Episode Report Card Daniel: B- | 3 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT 20 Chefs Compete
By Daniel | Season 11 | Episode 1/2 | Aired on 03.12.2013
It's dark at this point, and the bus pulls off the freeway, and the show really wants to persuade us that maybe one or more of the men are going to die out here, and back from commercial we learn that -- it's just a bathroom break?
Meanwhile, the women are getting tickets to a Celine Dion concert and meeting her and pretending that this isn't a worse punishment than the men received. Seriously, do they all like her? Not one person wants to break Celine Dion's balls?
They still arrive at Hell's Kitchen before the men get back, by about forty minutes, on the other side of midnight. Anthony whines about the women getting VIP treatment while he rode a bus. He's familiar with the concepts of "winning" versus "losing," right?
And while people get down to studying the menu, Gina pulls out -- no lie -- an Italian chef puppet named "Alfredo Al Dente" and proceeds to piss off her entire team. "Bitch, who brings a puppet in Hell's Kitchen?" Nedra asks. Age-old question! And suddenly Nedra is about to murder Gina? I guess? Goddamn, dial it back on the manufactured cliffhanger commercial breaks, guys.
Nedra tells Gina she's a little cuckoo, but Gina's opinion is that she is not cuckoo. Well, you both make a good case! And then apparently it takes the 49-year-old Gina a million years to get up from bed. She might be weighed down by all her eye makeup. Eventually she makes it, and the teams assemble in their reds and blues and receive their knife sets.
The teams get to work prepping for tonight's dinner service, but Gina appears to be hallucinating? "I'm feeling like I can't function," she tells Andi, who takes Gina backstage and yells for a medic. There is zero sympathy from her teammates, and their collective opinion seems to be, "Gina's screwing us so bad right now." Goddammit, Hell's Kitchen, I just survived Tierra on The Bachelor. I DON'T NEED ANOTHER TIERRA.
To be continued: In five minutes! That's right. It's not a two-hour season premiere, but two premiere hours!
That means we need to sit through closing credits, then previously-on scenes and opening kitchen-transformer credits again, because Fox knows we'll put up with this shit. FINALLY we get back to the show, where the medic is asking Gina if she knows who and where she is. Gina's mysterious ailment appears to be that she just doesn't want to be in a kitchen. So no, she's not dying. She's just a delicate flower who doesn't feel like working right now.