Spoilers for the Casualty Christmas Special have leaked.

Welcome to Peak MasterChef.

Putting the “Eat” in Theatre

The start of this episode will forever go down as one of my favourite TV moments as the contestants were all encouraged to collectively lose their minds. The downside was that we only got 15 minutes of it because the rest of the episode had to be a 45 minute advert for the Niklas Ekstedt Yurt Experience which… I can’t complain *too much* about

I am respectfully giggling and kicking my feet.

In order to decide which 5 chefs got to go to the Blair Kitch(en) Project, they all had to cook the most theatrical and memorable dish they possibly could. Half of them decided to cook as though they were operating through a lucid haze of a few too many phenergan while the other half defaulted to shrugging and making an illusion dish. Louise at least somewhat inverted this by making a savoury dish that looked like a dish having gone the full Great British Menu and taking inspiration from the font of all knowledge that is The Beano

I kind of wish the Beano wouldn’t encourage the next generation of YouTubers who think they can do the most heinous things and then shout “IT’S A PRANK!” as though that grants them diplomatic immunity. Thankfully Louise wasn’t getting naked, covering herself in ketchup and sliding across the Burger King counter for a sponsorship from Bang Energy. Although you could argue as to whether the bacon-flavoured panna cotta she had made was better or worse

my brain simply cannot process the thought of gelatinous bacon cream – I try to imagine it and all my limbic system can do is hiss like an angry goose. Then there’s the salt and vinegar lollipop that you dip into a bag of chorizo bits (which you have to do quickly before the grease dissolves the bag)

at which point the angry goose noises in my brain double

honestly, well done to Louise – this dish was weirder than I thought she would be capable of. I mean it’s not quite India Fisher having to say “crispy parsnip ribcage”, after dinner puppy play or having to think about Jack the Ripper while eating raw meat but on The Unsettling Scale of Henry Cavill’s CGI Moustache to The Shunting Scene From Society it measured at a strong Final Scene In Any Darren Aronofsky Movie

Mary had gone for the more usual take on an illusion dish by making a dessert that looked like something savoury. Her illusion of choice being a Scotch Egg that was actually a Miscellaneous Tropical Dessert consisting of lychee, coconut and rice pudding

and the most convincing illusion of all: a beer that was actually A Miscellaneous Rum Cocktail

The Alcoholics Anonymous Association does not condone this alternative.

Nothing about Mary’s dish felt particularly new, I could’ve sworn we’ve seen this exact dessert before and unfortunately the execution wasn’t all that either with the rice still being a little bit chalky. The only contestant being even less imaginative than Mary was Abi who was giving us the umpteenth ~quirky~ Dippy Egg and Soldiers. She was using the same hail Mary as, well, Mary and offering a cocktail on the side in the usual way that always makes me feel like Abi never knows how she got into this situation

she is the distilled physical embodiment of the record scratch, freeze frame meme

between this and the fact she’s an heiress to a mayonnaise dynasty, I’m convinced she fell out of the Netflix Christmas Prince Universe, I wouldn’t be too surprised if she ripped off a latex mask to reveal she was Vanessa Hudgens all along. Which would have at least been more theatrical than her Dippy Egg and Soldiers that was just a Slightly Less Dippable Egg and Soldiers

John and Gregg loved the dish. I was left a little disappointed considering the context of it. This could’ve been made in literally any round, there’s nothing particularly theatrical or memorable about it.

Now we come to the balls to the wall psychiatric evaluation required portion of the round. There is nothing better than the type of theatrical dining that comes from ammeture chefs. I would love an entire series dedicated to it. Channel 4 tried to do it with that unwatchable Michel Roux JR helmed Five Star Kitchen show in which professional chefs competed to take over the Langham Hotel restaurant. The closest they ever got to touching the sublime being this fever dream

but it was mostly just dishes inspired by some vague philosophical concept that looked impossible to eat

that’s not fun, that’s just a philosophy student’s first essay about populism masquerading as a taco.

Obviously this challenge was made for Chris, I could easily be persuaded that it was written into the agreement that if he came back he had to perform his pyro act at least once

sadly he didn’t have enough time to apply the pig prosthetics. Although if they made Kitty Scott Claus, Baga Chipz and Cheryl Hole all cook in full drag, Chris could break out of the silicon pig nose for the finale.

The theme of the Chris’s dish was not in fact fire or the circus. Instead he was taking John and Gregg on an East End Ghost Tour, hence the donning of the spooky cloak that looked like Gregg encountering his Dark Side self

for this dish, John and Gregg were going to have to play a game of Se7en and guess what’s in the box

in order to open the box they had to solve a few Baby’s First Escape Room clues to reveal a Beef Tartar served in a bone. As soon as he mentioned this whole game and what he was cooking I said “It’s Jack the Ripper. But surely it can’t be Jack the Ripper. Surely.”

oh no.

my brothers in Christ, it was Jack the Ripper

Hang this in The Louvre right next to the Infamous Bloody Hannibal Lecter Dish

if I had £1 for every time someone on MasterChef served a dish inspired by a serial killer I’d have £2. It’s not a lot but it is weird that it’s happened twice.

John and Gregg were both able to get passed the thought of the fact the dish was meant to evoke the feeling of eating the body of a brutally murdered victorian woman and the fact something in the dish glowed a little too powerfully under the blacklight much easier than I would’ve been able to

at least there wasn’t any practical blood effects going on…

remember that whole series of Great British Menu themed around the NHS during which we spent the whole thing in perpetual fear that someone was going to serve a tiramisu in a bedpan? George apparently watched it and instead of taking it as a cautionary tale on how surgical a dish can be before Nisha Katona enacts a citizen’s arrest, George took it as a challenge to make a dish that was basically just the big surgical set piece on a Grey’s Anatomy Thanksgiving Special

My favourite parts of this were obviously the fact that somewhere the MasterChef boardroom had to have a meeting about this dish and the thought of India Fisher reading the script for George’s dish for the first time

everything about this is a potential episode title. However, the boardroom obvious vetoed her saying “Blackberry Blood Transfusion”

It’s another dish that is so bizarre it just completely stumps me. I am irrelevant, there’s nothing I can add. My Sanity Points have withered to 0. I am consumed by the cosmic horrors.

George wasn’t the only one taking John and Gregg to work with them. Brin was doing his own veterinarian inspired dish

thankfully it was thermometre-free. It did however involve dinner and a little bit of a family-friendly puppy play

every day a little bit more of the MasterChef AO3 catalogue becomes more canonical

Chris wasn’t the only one to give bone vessels an outing as Brin was serving his Bone Marrow Panna Cotta in a bone because it wouldn’t be a dog’s dinner without it or the shortbread dog treat and the tennis ball panna cotta

mercifully he had provided them with cutlery and wasn’t going to make them eat it directly out of the bowl while scratching them behind their ears and calling them good boys. That’s for the Patreon exclusive fanfic.

A Theatrical Dish Ranking:
1. Canonical MasterChef Smut
2. Your Gwyneth Paltrow’s Head Is Ready
3. Louise’s Pork’n’Mix
4. Abi’s Undippable Egg and Lance Corporals
5. George’s Edible Innards
6. Mary’s Miscellaneous Tropical Scotch Egg

George and Mary were the only two to have John and Gregg pick up on any errors in their dishes – Mary’s chalky rice pudding and George’s under-rendered duck lungs. I thought George had the upper hand on the grounds his felt more theatrical (in a variety of senses) but the judges decided his time had come

we’ll never know what his endocrine system themed dessert could’ve been.

The Great Outdoors

As a reward for making it through their brief touching of the Theatrical Sublime, the remaining 5 contestants got to do a dramatic pre-boss fight cutscene

their nemesis of course being fire wizard, Niklas Ekstedt as all of their dishes would be cooked over open flames because he’s not like the other chefs

Niklas at least manages to have a personality beyond Man Who Is A Little Bit Too Into His Paleo Diet. He’s a fun time and was clearly enjoying teaching everyone how to build their own fires, even if none of them looked like they knew what to do once they’d got them lit and Chris was fighting the urge to devour it

The purpose of the 5 course meal was a gathering of conservationists from all sorts of projects, countries and apparently time periods

if he finds a way back to 1971, can he try a little harder to warn everyone about climate change?
The host of this evening being Ray Mears who I always forget looks more like Adrian Chiles got lost in the Forest of Dean for an afternoon and not at all like Bear Grylls

I would still have more faith in Ray Mears keeping me alive than I would Bear Grylls who would be telling me to drink my own urine through a gimcracked enema pipe within 3 hours of being mildly inconvenienced by a collapsed bridge.

The meal was starting with Mary who was having to barbecue Arctic Char on burning logs

a task made harder due to the fact the heat and smoke had rendered her legally blind

but with the rest of her heightened Daredevil senses, she managed to get through the service relatively unscathed with beautifully cooked plates of food

I mean, I wouldn’t judge her if she’d developed a severe pyrophobia and hears the gleeful cackling of a swedish mad man every time someone lights up a barbecue in her vicinity.

Brin was cooking a fish course – ignore the fact the starter was a fish course. His Fish Course 2: Seafood Boogaloo being a biblically accurate langoustine

it’s a striking if highly trypophobic dish – the creation of the 200 individual celeriac petals being a laborious labour of greek punishment and putting him further and further behind before he had to rope in Mary who had thankfully unstitched her eyelashes by this point

this also meant he could keep an eye on his langoustine which were being cooked in a wood oven, a process he had to be very observant on

I see Nikolas and I graduated from the same College of the Home Oven.

Despite the threat of serving up late, Brin did manage to get his dishes out on time, they just didn’t look quite as ethereally threatening as Nikolas’s example

still makes me squirm slightly.

Abi was on Main Course Numero Uno which involved giving the world’s worst Thai massage to a duck

her back alley chiropractic license might come in handy though seeing as though everyone was coming away from this challenge with a crick in their neck as they tried to avoid the smoke

except Chris who obviously had become one with the smoke

Lost (TV Series 2004 – 2010.)

Given that Abi had never cooked over an open fire before, this was quite literally a baptism of fire which she came out of pretty well with some beautifully cooked duck

she’d also had to use the most novel cookery technique of the bunch with the flambadou – a sort of funnel for dripping boiling fat over food while it cooks, the whole thing looking like Satan opened a Mr. Whippy van

you know Chris was jealous he didn’t get to use the flambadou, he did however get to make his own blood sausage out of reindeer blood

my favourite anthropological occurence is that just about every single culture developed their own blood sausage entirely independently. It’s the one thing that unites us completely and is the obvious key to world peace, in this essay I will…

The main component of Chris’s dish was venison which he was cooking over juniper wood – I would be curious to know if the flavour was as strong as everyone claimed it to be or if it’s a bit of a placebo effect like that whole cooking a chicken with a can of beer shoved up its arse

and of everyone Chris enjoyed the experience the most – so I hope his boyfriend is ready to run away to the woods with him

I am going to need an entire series just about Chris and his boyfriend. I know the BBC can afford to send them on a road trip through Italy.

Ending the meal was Louise having a No Good Very Bad Time with her Porcini Souffle. The first batch had gone wrong and needed to be remade. Then her second batch was having a difficult time rising

at which point Louise was trying to take herself out with the temperature gun

consider this the moment I decided Louise was ok, actually. Her food has left me a little cold over the series but there’s nothing more endearing than someone wishing they could blow their own brains out over a souffle. Luckily with some quick thinking from Nikolas, they did manage to get her souffles to rise

and it was worth pushing her to the brink as everyone claimed the souffles, the woodruff ice cream and the Blueberry creme diplomat was their dish of the night

Louise however will never go near a souffle ever again.

And so, we move on to the last episode of semi-finals week with 5 contestants hoping to become 4 finalists