lowell, MA, on his farm before we see him in the kitchen. As he rides his tractor through the farmland, penguins run across the screen. Chef Ramsey calls Bob out on not having any organic farm ingredients on his plate, instead serving tuna, and he says there’s no charm in Bob’s food. Bob is E-I-E-I-No. And the penguins? They were just a pop up add for FOX’s Mr. Popper’s Penguins movie, which comes out this month.
2. Joe goes soft: Judge Joe gets a lot of face time in this episode of MasterChef. Perhaps he melted during his come-to-Jesus in the kitchen, because he gives former lawyer Esther, who cries a lot, a yes, even though he thinks her food is not to par with a Master Chef.
1. Marcel, er, Alvin the Freak Genius: Alvin, a retail manager from Houston, Texas, comes to MasterChef with a homemade thermal immersion circulator . He’s a molecular gastronomist reminiscent to Top Chef‘s Marcel Vigneron. While at first the judges look about as excited as Marcel’s fellow Top Chef contestants when Alvin starts to play with science, they all give him a resounding yes for cooking a dish called Locomoto, which included an egg. Ramsey calls Alvin, who even started looking like Marcel toward the end of the episode, a freak genius.
Questions:
– Will Alvin continue to successfully combine science and food and become Network Television’s first renowned gastronologist?
– Will Esther make up for this week’s dish? If not, how much crap will judges Gordon Ramsey and Graham Elliot give Joe?
The Last Word:
Every reality TV show has its audition episodes. Whether it is to fill network slots and drag the show out a full season, or simply to give people the chance to embarrass themselves on national television. If you thought MasterChef was above an audition week, you were wrong. MasterChef, however, is the perfect summer season guilty pleasure. It’s a big burger, not prime rib. So grab a lawn chair and throw those burgers on the grill, because summer and MasterChef have returned.
Jennifer Leah Peck
Contributing Writer
(Image courtesy of FOX)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
