Misanthropaea

Ratio Absentis Treis

So anyway…

When last we left this tale, I had been weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the potential job offered to me by Big Box DIY over the uncertainty of a prolonged and tedious game of UnemploymentVille and, after some consideration, had accepted the position of Shipping & Receiving Team Member. And though accepting the job seemed like a good idea at the time – or at least felt as though something was finally going to go well after months of struggle – I honestly had no idea what I was in for.

As much as I had felt like a lackey at Liqu-O-Rama, it was nothing compared to the appalling serfdom I found myself in at Big Box. Despite being told by the Shipping & Receiving department manager – henceforth ‘The Wigger’ (and, yes, I use that term with as much pejorative venom as humanly possible) – that I would be able to work ‘as many hours’ as I could handle during their Big Spring and Summer Season™, the reality was that, no matter how often I requested as many hours as I could handle, I typically received about 20. However, because payroll is based solely on how many actual dollars the department generates on a daily basis, I was more often than not sent home early, once after being there for only 30 minutes.

It was also clear from the very beginning that The Wigger – a twenty-something punk with loads of tattoos and little tell-tale holes for a plethora of idiotic facial piercings – was enjoying the power trip of trying to make me his bitch by saddling me with every shit job imaginable, very little of which had anything whatever to do with the notion of Shipping & Receiving. Whether he was doing this because he knew I’d come from a previous position of management and, being weak and fearful, he perceived that as a possible challenge to his authority or simply because he had to assert his dominance to the rest of the team and prove himself the Alpha Male, I don’t know. But there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way to quit and go back on the dole, so I bit my lip, played along, and continued my rollicking game of UnemploymentVille at any and every available opportunity.

To make a very long, detailed, and mostly unpleasant story as brief as possible, the final straw – the day The Wigger finally got what he apparently wanted out of me – came on a bright sunny May morning during the last week of the spring term (and, so, just before Finals) when I was told to ‘power wash the bird shit out of bay13.’ Said bay was a 50x75 storage area, open to the ‘Outside Lumber Yard’ on one side and to the store, via a colossal glass and metal garage door covered in dried avian splay, on the other. It took better than four of the five hours I was scheduled to manhandle the damaged and leaking electric power washer and 150-foot garden hose about as I slogged through ankle-deep muck (because the bay sloped ever so slightly towards the store in a spectacular display of ignorance of design concept), spraying bird shit off the door and washing sticks, grass, plastic candy bar wrappers, food, bits of gravel, various sized cigarette ends, dead birds, grease, dirt and all manner of putrid debris into The Yard. And in the end, with one arm aching from holding the power cord out of the water so I wouldn’t get electrocuted, the other numb from the vibration of the sprayer and my shoes, socks, and clothing soaked and reeking of raw sewage, I went home and had a breakdown, understanding at that moment just why it is some people choose to suck on the end of a loaded shotgun.

Though I’ve willingly done my fair share of miserable and messy jobs throughout the years, power washing the bird shit out of bay 13 wasn’t merely the final straw in how I had been treated by The Wigger at Big Box, it represented the culmination of over five extremely dark months and the moment that I came to recognise as the point ‘when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.’

Allow me to elucidate…

In part one of this big sprawling saga attempting to summarise the reasons behind what turned out to be a fairly lengthy absence from the blogosphere because you are fascinated by the minutia of the traffic accident I call my life, I explained that things fell into three distinct and invariably linked categories. Trust me. No need to go back and look. And whilst the past school term (1) and the seemingly endless search for a decent job (2) don’t necessarily appear to have any obvious correlation, there were, as I also mentioned, aspects of my personal life (3) which wove in an amongst these two themes and roughly bound them together.

The primary bonding agent had its genesis during the spectacular unravelling of my coffeehouse. And though I said, in the second instalment, that I would perhaps delve into the finer details of that particular subject at the ambiguously described ‘another time,’ now is not that time. Whilst that tale looms large, I think it needs a post of its own to really stretch out and make itself comfy. As I wrote in a recent email to the gracious Jillian Madison of Food Network Humor (who contacted me regarding my strangely popular Next Food Network Star ‘recaps’), words such as ‘quick’ and ‘short’ do not frequently find a home in my written vocabulary, as weary readers will attest. Suffice to say for the present that one of the minor bits of collateral damage from the aforementioned spectacular unravelling was an overwhelming sense of defeat which left me battling a reasonably mild depression. And though I appreciated the people who patted me on the back and told me not to feel like a complete failure for what had happened, those things are far easier said than done.

It didn’t happen all at once, the depression; mostly it undulated and festered like an irritating parasite, gestating uncomfortably during the nine months of job hunting after I was first rather curtly cut adrift from Dribble & Whizz in February 2008 and prior to finally getting hired on at Liqu-O-Rama in early October of that year just as the doors of the coffeehouse got closed for the last time. During that revelatory nine month period of getting to see just how useless it was to have fifteen years of business management, six years of military experience, and a virtually spotless work history dating to 1982 but with no college degree, I chose to take up President Obama on his desire to see people pursue their education – because without a degree, it seemed, I would be forever relegated to asking people if they wanted to super size their meals. So to combat the suppurating depression and the incredible loss I was feeling over the demise of my business (and the demeaning fact that I had been forced to take a giant step down in both pay and position by accepting the job at Liqu-O-Rama), I sat down in early 2009 with an advisor, after they’d unearthed my file from the bunker, and I returned to university.

By the following year, the start of the 2010 fall term, I had settled into an uneventful rhythm of work/school/homework – a cycle broken only sporadically to include Ina Morata – and, believing my life was slowly returning to something close to ‘normal,’ the depression had generally subsided to just a minor nuisance lingering off in the  background. Unfortunately, also at the beginning of the 2010 term, I found myself in a writing class called Composing the Self, a crossover of upper level English Comp and Women’s Studies – which, in hindsight, seems somehow ironic. This particular course, chosen voluntarily because I’d nearly exhausted all my fiction writing options, struck my interest because it dealt with, as one would imagine, introspective writing. What I had not expected, however, was that it would soon tap into my depression and force me to confront the hydra of my malaise straight on for the rich bounty of a mere three credits.

Thus, in late October of 2010 when I was unexpectedly rather curtly cut adrift from Liqu-O-Rama, I was already in a relatively pensive frame of mind from having many of the badly healed scabs of old psychological wounds oafishly ripped away, and the run-around I was starting to get from The State over my unemployment benefits and the hideous lurking fear that in eight weeks I could be living in a cardboard box under a bridge only fuelled the start of a new downward spiral. As if these weren’t sufficient, I was also, at the start of November, just three weeks away from filing bankruptcy, a subject I approached with both relief and resentment. The relief was, obviously, that I would no longer have to be burdened with evading angry creditors or not answering my telephone or staring in dejection at the ever-increasing stack of official-looking documents scrawled in ruthless and labyrinthine legalese and, most importantly, not seeing the little money I had going to pay an attorney. The resentment… well, that’s a bit more complicated and perhaps better left for the eluded-to coffeehouse-only post. For the moment it’s enough to say there were the previously-stated feelings of defeat and failure coupled with the profound sense of loss for something I’d worked so hard for. I was – and still am – completely aware that the radical swirling of our economy  round the event horizon of a massive financial black hole left millions of others in a similar position to mine. I get that. But getting that did little to quell the pain or the humiliation.

Problem was,with regard to bankruptcy, State Law requires that your worldly wealth held on reserve be no more than a combined total of $350 between your savings and chequebook account (or accounts, if you should have more than one) on the day of filing. So when I exited Liqu-O-Rama with extra cheques for unused ‘sick days’ and the small amount of vacation time I had amassed, I couldn’t deposit the money in my credit union. Neither had I been able to direct-deposit any of my paycheques nor the untapped portion of my student loan. I could also not claim that I had this money, so it had to be stored ‘elsewhere.’ This was a trick my attorney advised me to pursue as a means of skirting the $350 maximum allowable assets rule and a marginal glimpse into the greater workings of our sham of a legal system in this country. You will note that the pertinent wording regarding account balance is ‘on the day of filing.’ This means you could have millions in the bank just prior to filing bankruptcy, however the moment that petition is filed, your combined holdings must be equal to less than $350. Of course you must have a very sound and rational reason for the abrupt disparity should you suddenly decide to move large sums of cash, but the trick is that – on the day of filing – you appear to subsist at or below the level of poverty. The next day you can legally dump those millions back into your account and no-one would bat an eye. And stashing money away, outside of a bank, would not typically be an issue unless you are trying to pay your bills. Hardly anyone takes cash these days, it seems. And, perhaps in some small way, the fact that my unemployment claim was subject to an ‘administrative inquiry’ relieved me of the complicated burden of juggling two accounts.

On Monday, 15 November, I had a call from my attorney who said she would be ready to file my petition – likely on Thursday – and reminded me to be sure my credit union account was under the $350 allocation by that time. She would, she said, co-ordinate with me later in the week just prior to filing to be certain we were ‘on the same page.’ I asked if she could wait until Friday, as I was waiting for a number of bill payments to  clear (which would then put me well below the allocation) and she said that would be no problem. By late afternoon on that Friday, when I hadn’t been ‘co-ordinated’ with as promised, I rang her to determine the situation.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did our paralegal not call you yesterday?’

‘Yesterday? No…’

‘It’s been filed,’ she assured me with sort of a breathless laugh. ‘I got it to the clerk’s office just before closing yesterday.’       

In a frenzy I accessed my account history on line and discovered that only one of the scheduled bill payments had cleared by Thursday leaving me with a final balance, on the day of filing, of $348. Seems to me I drank rather a lot that evening. Early in the following week, I received a nicely official letter from the courts extending their warm regards on my impeding bankruptcy hearing, which they had conveniently scheduled for 9am, Monday, 6 December, my birthday. And, yes, that makes me a Sagittarius, or Ophiuchus if you follow that sort of thing. Yet another reason I am still single. Then on Friday, 3 December, I received another letter from The State informing me that I would be eligible for unemployment benefits after all – in about ten days.

The enormity of my relief over the latter issue was, unfortunately, eclipsed later that same day when my attorney left me a voice mail (I was nowhere near the phone at the time) to ‘co-ordinate’ with me again and to remind me of the things I would need to bring along with me to the hearing on Monday. Amongst the items was a copy of my November bank statement indicating that I did, indeed, have less than $350 dollars to my name on the day of filing. She had left the voicemail at 4.45pm. I discovered it nearly an hour afterwards around 5.45pm. My Credit Union closes at 6pm on Friday. Thanks, Nice Attorney Lady, for waiting until the last possible moment to deliver this information. Couldn’t have called at any other possible time during the week or any time earlier in the day…

Fortunately, through the miracle of on-line banking, I had access to that information and was able to print a copy of my statement – that is, after making a trip to Staples to purchase a fresh cartridge of black ink, as the one presently inside my printer decided that this particular Friday night was really the most advantageous time to run dry and just further compound the frantic irritation.

Monday, 6 December, my birthday, was a grey, windy, rain-swept, utterly miserable day. Because I had never previously needed to know the location of the bankruptcy court, I had to do a Google search on the address – and a Street View of the building was enormously helpful. To my consternation, though, Google had the wrong location and I was told by the large irritated black woman behind the Plexiglas that I needed to go across the street. As I marched through the downpour, I thought to myself that, for people who are extraordinarily well compensated for the minimal amount of effort they need to exert, the State and Federal employees I had been dealing with of late were a cross and unpleasant lot.

In the courtroom, a cramped area with a low, water-stained drop-ceiling, ugly blue carpet and cheap plastic chairs reflecting the harsh fluorescent lighting, I sat alone and isolated, clutching my raincoat and required paperwork. Although I wore khaki pants, a white shirt and a tie, it was clear that I had over-dressed for the community meeting at the trailer park. After watching as a seemingly endless parade of greasy, tattooed, corn-rowed, slipper-shod, sweat-clothed, food-stained, dentally challenged people went through the expected motions before the Judge, it was finally my turn. My attorney (from out of nowhere) settled in the seat across from me and the Judge, apparently bored, grilled me with questions which veered far afield of the ones I had been told he would ask – the very questions he had asked of the unwashed masses who had teemed before him ahead of me. It was an embarrassing and unwanted scrutiny through which I struggled to keep my answers brief and direct. When it was finished, I was told to relinquish the entirety of my 2010 tax refunds so at least some money could be dispersed amongst my creditors and to file those taxes as quickly as possible. Should those taxes not be filed and delivered to the court with 90 days, my bankruptcy would be reversed. My attorney hadn’t seen that coming any more than she had anticipated my public flogging before the great unwashed. Probably because we hadn’t ‘co-ordinated.’ Happy Birthday to me…

Shortly before noon I was back home, where I sat in utter silence, staring at the floor, humiliated and feeling mentally and emotionally drained. In my head I kept hearing Richard Dreyfuss in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ‘Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get.’ Unfortunately, it was still only early December so things hadn’t got quite as bad as the could reasonably get. Yet.

I decided to give my classes a miss that night, lacking the energy to be even just the slightest bit social, and, instead, worked on the finishing touches to the final writing portfolio for Composing the Self which was due that Wednesday. And that seems an appropriate segue into a small matter briefly allude to in the second part of this epic saga: One of the wounds laid bare in Composing the Self, and conveniently done so the week after I’d been rather curtly cut adrift from Liqu-O-Rama, had to do with the nine years I had spent working at The Library. (Lest you think Composing the Self was a thinly-disguised armchair psycho-analysis class, it wasn’t. Yet it does seem that I just happened to choose one of the hardest possible times of my life to take such a class. The teachings of Carl Jung, however, will tell you there are no coincidences, so, in some way, maybe it was something I needed and just didn’t know it).

Being an avid reader and lover of knowledge, working at The Library was a job I truly enjoyed. Problem was, as it was another Federal institution riddled with an impassive bureaucracy, I could not – not matter how often I tried – get full time hours and, so, I made an ill-fated decision to leave (and not really in the most delicate of fashions) in 1993. And after languishing nearly18 years in (primarily) the liquor industry, that momentary and yet monumental lapse in judgement still plagued me.

Encouraged by a few friends – a couple of whom still worked at The Library and who’d explained that a massive systems upgrade in early 2006 had lead to the purging of all records more than five years old– I decided, as I was abruptly in the market for a new job, to take a chance and re-apply. Due to the time of year (early November) and the still wretched economy, the positions available were, to say the least, slim. Much to my surprise, however, the week of 13 December (the same week I was finally able to receive unemployment and just a week after the bankruptcy hearing) I had a call from Human Resources who wanted to know if I might be interested in a Branch Liaison position just opening up. I said I certainly was and then enquired as to the hours. There was, it turned out, a marginal conflict with my class schedule on two of the days where I would need to work at 1pm rather than noon but, if that minor adjustment could be made for just a week until the Fall Term was finished, I was at their complete disposal. No, was the short answer. These hours were carved in stone and could not be altered.

And I never heard from them again.

In fact it reached a point where, after applying for literally dozens of positions as they became available over the following months (including my former job when it became vacant) they no longer bothered sending me email acknowledgements indicating they had received my numerous applications. In late February of this year when a position opened at a branch managed by a former co-worker of mine (and who is also a close friend of Ina’s) I was informed – after I told him I’d applied – that my application did not appear anywhere in their system-wide data base and a search for it found nothing. As I was fairly deeply mired in playing UnemploymentVille at the time, I simply lost it. And so, frustrated by the wall of sheer silence, angry at the ridiculous games being played by yet another faceless institution, and disgusted that a Federally-funded establishment could be allowed to operate in such a contemptible manner, I washed my hands of The Library.

So with Composing the Self to help poke sharp objects at the lumbering demons of the past, losing my crap position as lackey at Liqu-O-rama, and suffering the humiliation of bankruptcy which left me with no credit and little money, the once nearly dormant depression came shambling out of the darkness fully revitalised. Add to that the long winter months of constant rejection and no viable  prospects of employment – not to mention moving straight away into spring term and the albatross of The First Three Minutes with Dr Giggles – it felt much like being trapped in a 24-hour advertisement for Cymbalta. The various temporary agencies I had eventually resorted to using had done nothing for me, the unfulfilled promises and the so-called ‘stimulus package’ of the Obama administration had clearly given me a miss and the portion of it which was supposed to aid small businesses had been far too little far too late. And to add a little dollop of creamy goodness to the shit sandwich I was already choking on, I got to sit back and watch as two friends – one in a position roughly similar to mine and another one who really only ever seemed to have a nebulous career as The Guy Who Smoked Pot – g0t their dream jobs literally handed to them on silver platters. Though it’s nice see friends accomplish things, it was the endless gloating Facebook posts about My Fabulous Life and I Am So Blessed that made me want to fucking scream.

Of course the endless search for a job wasn’t the only place I faced constant rejection. It manifested itself in my personal life as well, becoming the secondary bonding agent and the final prod that the big skulking ogre of depression needed to really get going. Upon returning to university in 2009, I very quickly learnt that I was The Old Guy™ in most of my classes which, frankly, had done absolutely nothing for my already floundering sense of self-esteem or the acute self-consciousness over my lingering weight issues. And although I had lost just over 60 pounds during the first year back I was not, by that time – nor am I currently, due in large part to a combination of the aforementioned reasons – a ripped, tan supermodel and compensated endorser like the happily transformed fatties on the various NutriSystem or Jenny Craig adverts. Consequently, I went almost entirely unnoticed – except on the few occasions I was mistaken for an instructor – and nothing gives your self-worth a better pommelling than being invisible. As such I tended to (and still do) keep mostly to myself, sensing that any discourse with the plethora of twenty-something women on campus might illicit a Creepy Stalker Guy alert. I can deal with that because, barring the occasional geeky types for whom I have a fondness, there’s very little common ground there to begin with and I simply don’t have the interest or the patience.

What I have found much harder to deal with is that, amongst the women I do know, I seem to have fallen into the Not If You Were the Last Man On Earth category. There’s a very peculiar irony to that – at least to me anyway– especially considering that, for example, according to the weekly analytics I receive on this pointless little Time Out Chair, more than 70% of the readers here are women between the ages of ± 30 to 40  (precisely the demographic that finds me as riveting as Eric Forsberg’s performance in Mega Piranha) and I have at least the same percentage of female friends. That’s a lot of disinterest. And it’s a dichotomy which makes little or no sense to me. Recently a friend of mine – a woman, not surprisingly – asked me, possibly jokingly (or maybe not), given my propensity for things like cooking, gardening, home renovation (not to mention all of the other things one can find over to the right under the title About, just above the profile picture), if I was sure I wasn’t gay. I assured her that if by ‘gay’ she meant was I a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, then yes, because, with some clear exceptions and notwithstanding some of the nightmarish oddities I’ve seen trawling through Walmart on objecting motorised buggies, I am very attracted to the all of the appropriately soft and roundy bits and generally find women perfectly intoxicating, providing they don’t resemble Rod Steiger in The Illustrated Man or have the sort of piercings which could potentially lead to a bloody and disfiguring accident given the right circumstances. This same friend also, in the course of conversation, referred to me as ‘safe,’ which felt rather a lot like being called ‘inconsequential.’

As if being labelled by one person with the hideous Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Safe and Inconsequential wasn’t enough of a blow – making me understand how it was Arthur Dent must have felt knowing the Earth was considered amongst other worlds as ‘Mostly Harmless’ – I very foolishly set myself up a short while later to let Ina take the final kill shot. As the musical wisdom of Michael McDonald teaches us, What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away, and what I believed I saw with Ina led me, in early March, to do A Stupid Thing™ and very timorously dip my metaphorical toe into the turbulent waters outside of the rigidly undefined area in which I resided and it was made clear that I ought not to have done so. So sometimes when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours it just means you’re both weird.

And with all of the cumbersome weight of five really bleak and calamitous months sitting on my shoulders like two very bleak and calamitous things, writing, which had always been my one escape, was suddenly a firmly closed door to me – one swollen from the humidity and refusing to budge no matter how strenuously I twisted and turned the knob and swore profusely at it. I struggled to articulate the mush churning in my head to absolutely no avail and found myself often staring at stories I’d written the previous semester in Fiction Writing – two rough pieces taken out of context from the novel I’d been procrastinating on for ages and third one I’d been meaning to work on when I had the time – and wondering why it all looked so completely alien to me. I’d toyed with the idea of posting them here to see if some responses from the Outside World would help get things going again but, well, that never quite happened.

So on that bright sunny May morning during the last week of spring term, I stood in a cold reeking pool of bird shit and other incomprehensible detritus realising that I had come to the last straw, the tipping point where things had, for me, generally got about as bad as they could reasonably get. And five months of misery came crashing down, leaving me gutted and angry.

‘You just have to say, “No, I won’t” one more time than they can say “Yes, you will,”’ John Sheridan says in a pivotal scene from the fourth season of Babylon 5, and I was determined that I was going to say ‘No, I won’t’ to The Wigger, even if it meant I would be living in a cardboard box under a bridge with no job and no money. I don’t know if he saw the hate and the loathing and the contempt for him in my eyes the next day or if he understood that, given the opportunity, I would visit unbelievable physical pain upon him, or if having finally broken me down had taken all the fun out of it for him, but near the middle of the shift he told me I was going to be transferred the very next day to the Paint & Wallcoverings Department. And for the remainder of the shift he was suddenly Mr Congeniality. 

Since the transfer, things have generally got better: I’ve been given a relatively more stable schedule with considerably more hours and have only been sent home twice in three months due to payroll issues; I’ve distracted myself, when I’m not working, with all those presumably ‘gay’ things which make me Safe and Inconsequential; I’m sort of writing again, or at least blogging, and the depression has mostly slipped back into the background. That or the breakdown simply left me desensitised.

As to whether there is an Amy Farah Fowler to my Sheldon Cooper, a Scully to my Mulder, a JoAnne Liebeler to my Dean Johnson, a Joe L’Erario to my Ed Feldman… Who knows? The increasing likelihood is that there isn’t one. But, whatever the certain Wessonality is that I clearly fail to possess which would make me a viable choice for a relationship of any kind I more than make up for by being a great Drinking Buddy®, or so I’ve been reliably informed. No need for all that messy and silly emotional or physical nonsense when a perfectly good handshake will do, providing that it’s done reasonably quickly and exhibits no warmth or compassion of any kind.

And I don’t really mind if I’m nothing in your eyes, it’s no surprise to me , say the amusing alternative group Wheatus. So maybe that just has to be good enough.

For now.

Theoretically Liveblogging The Next Food Network Star v7.11

Because we already know, thanks to a lack of due diligence on the part of the editorial staff at Food Network, that Vic is eliminated after the first challenge where they often  have to present ‘to camera’ (industry-speak for ‘to the camera’) some sort of dish they have just made in some indeterminate time period, it certainly spoils the shock of knowing  that we may have to wait a few months before Mamma’s Boy begins its run on The Cooking Channel.

At the Flatotel, the Final Two and Vic wake to face the last day of competition. Susie is aware that she needs to ‘work really hard to make my father proud, my family proud’ and Jeff says he pops ‘out of bed with one thought in mind.’ So after he’s had a nice pee he then asks rhetorically, ‘Am I gonna be the winner today?’ Given the sudden family photos tossed up on the screen to be lingered over lovingly whilst a gentle New Age piano, bass, and synth drum  number marks time, I am obliged to say ‘Yes, Jeff. Yes you will. Because these cues could be seen from space.’ This, kids, is what is known as ‘telegraphing,’ wherein small clues and visual references inform the viewer in subtle ways as to the outcome of a plot. Unfortunately there is no deft hand at Food Network and the telegraphing of events is done in typically inept fashion.  Meantime, the very soon to be eliminated Vic, goes about brushing his teeth, combing his head, and says he ‘don’t wanna wake up from this dream – because it feels like one.’ And being aware that one is dreaming is a state typically defined as a ‘lucid dream’ over which one can exercise nearly complete control, including making oneself the winner of some type of cooking competition from which one never wants to wake. ‘The finish line is like right here,’ he says whilst illustrating ‘right here’ by holding up one hand like a finish line and making a little running figure with two fingers on his other hand and then tells us ‘And I’m so close I can taste it.’

Whisked hurriedly away to the Chelsea Market, home of The Food Network, the Final Two Padawans and Vic enter the strangely vacant Food Network Kitchen to find Darth Giada waiting for them. Having not seen the teaser trailer showing that Vic will be the one who is soon to be eliminated, Darth Giada congratulates the three Padawans on being the Top Three Padawans and explains that ‘the next step is making pilots’ for the Jedi Council (and of course the eventual ‘Focus Group’ of former Padawans) to watch. ‘But this time,’ she smiles slyly, ‘we’re changing it up!’ Only two of the Padawans will be making pilots and Vic, as we have seen, will not.

‘Whoa,’ Jeff asks from the sanctuary of the BNR, ‘what just happened?’ Because he’s been busy thinking of amusing quips for Craig Ferguson and hasn’t been paying a bit of attention.

There will be one last camera thing for them – ‘To present the best dish of your life,’ Darth Giada tells them. ‘Make us the one thing that brings all of your skills together and that proves to us that your cooking is the best of the best.’ And then Vic will be eliminated. They will have two hours and presumably the run of the strangely void Food Network Kitchen.

‘The challenge is,’ Jeff suddenly explains to us in case the instructions just given to them by Darth Giada were somehow vague and uncertain, ‘we have to make the best dish of our lives and present it to camera.’ He means ‘to the camera’ but fame has got to his head. He will make ‘a very light and texturally complex bite’ in the form of an eggplant parmesan sandwich.

Vic, ‘getting in the cooking zone’ so he can be eliminated soon, makes the ‘Italian Seven Fish Tradition’ and Susie, rightly estimating that this season began ‘a thousand years ago,’ is preparing carnitas in honour of her father. With a Project Runway-like gentle guitar riff playing in the background, Susie explains that ‘it’s gonna be sad’ that she, Jeff, and Vic will only have this last time together in the kitchen and, whilst Vic makes a mess with a blender, Jeff (actually imitating Alica as we discovered in the useless Reunion Special) runs into the fridge and falls down because he is, after all, a comedian at heart.

When it is his turn to present his sandwich, Jeff tells an endearing tale of his father, ‘Big Gus,’ and how his eggplant parmesan sandwich is a tribute to the sorts of things Big Gus would make and, in a bizarre lack of continuity, we first see Susie Fogelson (in her end-of-season cameo) nearly devouring half her sandwich in one not quite dainty bite and then, in the very next shot, see her sitting with an untouched and uneaten sandwich on the plate before her whilst she smiles and doesn’t twirl her hair as Jeff is speaking.

Susie’s Spice It Up segment is an ‘inspiration’ from both her parents and features pork carnitas with a grilled cactus salad and a big cold pitcher of citrus margaritas. Her presentation is just bang on, garnering praise from Lord Flay and Bob T and causing Darth Giada to sip on the cocktail whilst Susie Fogelson shouts ‘Woo’ and claps her hands. ‘It was the day and the time to bring the best,’ Susie Fogelson says when she calms down and says she is please that Susie ‘seized this opportunity.’

The soon to be eliminated Vic offers his zuppa de pesce and a heart-warming tale of family and friends and very little about the actual dish itself.  Bob T loved ‘the heart and soul’ Vic brought to what was arguably his best performance before the camera to date but Dark Lord Flay expresses concern that he said almost nothing about the preparation of or ingredients in the Italian Seven Fish Tradition.

The Council deliberate privately over the relative merits of each performance and the state of readiness exhibited by the two remaining Padawans and Vic and then call the Padawans back so that Lord Flay, in rather a shocking and unexpected twist, can tell  them that their challenge was simply to ‘make the best dish you could possibly make and present it to camera.’ He means ‘to the camera,’ of course, but stars of more than ten programmes have no need for such trivialities as the definite article. Throwing yet another spanner in the works, Bob T explains that only two of them will be moving ahead to make their actual pilots and then starts to say ‘The person who’s going to be leaving us now…’ but he has to wait for the synthetic drums to bang a bit before he finishes his sentence, ‘is Vic.’ Darth Giada offers a tasteful ‘golf clap’ as Susie is told that she is not eliminated and then gives Mamma’s Boy a big hug before he exits to join the Focus Group we will be seeing shortly.

Moments later, suddenly standing alone again in the once more strangely deserted Food Network Kitchen, Darth Giada congratulates the final two Padawans on being the Final Two and tells them that ‘in the morning,’ because they’ve had an exhausting two hours in the last 18 minutes, they will ‘report to Food Network’s Studio A, where a very special guest will be there to direct you.’ She means they will be directed in their pilots by not-so-very-special-guest, Guy Fieri as we have also seen ad nauseam in the  not-very-teasing teaser trailers which have the rather annoying habit of taking the ‘surprise’ out of anything surprising.

In ‘the morning,’ Susie is reading over the shooting script for her pilot entitled ‘Susie Jimenez Pilot Script, “Sopes with Chorizo Refried Beans and Tangy Slaw”’ whilst Jeff, stating once more that he’s doing this for his son, The Sandwich Prince, pores over ‘Jeff demos’ (or ‘demonstrates’) which have, it seems, been left for them in the night by some unseen force. Perhaps the Food Network Magic Pixies who bang out scripts whilst everyone is sleeping. Arriving at Studio A, ever curious as to whom their Very Special Guest Director will be and hoping it isn’t Andy Fickman, they are surprised to discover that their Very Special Guest Director is none other than winner of The Next Food Network Star Season Two, Guy Fieri which they didn’t know anything about as they haven’t seen the teasers that spoil everything.

‘This is it!’ Guy happily announces and then tells them that ‘It’s a little trippy for me, because I come walkin in here, and this is Studio A, and this is where it all went down.’ What ‘went down,’ of course, is that in 2006 Emeril Lagasse, tightly bundled inside a black t-shirt and black suit coat, announced that Reggie Southerland had not won the title of The Next Food Network Star at the end of the second season. This is shown in a brief, de-saturated video clip (because the past is always lacking the vibrant colours of today). He does not explain, however, just why it is he has avoided Studio A for the duration of his Food Network career.

What he does do is to explain that, with Vic eliminated, the final two Padawans will be making pilots for their potential programmes and he will be directing them because when Jeff and Susie were told this information just a short while ago by Darth Giada it was perhaps unclear and imprecise as she only said ‘a very special guest.’ They appear surprised by this new information they’ve only just heard from Guy and they smile anxiously. It seems clear to them now why they were given scripts to read.

When the pilots are completed they will be shown to the Jedi Council – news which appears to shock the Padawans even more as they seem to not understand just why they are making pilots – ‘and,’ Guy tells them, ‘they will determine who’s got the best pilot. But,’ he says, because there’s always a but, ‘we’re also gonna show it to a focus group of Food Network viewers,’ He does not tell them that, as seen in the teasers, the ‘focus group’ is made up of the former Padawans – including recently-eliminated Vic Moea.

‘And imonna tell ya this,’ Guy ominously confides. ‘For one of you… your life will never… ever be the same. In a FANTASTIC WAY!’ he then shrieks, laughing at how richly he gets rewarded for wearing bowling shirts.

For his pilot, Jeff exhibits the Softer Side of Sears by wearing a dark blue Mr Rogers Sweater instead of his Magic Mike Reno Good Luck Headband but it doesn’t save him from the sudden stage fright and the realisation of, as he says, ‘what’s at stake here.’ He botches the first take in less than four seconds and spends most of the second take badly mimicking Emeril by saying ‘boom’ (but not ‘bam’) a lot until Guy can’t take it any longer and calls ‘Cut!’

‘Am I in trouble?’ Jeff asks.

‘Do you think you’re in trouble?’ Guy retorts and then launches into him for using boom as an irritating crutch-word. Calming down he then asks ‘What got you here?’ and then it’s family and the Little Sandwich Prince time again as Jeff recalls that in the heat of the season finale last year, a troubled Herb Mesa taped pictures of his family to the camera for inspiration. Jeff then tapes a picture of his family to the fridge and, as if no-one could have guessed, he emerges like Rocky Balboa at the end of Rocky II and gets ‘in a zone’ during which Guy supposedly ‘forgot we were even doin this’ because he was so enraptured.

When Susie steps up, Guy wants to have her walked through her mise en place with the ‘culinary team’ and then he tells her to ‘stick to task’ as she confesses to feeling a bit ‘scattered.’  Like Jeff, Susie blows the first take because she is not ‘connecting with the camera.’ Her second and third takes, though better, still tend to lack focus – and it is something Guy reminds her of.  For the fourth take, Susie begins to think about her father – her inspiration – and his memory, not taped to the fridge, carries her through an almost flawless final performance after which Guy mumbles, in reference to the Jedi Council, ‘Wow, they got a tough job on their hands.’

Fortunately it’s not going to be as tough as Guy believes. The telegraphing of Jeff’s victory is becoming more apparent as the hour winds down – obvious in the way he is talking about how it feels to win (not how it will or could or might feel to win) and the amount of camera time he is getting clearly outweighs Susie’s.  At the Flatotel the next morning, whilst Susie is awake and ready to go, Jeff finds that he once more pops out of bed with one thought in mind. Perhaps he ought to cut back on all the champagne before bed.

For the last time a Black Ops SUV jettisons through traffic to deliver the Final Two to the Chelsea Market, home of the Food Network, where the Padawans find the formerly barren Food Network Kitchen now full of the complete Jedi Council, fifteen empty seats, a massive television screen, and that the walls are bejewelled with enormous posters of various Food Network Stars and Food Artist Duff Goldman.

Dark Lord Flay congratulates the Final Two for having made it to the Final Two and helpfully explains that ‘One of you will be the newest member of the Food Network family’ because attention spans run short at the Food Network.

‘I’ll take it,’ Jeff nods in agreement, telegraphing again.

Bob Tuschman leaps in to fill the awkward silence after Jeff’s acceptance of his new duties and says that, ‘We like to watch porn pilots with focus groups to find out what the average viewer thinks.’ Not that they were just talking about focus groups. ‘So now it’s time to meet your focus group…’

And, as if it wasn’t already painfully obvious because of the number of available seats (which was 15 – yes, count ‘em, 15) in the studio or the fact that we have already seen in the teasers that the ‘focus group’ are the previously eliminated Padawans, all of the previously eliminated Padawans emerge from the darkness to take their seats.

‘Oh surprise!’ Susie smiles at the Jedi Council in a knowing fashion, clearly having put the puzzle together well before Jeff had done.

‘I couldn’t think of a better focus group!’ Jeff says, taking a page from the Jeffrey Saad book of How to Ingratiate Yourself to an Audience and Act Like You’re Giving an Acceptance Speech Before You’ve Actually Won Anything. ‘Be honest, be brutal,’ he instructs them. ‘I don’t care. I trust you guys more than other people on the planet – obviously besides you four!’ and he gives the Jedi Council a winning nod.

‘So anything they come back with,’ Susie Fogelson suggests, ‘you think will be fair game?’

‘Yeah,’ says Susie. ‘I mean—’

‘Yeah,’ Jeff cuts in. ‘As long as it’s positive.’ And everyone laughs. Because he is, after all, a comedian at heart.

Susie’s pilot for Spice It Up is shown first and, from the comfort of the BNR, Jeff says he is suddenly ‘more nervous than I am confident’ at seeing how well Susie performs. After it is finished, Bob T seems impressed and he says, ‘Excellent job, Susie! But now it’s time to find out what the Focus Group thinks about your pilot.’ He turns to the previously eliminated Padawans and explains, ‘So, focus group, we are looking for your very honest feedback here. And then we’ll take it into consideration when we do our deliberation. So let it all out!’

Paul Stanley, naturally, felt Susie was ‘not as engaging’ as she could have been. Big Chris disagrees and thought Susie was ‘energetic’ and kept his attention. Jyll felt she was ‘fabulous’ especially in light of the difficulty Susie often had before the camera in other challenges. When asked, Jeff says ‘I thought you were great. It was really great. It’s hard. I wanted you not to be great, I’ll be honest.’

Thankfully, Juba says nothing.              

Jeff’s pilot for The Sandwich King is, from what is shown of it, loud and somewhat hectic but causes Susie to admit to us from the depths of the BNR that ‘the nerves are starting to kick in.’ When the attention is turned to the focus group, Vic begins by telling Jeff, ‘I got one word for you – Wow, brother!’ which is, as you can clearly see, two words. Howie Drummond – a distant memory from the first episode way back when – correctly felt that ‘it seemed to be a little bit too much schtick for me’ and Paul Stanley (ever the contrarian) disagrees and babbles about how she felt she could have made so many things with the meat other than a sandwich and that it was ‘absolutely inspirational, very entertaining. Watch out Guy,’ she adds, as if auditioning. ‘Watch out Emeril, he’s awesome.’

Dark Lord Flay asks Susie what her thoughts are and she says, ‘I think he did fantastic. He’s a funny guy. He did a wonderful job.’

Thankfully, Juba still says nothing.

Lord Flay thanks the Focus Group for their time and banishes them from the Council Chambers, no doubt causing many of them to wonder why it was they were called back if only five of them were ever asked their opinions. Once they are gone, Bob T reminds the Final Two that ‘Starting next week, one of you will have your own show on Food Network’ because in all of the confusion they probably have forgotten what it was they were doing there, and tells them that they will also be headlining a book tour for a book they didn’t write.

Susie Fogelson reminds Jeff that his challenge from the start was to balance his sense of humour with his warmth, and she feels he has finally achieved that goal. A gushing  Bob T tells Susie (not Fogelson) that she has an abundance of joie de vivre – ‘ it’s not Mexican,’ he explains on the outside chance that there could be a misunderstanding either linguistically or geographically – and that she tends to shed ‘this radiant light everywhere you go and I thought you lit up the screen.’

Presuming that there needs to be a moment of clarification, Lord Flay tells the Final Two that, ‘only one of you can win your own show on Food Network.’ He pauses to let this startling fact sink in and then suggests that the Padawans avail themselves of the exit door of the Council Chambers whilst the Jedi deliberate one last time over just how long it will be before Spice It Up will go into production and whether it will be on Food Network or The Cooking Channel.

When the decision has been reached, the Jedi call the Padawans back into the Council Chambers and tell them that a decision has been reached. Bob T feels it necessary to remind the Final Two that ‘Over the last eleven weeks, you’ve both proved to us that you have what it takes to be a Food Star’ and Lord Flay prolongs the inevitable even more by mentioning that only one of them will soon be working for ‘The Greatest Boss in the World, President of Food Network, Brooke Johnson’ – and so Brooke Johnson stalks out into the harsh glare of the spotlights to congratulate the Final Two on their having made it to the Final Two and that one of them – just one of them – will begin, the next day, their new job as The Next Food Network Star and reminds them ‘Don’t be late.’ And finally Dr Rumack steps into the cockpit to mention, ‘I just want to tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you.’

‘The person we’ve chosen,’ Lord Flay says at last, ‘to be The Next Food Network Star is…’

boom-boom… cha… boom-boom…

Dramatic shot of Susie.

ticka-cha… boom-boom… cha…

Dramatic shot of Jeff.

boom-boom… ticka-cha… boom-boom…

Dramatic shot of both of them.

cha… boom-boom… ticka-cha… 

Dramatic shot of Jeff.

boom-boom… cha… boom-boom…

Dramatic shot of Susie.

ticka-cha… boom-boom…

Dramatic antelope sweeping majestically across the plain.

cha… boom-boom… ticka-cha…

‘Jeff,’ finishes Lord Flay after such a long time I can hardly remember what the first part of the sentence was.

But, as he is suddenly being congratulated, it is obvious that, to the surprise of no-one at all, Jeff Mauro has made it to the Final One to become The Next Food Network Star, and his programme will be broadcast on Sundays at 11.30 am – the same place where all the new Food Network Stars go to tough it out against the Brazilian Butt or Justin Bieber is Proactiv infomercials.

‘One little thing wrong,’ an eliminated Vic was seen to explain from the BNR in a clip we never saw outside the teasers, ‘and you won’t be the Next Food Star,’ meaning, of course, The Next Food Network Star.  But it won’t stop Mamma’s Boy from cropping up somewhere along the line. And Susie, also in a clip we only saw in the teasers, was quite adamant that ‘I know now, more than ever, that I’m meant to be The Next Food Network Star.’ And I imagine that will happen, because, in the background, whilst Jeff is receiving hugs from his family and telling us how happy and blessed he is, Susie can be seen in the background having a nice chat with Brooke Johnson and Susie Fogelson and one can only imagine they’re already discussing salary, marketing strategy, and the subtle deployment of the Susie Jimenez juggernaut and how she will soon follow in the path of other former Padawans who have successfully circumvented the official and meaningless elimination process to become Almost But Not Quite The Next Food Network Star Anyway.

And now, until the next time, back to your regularly scheduled blog…

Theoretically Liveblogging The Needless Next Food Network Star Reunion Special No-One Cares About

Dark Lord of The Sith Bobby Flay feels that this was the wildest and most competitive season yet of The Next Food Network Star – so much so that it warranted the first ever reunion special – and I couldn’t agree. More than any season before it – riddled with contradictory judging, clear bias, sloppy and manipulative editing, trite musical cues lifted from Project Runway and with the irksome inclusion of a pre-determined Antagonist and two pre-determined Protagonists – this was the most engineered.

And what did we see in the reunion? We saw how Vic, Susie, and Jeff rose from the primordial soup of the first episode to become the Final Three in a twenty-second version of the last ten episodes. We saw the uncut version of Mary Beth’s elimination where she broke down crying because her dreams had just been crushed rather than taking it like the smiling trooper she was portrayed as last week – and got to see her refuse a conciliator hug from Jeff, leaving him to stand aside awkwardly as Darth Giada got teary-eyed. We saw that Mary Beth would prefer not watch Jeff’s probable programme because she clearly believes, as do I, that Susie has far broader culinary skills than just making some sandwiches. We saw that the word ‘equagulate’ was one of the more popular entries in the Victionary – the verbal mangling often utilised by the Former Potential Celebrity Chef Known As Vic ‘Vegas.’ We saw that Big Chris and Jyll did not get on very well and that Big Chris and Justin The Second, Fishmonger had very different cooking styles and that Big Chris believes that he could win against him in a throw-down ‘all day every day’ because Big Chris is still an idiot. We saw that Jeff was Mr Funny Man, that Paul Stanley was – shockingly – a bitch and no-one liked her which was hardly made apparent throughout the season and, thankfully, Juba was not allowed to speak.

We also saw, through the magic of a poorly-considered and ill-timed teaser for the final episode, that Vic will be eliminated because you can see the top of his bald head in a brief shot of Paul Stanley sitting amongst a ‘Focus Group’ of the former Padawans who will be asked to critique the ‘pilots’ of Susie and Jeff in the next episode. 

More than anything, we saw just how to waste an hour of valuable time…

Theoretically Liveblogging The Next Food Network Star v7.10

‘This is like walking, chewing gum, tap-dancing, singing all at the same time,’ a stunned Mary Beth told us last week and, given that she is feeling burdened with carrying on in the aftermath of the departure of Cold Steel Whitney, my prediction is that she will be shown to Mr Exit Door tonight.  Vic, admitting to having had ‘a little bit of self-doubts in the beginning,’ is now ready to face the world as the reborn and manly Vic Moea, the Mamma’s Boy, and he sits bleary-eyed in the back of the Black Ops SUV clutching at a nice blue blanket for comfort as they are swept away from the Flatotel.

Arriving in the Food Network Kitchens at Chelsea Market, home of the Food Network, our Padawans find that it has been transformed into Kitchen Stadium Junior for the much-anticipated Iron Chef segment of the programme which has been used to death almost as annoyingly as the Camera Challenge and the Star Challenge. Blue and white swirly lights and puffy smoke abound and, waiting for them with folded arms and the hallmark unhappy frowns of Iron Chefdom, are Chef Michael Symon and Dark Lord of The Sith, Bobby Flay. Perhaps Lord Flay is unhappy because he has been forced to step aside temporarily in favour of Thomas Dolby Alton Brown, or that, with only two episodes remaining, he will soon only be seen in a mere 10 programmes between the Food Network, The Cooking Channel and Lifetime Television (which, quite thankfully, excludes the failed and wretched NBC rip-off of the BBC’s The Restaurant – or, for BBC America fans, Last Restaurant Standing). Personally I would like to see such stellar newcomers as Sunny Anderson, Ree Drummond, Marcela Valladolid and Lisa Lillian battle it out in Kitchen Stadium Junior as they – like The Neelys before them – have appeared out of nowhere and have ostensibly done nothing to warrant having their own programmes. 

‘We’re gonna put you through the culinary gauntlet that is Iron Chef America,’ Alton Brown crisply explains to the Padawans. ‘There’re gonna be two battles,’ he says, ‘featuring two finalists going head to head with the secret ingredient.’ My admittedly limited understanding of Iron Chef is that traditionally two chefs go head to head and are to utilise the secret ingredient in some fashion. I have never seen two chefs square off against an ingredient before but, then, it’s been some time since I’ve bothered to sit through an episode. Thankfully, Alton clarifies that they will have one hour to cook three different dishes ‘using your ingredient.’ They will be split into two teams and as one team cooks the other team will provide colourful commentary and then they will switch places. There is also an extra seat at the judging table where the Padawans will be allowed to sit in judgement of their competitor.

Because Jeff was the winner of the last challenge in the previous episode, he will once again have the advantage this time round, and that is to pick the person against whom he would like to ‘go head to head.’ He picks Susie – ‘the best cook in the competition,’ he suddenly realises with dread from the solitude of the BNR. To the surprise of none, Alton also explains that ‘four talented culinary pros’ are standing by to act as the sous chefs for the Padawans – Jyll, Cold Steel Whitney (no longer bursting into tears), Big Chris, and returning ‘like so many horror movie villains!’ exclaims Mary Beth from the BNR, Paul Stanley. So, in point of fact, there are two talented culinary pros and Big Chris and Paul Stanley. And why, you ask, could they not have had Justin The Second, Fishmonger and maybe, oh, let’s say Orchid come back and assist? Because this is a sad and overt ploy for ratings and a needless attempt at dramatic controversy and has literally fuck all to do with an actual desire to assist the Padawans in any tangible way – a sad and overt ploy through which even the most casual observer could see. Plus, it instantly sets up two of the Padawans for nearly assured failure should they be unlucky enough to be laden with Big Chris or Paul Stanley and efficiently clears the path to potential victory for the other two.

The other advantage Jeff has is getting to pick Cold Steel Whitney as his sous chef and the rest are doled out by lottery. Vic picks Jyll’s name from the little tin bucket, Mary Beth, laughing in a mix of disbelief and horror, finds herself saddled with Paul Stanley, and Susie is weighted down by Big Chris who, gratefully, says nothing and is given but seconds of screen time.

Vic and Mary Beth are first to ‘face fate,’ Alton tries embarrassingly to sound like the very absent Chairman Mark (sans cool karate whooshing noises). The Jedi Council, suddenly arrived from nowhere (and this time including  both Susie Fogelson and a magically-arrived Darth Giada, dispelling rumours that they share a Clark Kent/Kal-El type of existence) abruptly appear at the judging table with Michael Symon and Dark Lord Flay to, as Alton Brown says, ‘watch your every magnificent motion.’

With the secret ingredient of

‘RACK OF LAMB!’

the Padawans are off. Jyll, as Vic says, is ‘on fire,’ a stark contrast to Paul Stanley who isn’t. Vic decides to do a Lamb Carpaccio, a ‘Lamburger’ patty melt, and another thing he hasn’t figured out just yet. Mary Beth has chosen to tackle Sunday Supper Lamb for Every Season with the ‘star’ of each dish being a lamb chop either roasted, grilled, or pan-seared, prompting Bob Tuschman to lean towards Darth Giada in amazement and ask, ‘Is Mary Beth’s dishes all lamb chops!?’

‘Yes,’ Darth Giada responds, turning away in irritation that Bob T hasn’t been paying attention and annoyed by his glaring subject/verb agreement error.

Regardless, Mary Beth wants to do ‘something a lot with umami,’ one of the five basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savoury (or ‘umami,’ Japanese for ‘savoury’ because ‘umami’ sounds cooler than ‘savoury’) and decides to encrust one of her lamb chops in parmesan and walnuts. This prompts Jeff to explain to Alton that this will be called an Umami Explosion – also the name of his high school progressive rock band, and Alton chuckles appreciatively. Susie then mentions to Alton that Vic will be using a mix of rosemary, basil, garlic powder, salt and pepper to which Alton responds, ‘So would you call that Mediterranean?’

‘A little bit,’ Susie tells him. ‘But he’s trying to stick with the basil as his Italian roots.’

‘Just want to point out,’ Alton replies, ‘that Italy pretty much sticks out right into the Mediterranean…’

Susie laughs at this, enjoying a moment with Alton only to have Susie Fogelson, at the judging table, turn to Bob T and suggest that she often defaults to essentially ‘airhead’ mode at critical times and Darth Giada concurs saying, ‘She may fall back on it when she feels like she doesn’t know the knowledge.’ ‘Yeah,’ Susie Fogelson responds flatly, feeling her own description was far more descriptive and certainly more playful in front of the camera and wondering if Darth Giada had really meant to say ‘have the knowledge,’ as ‘knowledge’ itself indicates a state of knowing and to know the knowledge seems pointlessly redundant.

Vic confesses from the BNR that he has never made a lamburger before but that he has watched Iron Chef before, which is much like saying he’s not a celebrity chef but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Mary Beth, conversely, expresses her irritation over the fact that having Paul Stanley as her sous chef ‘is highly distracting’ because, in the words of Chef Michael Symon, ‘God, this girl’s moving like the speed of dirt’ and is costing Mary Beth valuable time as she hacks away slowly and clumsily at the vegetables.

Having finally decided that his third dish will be a grilled lamb chop with a sauce of Grand Marnier and mint jelly, Vic garners cringes of repulsion from Dark Lord Flay and Chef Symon. Susie notes that Vic is also using white asparagus to some effect and, continuing in the Battle of Declining Linguistic Skills, Alton Brown enquires as to the differences between white and green asparagus.

Susie explains that the green asparagus is ‘a little more bitter and a little more fibre-er …fibrey-er…’

‘Fibrey-er?’ Alton asks.

‘Fibrey-er-eeer,’ Susie laughs. Her inability to use (and Alton’s inability to offer) the word ‘fibrous’ does not amuse Jeff and he decides to impress Alton with his use of the words ‘umami’ and ‘trifecta’ in the same sentence. Alton laughs and says that Jeff wins the prize for the day – unnamed, of course, but presumably the Oxford Dictionary of Smarmy Persiflage – and the delighted Darth Giada and Susie Fogelson appear to have moistened their panties.

‘Jeff’s very cute,’ Susie Fogelson twirls her hair and Bob T, perhaps in need of a change himself, smiles widely and nods.

After the merriment has diminished and the music cues turn ominous, Darth Giada calls Alton over to the judging table where she and Bob T suggest that Paul Stanley is ‘moving at a snail’s pace’ which, as anyone can tell you, is substantially faster than the speed of dirt, but which should come as no surprise to the Jedi as they deliberately chose Paul Stanley as a theoretically ‘talented culinary pro’ to add dramatic tension and to supply a tactical disadvantage to whichever Padawan was unlucky enough to have her as a ‘sous chef.’

‘Do you generally work at this kind of… leisurely pace?’ Alton then asks Paul Stanley whilst approaching her work area.

‘I seem leisurely?’ she smiles knowingly, fully cognisant of her detrimental lack of any sort of velocity.

‘You do,’ Alton assures her.

‘I’m, uh, methodical…’

‘You know, it seems… leisurely,’ Alton reiterates, ‘which in Kitchen Stadium often… results in losing…’

In reply, Paul Stanley offers a frown and an ‘oh well’ sort of shrug so representative of her typically reprehensible and unprofessional conduct throughout the course of the season and makes it abundantly clear that Mary Beth has been sabotaged for the sake of ratings. Any reasonable person with even the tiniest morsel of personal integrity, principle, or honour would have either not invited this destructive instigator back on the programme or would have called a ‘time out’ to take her aside and insist that she be co-operative. Obviously any notion of fair play was not discussed with her as a condition of her return or, if it was, it went unheeded. In fact, had they any sense of fairness at all, they would have called a halt to the proceedings and replaced her on the spot without a penalty to the competitor with whom she was teamed. That would be some dramatic television.  Against this indifference, however, Mary Beth plunges ahead doing virtually everything herself.

Vic, meantime, finishes off his secret thrice-deep-fried julienned potatoes until they are, as Alton Brown calls them, ‘just plain freaking burned’  to partner with his special lamburger that he’s never made before. And at the judging table these cauterised little burn victims are unanimously panned by the Jedi Council, the Iron Chefs, and guest judge Mary Beth whilst the lamburger is praised by Susie Fogelson as being ‘the best thing I’ve ever had of yours’ and garners a knuckle-bump from Darth Giada . His rare seared loin of lamb and arugula salad – ‘a  lovely little lamb salad,’ puckishly states a smitten Lord Flay – fares much better, but his final dish is harshly criticised by the Iron Chefs who feel that ‘mint jelly has no room in Iron Chef kitchen – ever’ which, in turn, gives Vic pause to (quite correctly) reflect from the BNR ‘then why was the mint jelly in the Iron Chef kitchen?’

When it is Mary Beth’s turn, her Lamb for All Seasons begins with Winter – an Israeli couscous and a grilled lamb – over which guest judge Vic professes ‘I love this type of stuff with the meat,’ to which he adds, ‘Overall not a bad job.’ Chef Symon enjoys the ‘thought process’ behind it but feels it ‘lacked in execution a little bit.’ The second of her three dishes is representative of Fall and is a pan-cooked (not pan-seared) lamb chop with pairs which, to Vic’s way of thinking, is ‘overall, definitely not a bad dish.’ Bob T enjoyed the ‘thought behind it’ as well but felt the meat was perhaps a touch too greyish and thus not as appetising as it could have been. Lastly, her Late Winter/Early Spring dish is not only roasted lamb but is the awaited ‘Umami Explosion’ and guest judge Vic contemplates that it is ‘overall, not a bad dish.’  Darth Giada does not agree with Vic, however, and tells Mary Beth, ‘The secret ingredient was lamb… and the lamb’s the worst thing on the plate.’ But she loved her stories though.

***

In the second round (oh sorry, did you have to be somewhere?) Jeff and Susie are told by Alton Brown that they’ll have ‘one hour to work your will upon that product.’ And just what is ‘that’ product?

‘And today’s secret ingredient IS….’ Alton declares stretching out his left arm to point in the general direction of the cart full of secret ingredient, ‘LOBSTER!’

‘Lobster,’ Jeff states from the secrecy of the BNR, ‘is a very difficult secret ingredient for sandwiches.’ No doubt the thought of some form of seafood or shellfish – perhaps breaded and fried – placed between two slices of some kind of bread and garnished in some manner is not only purely heretical but also an unproven concept.

Leaping straight away into preparation, Susie immediately takes control and gives Big Chris a series of orders at which he nods in dutiful silence except when she tells him that she wants to make a ceviche and needs him to extract the raw lobster tail.

‘You’re not gonna cook em first?’ he asks her, proving once more that a nice meatless risotto is not the only culinary concept he has difficulty with.

On the opposing side, Cold Steel Whitney questions Jeff’s choice of making three sandwiches and he suggests ‘maybe a bisque… let’s do a bisque’ which, as one might well imagine, is even more of a difficult ingredient for sandwiches as it inherently wants to slide off the bread.

‘I got the tails out,’ Big Chris suddenly blurts out to no-one in particular. ‘I’m finishing em up. You know, I got my dark meat workin!’ Unfortunately Big Chris seems not to be aware that dark meat, as typified for example in avian species, is derived from the increased oxygen drawn through the muscles during various sustained activity such as running, walking or flying and, as such, is not generally present in lobsters and that the meat really ought to be white, not dark, because Big Chris is an idiot.

On the commentary side, Mary Beth is eloquent and knowledgeable about the items Jeff is preparing – even the bisque and the poorly named would-be BLAT (or bacon, lobster, avocado and tomato) sandwich which will be sadly A-less due to a sudden lack of avocado – and she describes them quite well. Whilst on a roll, however, Alton hears her mention sea salt and he rudely interrupts her to ask ‘What salt isn’t sea salt?’ Though it is a trick question, it throws her momentarily and he soon stands toe to toe with her to stare down at her with a saccharine grin and informs her that ‘All salt… is sea salt. All of it. There is no salt where there wasn’t a sea.’

Correspondingly, when called upon by Alton Brown to explain what Susie is creating, Vic mentions that he sees harissa paste as one of the ingredients.

‘You got a tube of harissa?’ Alton queries rather sanctimoniously. ‘I’ve never heard of harissa before. What is that, Vic?’

‘Harissa is a spicy pepper,’ he states incorrectly, ‘that’s used…’ and he pauses to think.  ‘Harissa is a spice and it’s in this tube. It’s toothpaste for the devil, Alton,’ which gets him a big laugh from the Jedi Council and the Iron Chefs because, hey, he’s Mamma’s Boy, but Alton fails to see the amusement. If only Vic had been wearing a Magic Mike Reno Good Luck Headband and had made a joke about seventies progressive rock…

Jeff is first up at the judging table and he presents a ‘classic lobster roll’ made with, or, from the looks of it, swimming in, mayonnaise (from a jar), celery, what he describes as ‘minced red onions’ which are actually sliced, and toasted walnuts and served on a potato roll. Frankly to enhance the lobster flavour, he ought to have done it in a New England style and blended the lobster with butter and lemon but he is the Sandwich King and I’m not. Regardless, it is approved of by the Jedi Council, the Iron Chefs, and guest judge Susie. His second dish, a ‘Baja-style taco’ is ‘not very pleasant,’ in the view of Lord Flay because of the unnecessary thickness of the tempura batter suffocating the taste of the lobster. Susie Fogelson likes that he did a taco, though. His third and final offering is a lobster club sandwich with a lobster bisque shooter which, in the considered opinion of Lord Flay (nearly the only person allowed to comment upon the food, it seems) was executed quite well. Chef Symon notices the distinctive taste of purchased mayonnaise and bemoans the lack of acidity, prompting Darth Giada to suggest that Jeff begin making a life-changing lemon mayonnaise from this day forth and thus Jeff tells us from the BNR that ‘Sandwich King will always make his own mayo from now on.’ He is also planning a sudden move to Stepford, Connecticut.

When Susie presents her first dish – a lobster ceviche in lemon, lime, and orange with diced cucumber – the Jedi Council and the Iron Chefs agree that she made the secret ingredient the star of a perfect starter. Jeff is seen to squirm a bit. Her second offering is an ‘enchilada’ of sorts made with Swiss chard folded round lobster sautéed in cumin and served with a zucchini, almond, and jalapeno purée. ‘When I think of Iron Chef,’ reflects Darth Giada, ‘I think of a creative spin on a traditional dish, which I think you did here.’

‘You’re hitting very high marks on technique,’ agrees Chef Symon and Jeff squirms a bit more.

Her third and final dish is a lobster stew with a spicy potato cake on top which, to Bob T, is just ‘a heapin portion of sizzlin sunshine.’

‘The smell of it was delicious,’ admits Darth Giada. ‘And I knew when I smelled it that it was Susie. And, um, you brought the spice. I’m happy.’

Jeff smiles at the accolades being showered upon his opponent but from the solace of the BNR he squirms uncontrollably and tells us, ‘So I’m scared. I’m nervous. She looks happy as a clam over there…’

***

Later that evening, dramatically represented by fast motion photography of the sun setting over New York, the Padawans gather round a basket of oranges in the Stark Grey Crockery Exhibit Hall and quietly consider their potential fates. When they are called before the Jedi Council they wait for the requisite crane shot and the tracking shot across the X/Y axis as the music dramatically swells and finally Bob Tuschman tells them that they are in the Final Four and that, in one week, one of them will have their own programme on Food Network because they evidently hadn’t a clue as to why they were standing there.

Very helpfully, Dark Lord Flay explains to them just what it was they did in the last hour in case they weren’t paying attention and then proceeds to tell Mary Beth that he felt she was ‘a tiny bit handicapped’ by having Paul Stanley as her sous chef. A tiny bit handicapped in the same way the Emperor Nero was often in a tiny bit of a mood.

‘That was a big problem,’ Mary Beth agrees.

‘We obviously all saw that,’ Lord Flay admits. ‘That said, lots of things can go wrong in Kitchen Stadium. You must overcome adversity, no matter what.’ This from a man who would gleefully strike down a sous chef at the first sign of dawdling.

Bob T and Darth Giada are in agreement that Mary Beth was, apart from a stumble with Alton Brown, a brilliant commentator and that she was the best ‘guest judge’ from amongst the Padawans. Her food, however, is at ‘75%,’ in the view of Lord Flay, and Darth Giada is concerned that if Mary Beth cannot produce better results with her food, then the potential home viewer will also not be able to successfully replicate her recipes. Neither of them – especially Lord Flay – seem to be aware of the fact that just last week Bob T very explicitly told Susie that ‘We can teach people how to cook,’ thus making their arguments moot.

Vic, the Council are unanimous, produced two of his best dishes and one of his worst in the Iron Chef Junior challenge and his commentary lacked conviction and suffered from a dearth of authority. Bob T feels that he has ‘grown more than any other person I have ever seen in this competition’ but he is criticised for ‘being soft’ in his judging responsibilities and for repeatedly saying  absolutely nothing in the form of ‘Overall, not a bad dish.’ 

‘It’s lesson learned,’ he tells Susie Fogelson.

‘Looking for a star,’ she replies, ‘not a student.’

Jeff, considered by Lord Flay as ‘a serious contender since day one,’ is chastised for not making his own mayonnaise and Jeff confesses that it was a ‘total timing issue.’ Darth Giada points out that, in an Iron Chef-style competition, not making his own mayonnaise was a critical misstep and that he needs to better execute his finished product. Bob T, on the other hand, is happy that Jeff has stayed with his Sandwich King CPOV from the beginning and feels that Jeff has a quality that ‘can’t be taught’ and Jeff affirms that he is ‘the man for the job just to showcase sandwiches’ that are not made of bisque.

Darth Giada turns then to Susie and reminds her that she had once told her to ‘go back to your roots and make the food that you grew up making – and look how far you’ve come!’ She is praised for mastering the use of her ingredients, for having approached the Iron Chef Junior challenge like and Iron Chef and for offering constructive judging without being harsh. On the downside, Darth Giada explains that she cannot make the types of mistakes she made during the commentating – such as over the nature of the white versus green asparagus – because her ‘authority goes right out the window and the trust goes right out the window.’ Of course it also makes her look entirely human and just like someone with the ability to laugh at themselves which could endear her to people and therefore throw the possibility of having a television programme on the Food Network right out the window.

Regardless of the egregious error of not knowing the word ‘fibrous’ and for laughing during an Iron Chef Junior challenge, Susie is announced as the winner in the battle against the Sandwich King and, in ‘a close one,’ Vic is chosen as the winner in Battle Rack of Lamb, leaving Jeff and Mary Beth to face elimination. And given the glowing and doe-eyed adoration of Jeff – especially with regards to Susie Fogelson – it ought to be fairly obvious that Mary Beth is, indeed, going to face the Plain Brown Closet Door To Nowhere had it not been left behind in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, they are asked to remove themselves from the Council Chambers as the Jedi ruminate for the next few precious minutes over a clearly foregone conclusion which was made the very second Mary Beth drew the skankorrific Paul Stanley as her treasonous sous chef amidst the swirly blue and white lights and puffy smoke of the pseudo-Kitchen Stadium set. After rehashing the same talking points they have come to hold so dear for the past ten weeks, the Jedi have the two Padawans return to the Council Chambers so that Bob T can say, ‘Jeff…’ and then pause dramatically for the synthesised drums to click away

boom-boom… cha… boom-boom… ticka-cha…

and allow the timpani to rise to a crescendo culminating in what sounds like a distant Shadow vessel passing through hyperspace before finishing with, ‘you are safe.’

‘A lot of people never find their passion,’ Mary Beth wisely explains from the safety of the BNR. ‘And a lot of people, when they find their passion, don’t get an opportunity like the one that I’ve had.’

Amen to that, sister.

Next week, Darth Giada will congratulate the last three Padawans on being the Top Three Padawans and then will explain that after the what? The Camera what..? One of them will be eliminated. Jeff will presumably ask, ‘Whoa, what just happened?’ Vic will make a mess with a blender and say ‘One little thing wrong and you won’t be the Next Food Star,’ meaning, of course, The Next Food Network Star. ‘It was the day and the time to bring the best,’ Susie Fogelson might tell someone and Jeff will explain that he’s doing it for his son. Darth Giada will sip on a cocktail whilst Susie Fogelson shouts ‘Woo’ and claps her hands. ‘I know now, more than ever,’ Susie will tell us, ‘that I’m meant to be The Next Food Network Star’ and Bob T will start to say ‘The person who’s going to be leaving us now is…’ but will probably have to wait for the synthetic drums to bang a bit before he finishes his sentence. ‘The finish line is like right here,’ Vic will say whilst illustrating ‘right here’ by holding up one hand like a finish line and making a little running figure with two fingers on his other hand and then tell us ‘I’m so close I can taste it.’ Guy Fieri, a so-called ‘very special guest,’ according to Darth Giada (who obviously hasn’t been round enough to know that Guy Fieri has already been a very special guest), ‘will direct you in your pilots’ and Guy will happily announce ‘This is it!’ He will likely mention that ‘We’re also gonna show it to a very special group of guests’ which will turn out to be a ‘Focus Group’ made up of the previously ousted Padawans (because they will have already been gathered together anyway for the big pre-finale ‘Reunion Special’ transmitted earlier) and Bob T may explain to them that ‘We are looking for your very honest feedback here, so let it all out.’

Are we there yet?

Theoretically Liveblogging The Next Food Network Star v7.9

My guess for the chopping block this week, Mary Beth. Or in all probability Cold Steel Whitney. There. I said it. As much as I tend to like Mary Beth for some reason, I know that her inconsistency and weak culinary skills could be her undoing. On other hand, Cold Steel Whitney, being the continued focus of attention for what the Jedi Council see as a lack of personal warmth, may also face having a programme on The Cooking Channel. With Jeff edging ahead with the skilful use of his Magic Mike Reno Good Luck Headband, Vic being the Great White Hype, Susie marginally chipping away at Jeff’s lead as an emerging favourite, and Nietzsche as the forerunner of nineteenth century existentialism, Mary Beth and Cold Steel Whitney have to step up their game.

Of course morning at New York City’s Flatotel finds a puffy-eyed Susie lamenting her egregious denunciation of Mexican food on The Rachael Ray Show and she explains ‘There’s a lot riding on this and I don’t want to go home,’ so she’s likely to be shown to Mr Exit Door as well.

At the Chelsea Market, home of Food Network, Dark Lord of The Sith, Bobby Flay welcomes the Padawans to Chelsea Market and says, ‘This is home of Food Network and also home of some of the best specialty food shops you’ll find in New York City.’ They are given one hour to browse and sample the offerings at the various specialty shops and restaurants and, once they’ve chosen which item was their favourite, they will then tape a two minute segment pretending to be on The Best Thing I Ever Ate as directed by Cecil B DeFlay, making me wonder if next season this programme will be called Bobby Flay Presents Bobby Flay’s The Next Food Network Star Starring Bobby Flay.

And, should the home viewer not understand what The Best Thing I Ever Ate is, we not only see a brief montage of the actual programme including highlights of Food Artist Duff Goldman telling us a great deal of nothing about some nameless plate of food I would never touch because it is endorsed by someone called ‘Duff,’ but Vic helpfully describes the nature of the programme for us which I will not relate because the title of the programme The Best Thing I Ever Ate seems, to my way of thinking, a reasonably self-explanatory title.

‘As a food star,’ Lord Flay pontificates, ‘you need to make people’s mouths water just by talking about the food. You’re gonna have to dig very deep,’ he goes on, ‘into your culinary vocabulary to describe this dish the best you can.’

Digging deep, Vic replies ‘Right on,’ whilst the rest wonder what ‘this dish’ is.

Three minutes later when their hour is finished, the Padawans return to the Food Network Studios and Lord Flay reminds them what their challenge will be in case they had forgotten about it in the frenetic pace of the last three minutes. Susie, feeling at a disadvantage because everyone can watch and learn from her mistakes, is first and she talks about the flautas she just had, opening wide the flauta/taquito debate, and not to be confused with the flatus she may or may not have just had as a direct result of the flautas.  As Mary Beth points out from the safety of the BNR, ‘Susie is talking too much about what the ingredients are rather than what the ingredients taste like’ and Lord Flay insists that ‘We got a lot of descriptions of ingredients but you didn’t really tell us what the ingredients were doing to your taste sensations.’ Mary Beth watches him, thinking his words share a similarity with something she’d recently heard.

Vic is up next and his chicken and eggplant parmesan (or ‘parm’), it is noted by Susie, is also not being described. Lord Flay, Susie explains, ‘just called me out on that’ and when Vic is through, Lord Flay calls him out on that as well. Jeff, understanding what Vic and Susie didn’t, even without the invaluable aid of his Magic Mike Reno Good Luck Headband, describes just exactly how magnificent the Ruben was he got from some sandwich shop in enough mouth-watering detail to make Lord Flay grimace and say ‘Good job.’

Mary Beth who says ‘Every single day I figure out words to describe foods’ such as borborygmic, diacetylish, or nubilous, describes her walnut, fig, gorgonzola crepe in an explicit and nuanced fashion which puts Cold Steel Whitney at odds because she, too, had planned on describing a crepe from the very same shop in very nearly the identical manner as Mary Beth. Lord Flay fidgets and contorts in his seat and tells Mary Beth, ‘Really good job,’ and adds, ‘Whitney, you’re last.’

Having to change her planned-for segment mere seconds before the camera is set to roll obviously throws Cold Steel Whitney off and her presentation suffers, seeming to lack a personal warmth. She confesses that she did not want to parrot Mary Beth just as Lord Flay had done a mere three paragraphs ago and he admonishes her saying ‘If you say the same thing she said because you want to say it, that’s totally fine.’ Apart from that, however, Lord Flay felt her performance was such that he announces Jeff as the winner and he will have ‘the advantage’ in the next challenge, giving me pause to consider why these so-called advantages are meted out so irritatingly at random?

For their next challenge, the Padawans are tasked by Lord Flay with putting their own ‘spin on an entertaining staple – a roast.’ The placement of the attributive adjective in his statement ought to have roused suspicion amongst the Padawans as there is little chance of one finding entertaining meat outside of, perhaps, pornography. Instead, the ambiguity of his double entendre goes unnoticed thereby setting the stage for the the title of this week’s episode Comedy Roast, starring some B-list comedians from the 80s who have washed ashore at VH1 to provide thoughtful insights on viral videos and unfascinating television programmes you are likely to never see.  ‘You’ll each be assigned a different protein,’ resumes Lord Flay, ‘that you’ll have to make into a roast. Then tomorrow—’ because the expectation that they could possibly function after the past 15 minutes is unrealistic ‘—you’ll serve your roast to a group of surprise guests.’ Or perhaps it was ‘suprised guests’ such as Gilbert Gottfried who must be struggling in the aftermath of the Aflac debacle or Louie Anderson who hasn’t had a meal in hours.

As the winner, the ‘advantage’ Jeff has is to parse out the long chains of amino acids to his fellow participants – pork roast to Cold Steel Whitney, prime rib to a very happy Vic, duck to Mary Beth (who, like the Marx Brothers, asks ‘Why a duck?’) Leg-O-Lamb to Susie and Jeff himself takes the rump roast in case he gets a little behind.

A little be—

They will have $300 to shop at, Lord Flay says, ‘a specialty butcher shop’ (in Chelsea Market, Home of The Food Network) and the next day, after they’ve rested, they will have four hours to prepare their roasts for what the Dark Lord calls the ‘distinguished panel of guests.’

Unfortunately shopping drags out as Mary Beth consults with the ‘specialty butcher’ on the best method  for creating a well-roasted whole duck with which she has had no experience and the remaining Padawans grow agitated and fidgety in the background, questioning why she simply just doesn’t cook some form of duck with which she is more knowledgeable. Upon their eventual return to the Flatotel, Susie has a moment of self-doubt and, in a scene quite reminiscent of a similar scene in season 3 in which Amy Finley expressed a moment of self-doubt, she makes a tearful call home to get the support she needs to see her through the difficult preparation of a Leg-O-Lamb and having washed-up comedians mock her.

The next day the Padawans arrive at what Jeff calls ‘this club in the heart of New York City’ to find Lord Flay once again waiting for them, this time standing in front of a sign which Jeff explains says ‘Food Network Roast.’ In point of fact what is written on the sign is ‘Food Network Star Roast,’ but then they didn’t catch the attributive use of the word ‘entertaining’ so…

‘Meat is not the only thing that’s gonna be roasted today,’ announces a nasally Lord Flay. ‘So are you.’ There is the requisite Oo-ing and Ah-ing and Vic saying ‘Wow.’ Once their food is prepared (in four hours) the Padawans, Lord Flay smirks, will ‘serve it to a panel of A-List comedians’ who will attempt to ridicule, mock and deride them for the sake of ratings. He explains that also on the panel are Louie Anderson, Gilbert Gottfried, Aubrey Plaza, Judy Gold, and Anthony Anderson (not related to Louie Anderson, though they both share a pronounced diastema).

Vic is up first, presenting a slab of prime rib so large it appears to have come from an episode of The Flintstones and the suddenly-appearing-from-nowhere Susie Fogelson gapes at it, asking ‘Who would eat that?’ ‘It’s like Medieval Times,’ agrees an amazed Bob Tuschman, who has also suddenly arrived. ‘I feel like a Viking! hilariously notes Anthony Anderson. ‘Is this an animal I’ve seen on this planet?’ asks Gilbert Gottfried, squinting down at his plate in a pee-your-pants-funny moment. ‘Yeah, in prehistoric times!’ responds Anthony Anderson through the gap in his teeth. Oh stop it. My sides are aching. Fortunately the hilarity subsides for a moment as a more serious point is made by the ‘distinguished panel of guests’ and the comedians who have decided that the ‘Vic Vegas’ persona should die a quiet, unassuming death at This Club. Vic agrees and Lord Flay leans back to consider this. ‘Wow,’ he contemplates. ‘The Death of Vic Vegas, right here’ and Vic gives Lord Flay a hip-level double finger point and a nod to show that he ‘feels’ it.

Mary Beth, a tad bit upset with Jeff because he gave her the duck she wasn’t entirely certain what to do with, enters the cathedral of comedy without any of the fanfare or serving assistance Vic seemed to have had. The duck, Mary Beth explains to the stoic faces of the distinguished guests and the comedians, is glazed in blackberry and the golden crispy potatoes on the side were roasted in the duck fat. As Lord Flay scowls, Mary Beth believes she is coming off a bit ‘academic,’ particularly when she explained that the richness and complexity of the duck’s flavour derives from it having got a lot of exercise in its life. Louie Anderson looks concerned and turns to his left, uncertain what this concept of exercise is. Judy Gold also looks concerned and turns to her left if only because Louie Anderson, on her right, is looking at her. And Aubrey Plaza sips amusingly at her water.

‘This is the first time I actually really liked duck,’ Gilbert Gottfried breaks the silence with his cutting wit, squinting down at his plate.

Not to be upstaged, Louie Anderson uproariously states that Mary Beth lost him with her ‘proper and prim and smart and academic’ viewpoint and Judy Gold humorously agrees whilst Aubrey Plaza knee-slappingly sips at her water glass. Anthony Anderson jocularly retorts that Mary Beth’s programme might be called ‘The Food Aficionado’ and I have to pause the DVR to dab the tears from my eyes after the gales of laughter.

Sporting his Magic Mike Reno Good Luck Headband, a terrified Jeff is next to subject himself to the scathing wit of the distinguished guests and comedians. Just as the fun begins, Anthony Anderson humorously quips, ‘You have a sporting event after you leave the room?’ and Jeff’s comeback is, ‘What I have for you guys today is a classic, uh, Italian beef sandwich from Chicago, Illinois,’ which makes it clear his stand-up days are not entirely behind him. He and Anthony share a screamingly funny moment over the fact that Jeff pronounces ‘suet’ as ‘S00-ette’ – like a bad Swedish pop band – and Judy Gold presses him to relate his opening joke from his stand-up days, which he does, and Gilbert Gottfried suggests that he should have a cooking programme if only to avoid ever doing stand-up again. Throwing herself into the fray, Aubrey Plaza says of the Italian beef sandwich, ‘I thought it was really good.’ Oh the merriment. When his time in paradise is finished, the comedians all agree that Jeff has ‘it’ and is a real ‘TV personality,’ leaving me breathless with laughter.

‘The next person,’ as Lord Flay hysterically calls her, is Susie, presenting her spiced Leg-O-Lamb, of which Anthony Anderson jests, ‘this is the most flavourful dish that we’ve had so far.’ Judy Gold asks about Susie’s heritage and Susie responds in mostly  Spanish, leaving the panel of distinguished guests and comedians wide-eyed in a lack of comprehension. ‘All right,’ smiles Lord Flay, possibly rupturing a vessel to do so. ‘Thanks, Susie.’

‘The last person,’ of course, is Cold Steel Whitney who bursts into tears in a sudden display of personal warmth when Judy Gold asks her to discuss how her parents had reacted to the fact that she switched from engineering to cooking. Comically, Aubrey Plaza stares uncomfortably at her plate, wishing she could squint like Gilbert Gottfried does, and Judy Gold quite funnily looks as though she’s sorry for having brought up the topic. Louie Anderson cheerfully shifts in his seat as Whitney playfully mentions how recently the pig they are eating was slaughtered and, poking at the meat, Aubrey Plaza chides impishly ‘I can taste the pig’s personality. He was really happy.’ Getting in one last zinger, proving just why he was once the voice of the Aflac duck, Gilbert Gottfried winces down at his plate and says ‘I thought the food was very good  but I think you’re a soulless, flesh-eating zombie.’

That, kids, is pure comedy gold.

Lord Flay thanks the comedians for joining the distinguished panel of guests and they thank him in return for which he thanks them for thanking him and they thank him a bit more before he thanks them for thanking him again and then thanks them for the input as they thankfully cut away for an advertising break so Louie Anderson can be thankfully airlifted from the studio and I can locate my ass which, it would seem, I’ve laughed off.

Gathering in the Council Chambers, NYC Offices, beneath the glow of the same waxing moon seen in the episode last week, the Padawans are prepared to hear the judgement of the Jedi. Cold Steel Whitney, from the sanctity of the BNR, confesses that she has no idea what awaits her but pleads ‘I really really really want to stay in this competition’ which almost assures she will not.

Lord Flay begins the festivities by telling the Padawans how impressed he is with how far they have come in the five short years this season has dragged out and Bob T then  feels it’s necessary to explain to them that their challenge this week was to put their own ‘spin on a home entertaining staple – the roast,’ making his statement a bit more determinative and less ambiguous and yet completely redundant. He goes on to tell them that they, in turn, were apparently ‘roasted’ at some point (probably to be seen in the DVD extras in the season 7 boxed set) and that ‘It doesn’t get any tougher than having to hold your own in a room of larger-than-life comic personalities or those other people who were here today.’ He fails to explain what precisely of their own they were forced to hold, however. Susie Fogelson, sitting in for the again-absent Darth Giada who must be neutralising another uprising amongst the Disciples of Ragnos, mentions that they all ‘tasted some excellent food and shared lots of laughs’ during the advertising breaks when the cameras weren’t rolling, and that there was no better way to judge their potential ‘Star Potential’ than to make them hold it.

Susie’s ‘raw talent,’ Lord Flay explains to her, solidifying the idea that she is chipping away at the lead, ‘is gold. A lot of people who want to be on television,’ he says, ‘don’t have what you have.’ And although Bob T agrees with this assessment, he does rather oddly admit that ‘We can teach people how to cook, we can give people more camera skills… We can’t give people personalities. You have that. Unlike Paul Stanley.’ So how is it that Aaron McCargo won season 4..? 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Cold Steel Whitney is told by Bob T that she still continues to exhibit a lack of personal warmth yet possesses all the technical skills to be a Food Network Star. Though she inspires confidence and Lord Flay feels that her food was ‘really delicious’ he sternly expounds that ‘the bad news is that it’s not going to give you an advantage tonight,’ clearly signalling her impending departure.

Vic, knowing that Mamma’s Boy is ‘the core’ of him, is glad to shed the ridiculous ‘Vic Vegas’ image and simply be Vic Moea. Bob T is disheartened however by the fact that he has ‘driven Korean cars that have weighed less than that hunk of prime rib’ Vic had served at This Club in the Heart of New York City, but the comedians ‘melted’ before him and were as ‘little putty’ in his hands.

Jeff, in turn, displayed ‘a subtle kind of sexiness’ for Susie Fogelson and Bob T feels he was at his best in front of the distinguished panel of guests and the comedians. Lord Flay thought his sandwich was good.

Lastly, Mary Beth’s dish was ‘superb,’ says Bob T but ‘the comedians got a little turned off by what they felt was a barrage of information coming at them.’ Mary Beth is rather disappointed to find that, despite her efforts, she was unsuccessful at making herself more ‘interesting to general audiences’ and Lord Flay, understanding that cooking a whole duck for the first time is ‘daunting,’ helpfully informs Mary Beth that ‘duck’s not chicken – it’s duck.’

Jeff, Susie, and Vic are, unsurprisingly, the top three Padawans this week– with Jeff named as the overall winner – and they will be moving on to the next episode, which leaves Mary Beth and Cold Steel Whitney standing alone for the axe. In the Stark Grey Crockery Exhibit Hall (not at all like the Stark Beige Crockery Exhibit Hall back in Los Angeles) Jeff gives Vic a hug. ‘Final Four, baby,’ he says and Vic concurs: ‘Final Four, brother.’ ‘Top Four,’ Jeff tells us from the BNR. ‘Way better than Top Five.’

‘Final Four!’ exclaims Vic as Susie enters the Stark Grey Crockery Exhibit Hall and Jeff elucidates that ‘We’re in the Final Four, baby. I mean, that’s Final Four, man!’

I’m not entirely sure what point it was they were trying to establish, but we return quickly to the Council Chambers where the Jedi must, as always, banish Mary Beth and Cold Steel Whitney from the room whilst they deliberate during the last four minutes of the programme over the same tedious ground we have seen them tread week upon week: Cold Steel Whitney has the culinary skills but needs to display more personal warmth and more personality and it does not inspire confidence when she bursts into tears; Mary Beth has the personal warmth and the personality but needs to increase her culinary skills which, as Bob T disclosed earlier, can be provided by the Food Network behemoth.

When they return to the room, Mary Beth and Cold Steel Whitney are told by Bob T that ‘We see a lot of potential in both of you’ but the one they see the most potential in at the moment is, to no surprise given the editing of this programme, Mary Beth who says ‘Oh!’ in disbelief. Cold Steel Whitney, in a suddenly display of personal warmth, bursts into tears as she thanks the Jedi for the experience.

‘This is like walking, chewing gum, tap-dancing, singing all at the same time,’ says a stunned Mary Beth and next week she will have an opportunity to walk, chew gum, tap-dance, and sing throughout the much-anticipated quasi-Iron Chef segment of the programme (starring Dark Lord of The Sith, Bobby Flay) with her former BFF, Paul Stanley.

I think I just peed a little…