The women walk off, tails between their legs, after Amanda's ouster. Elise can't believe Carrie's still here, but she figures Carrie won't be much longer anyway. She goes off on a tirade back in the house, bitching about Carrie right in front of her. "I am so over Elise and her mouth and her attitude," Carrie tells us. Elise is also spraying bullets in Krupa's direction. "Her attitude puts everybody off," says Krupa, and then we watch as she packs up her stuff to move to a different bed, one that's not near Elise, and Elise really sorta illustrates what a good idea that is by screeching uncontrollably at her.
"She's got her fucking nerve!" says Elise, who really never does stop talking. I think she must breathe through her ass.
The morning, sous chefs Scott and Andi show up with special gear -- overalls and boots -- for the teams. There's a delivery truck of chicken out there... but the cooks don't have to unload it, so they applaud. The truck pulls away, revealing behind it a coop full of actual live chickens, and the culinary nimrods keep clapping for long after they should have figured out that they're likely going to have to do something more challenging than lifting a few boxes. Anyway, it's some stupid game in which they take turns chasing chickens because each time they catch a chicken they get to pull an ingredient from a list, and however many ingredients they get, that's what they can use for today's challenge.
"We don't chase chickens where I come from. We chase chicks," says Will, making sure everyone knows that New Jersey has heterosexuals living there. Including him! Got that, ladies? Will is all (non-gay) man! Elizabeth says, "We need to win a fucking challenge." I love how it's become impossible to get through a talking-head without dropping an F-bomb. It's like the way your mom and aunts use LOL on Facebook.
Jonathon, being from Tennessee, is quite adept. Monterray is the one to refer to Rocky Balboa's training, earning major points from me. Chino does well, so Will makes a "choking the chicken" joke for our benefit, and I can only assume it was the thousandth one he made that day. "City slickers" Krupa and Gina do all right too, and the women wind up with nine ingredients, while the men finish with 11.
They get changed, and then Scott and Andi bring out one chicken for each team, who split up into four pairs to cook the chicken using four different techniques: roasting, grilling, sautéing and frying. Carrie's thrilled to be teamed up with Gina, and they're doing fried chicken, which she thinks is super easy. Carrie's cockiness might actually be endearing if it weren't for the fact that she hasn't demonstrated any reason to BE cocky. I mean, you know what ELSE is easy to cook? Mashed potatoes, Carrie. MASHED POTATOES.
Jonathon's grilling the chicken with Monterray, but Monterray accidentally swipes some onto the floor as he's slicing it. They do their best to recover. Meanwhile, Carrie's showing off how good her chicken looks, only it's a surprise to no one when, a minute before the 30-minute time limit is up, she and Gina discover the chicken is raw in the middle. They keep it cooking until the very last second. "Gina, I did everything I was supposed to do," says Carrie, forgetting the fact that she didn't actually cook the chicken. I mean, it's not like the chicken's defective. Is Hell's Kitchen doing a thing this year where one of the contestants isn't actually a cook but just a moron put on the team to cause havoc and gastro-intestinal distress? "You don't know what you're doing if you're cooking chicken and it's that raw in the center," Gina tells us.
Before inspecting the dishes, Ramsay asks if everyone is satisfied with their concoctions. Gina shakes her head. It looks more like she's doing it for her own benefit, but Ramsay picks up on it and asks her what it's about. "Our chicken's raw," says Gina. This cracks Tommy up. Ramsay? Not so amused. He wants to know how this happened, and Carrie starts in with the explanation that implies the chicken itself resisted all her attempts to cook it properly, but Gina just snaps, "I'm talking," and then explains that it wasn't cooked long enough while Carrie smiles weirdly and shakes her head.
Elise tells Ramsay, "I don't have anything against anybody [not true -- Krupa and Jamie in particular seem to find that part amusing], but it seems like the common denominator is always Carrie [true]."
Anyway, rather than ripping Carrie's face off, Ramsay tells them all to hold it together, because there are a couple of special guests, and then a couple of writers from People and Entertainment Weekly walk in, and the chefs clap and smile like they know who these people are. Ramsay explains that the chef whose dish is determined to be the best will be featured with him in People. I assume they used clips of the cooks' reactions to that for the reaction shots from when the journalists walked in. I think it's also funny that it almost comes off like a bad sitcom plot: "Everyone play it cool! We don't want the journalists to notice the raw chicken!"
Jennifer in particular is excited, because she loooooooves People. "I get it every week!" she tells us. Jennifer seems nice and all, but it's not like we all expected to hear she reads The Economist cover to cover every week.
So the first dishes brought to the judges are the fried ones, but Ramsay's probably not going to knowingly attempt to poison anyone, not even journalists, so he tells Gina to tell the writers what happened. "I was on a team with Carrie..." Gina begins, which is hilarious, because it's almost like she expects the guests to be sympathetic. "Oh, with Carrie? I heard about that bitch!" Ramsay makes her bring the dish back to the kitchen, and Carrie whines to us about being thrown under the bus. "I don't like girls," Carrie tells us, and it's not terribly surprising to find out Carrie is one of those "I don't like girls" girls.
Meanwhile, the judges like Paul's dish of fried chicken with roasted corn and rosemary grit and basic gravy. "It's not easy to eat, but it's worth it once you get the taste," says the EW writer, whatever that's supposed to mean. Ramsay gets one more dig in when he points out that whatever it is, it has to be better than raw chicken, so Blue Team gets a point.
Battle of the sauté! Jennifer and Gina's chicken cacciatore (looks awful, tastes great, apparently) versus Jonathon and Will's lemon-herb sautéed chicken, which is also highly praised. The People woman says she could easily see this on a page in their magazine, fighting for space with a real think piece on whoever Hugh Hefner happens to having sex with this year.
Jamie's grilled chicken salad versus Tommy and Monterray's half-breast. People says the flavors in the grilled chicken salad threw her off, but it's cooked really well, and EW agrees that it's cooked perfectly. And since Tommy and Monterray could only come up with half a portion, Red Team gets a point, tying it at two. Admirably, Tommy admirably doesn't publicly blame Monterray, but Monterray does take the fall with his own teammates.
So it's down to the roast chicken: Elise and Elizabeth come up with roasted chicken with butternut squash puree as well as swiss chard sautéed with sweated onions and garlic. The guests love it, and Ramsay asks whose idea it was. Elise says it was hers, prompting a whispered, "That's bullshit," from Elizabeth to her teammates in the kitchen. "You don't like sharing, do you?" Ramsay asks Elise, who answers affirmatively.
Natalie and Chino have a roasted chicken curry coconut soup, and the judges praise it too, so they need to have a discussion to decide who wins. "We have to win this one," says Elise, because she's sick of punishments.
After the commercial break, Ramsay announces that Red Team won -- not really a surprise -- and that the women are going to be spending the day go-karting, which really gets them all excited. Further, Elizabeth and Elise's dish is judged the best, so they're doing the People magazine thing. "I cannot believe that we are going to be in a magazine! This is everything I wanted out of life," Elizabeth tells us, which makes me feel really sorry for Elizabeth. Also... you do know that you're on television right now, don't you?
The women scamper off, visions of go-karts revving in our heads. "This is the best day of our lives!" says Elise, who I'm pretty sure has a child.
As for Blue Team, they're ordered to produce eighty quarts of "stunning" chicken stock, and they're glumly working away when Red Team strolls back through the kitchen, having changed into their street clothes. Natalie in particular is peeved to have lost a challenge to a team that came up with raw fried chicken. Someone makes a joke about Elise not being able to fit her big head inside a helmet, a joke that's even funnier when a talking-head lets us see that Elise has her own name tattooed on her breast. Because of course she does.
So, of course the reality show has to do the cheesy shot of the women marching in line in their racing uniforms, helmets tucked at their sides. It's all the lamer because this isn't exactly Days of Thunder we're watching, here. Hell, it's not even Talladega Nights. We spend an exhausting amount of time checking in with most of the women to find out what they think of the goddamn go-karts and it's beyond boring, except maybe for when Elizabeth says she doesn't even know how to drive. "I'm from Manhattan, New York," she says, sounding just a little snotty, like driving is something only hillbillies need to do.
Back in Hell's Kitchen, Blue Team decides to practice for their service by miming cooking. It's really kind of bizarre. And then Chino manages to fuck up mime risotto. I mean, obviously he's doing it to present a bit of an obstacle so they can practice overcoming something like that, but Will and Jonathon are all, "He can't even fake being a good cook." Jonathon exasperatedly points out that there wasn't even any real cooking involved. Yeah, well, there was no actual undercooked risotto involved, either!
Back at the stupid go-kart track, there is one stupid race left between stupid Carrie and stupid Elise and stupid Jamie. "There was no way I was going to allow Carrie to win the race," says Elise, who proceeds to run Carrie off the track at every opportunity. And then Jamie "wins" some stupid trophy and everybody cheers, and unfortunately there is not even one go-kart-related fatality.
And later, Red Team's back in the kitchen, doing prep work for the night's service, with sous-chef Andi popping in and refusing to take Elise's garbage. "Would you stop talking to me like I'm your fucking child?" says Andi, god bless her, in response to Elise's chirping. Elise, like a child, talks back as she insists she's not talking back. "I'm here, you're here. Get it straight," Andi points out, holding the Andi hand much higher above the Elise hand. "You're so fucking disrespectful," Andi snaps at one point. "This is the first time I've smiled all night," says Carrie, who in reality actually smiles all the time like a psycho.
Apparently, there are some VIPs in the dinner service tonight at the chef's tables, putting extra pressure on the teams, although they're the kind of VIPs that require an onscreen graphic for anyone to actually know who they are. We've got Misty May Treanor and Jen Kessy, who are champion volleyball players, dining in the Red section, and the Blue section has a bit of an upgrade with Olympic swimmers Mark Spitz (who now appears to be eighty years old) and Janet Evans.
Krupa's going to play hostess to the Red chef's table, and she's really excited because she knows who they are. Jonathon is assigned to look after Spitz and Evans, and he declares himself a Mark Spitz fan.
Let the cooking begin! Elise, on appetizers, messes up the first order of scallops, but not too egregiously, and Ramsay shows her how to do it right, and she gets the one perfect. Over in Blue, Tommy delivers a Caesar salad that's swimming in dressing, and Janet Evans doesn't like it, so Jonathon brings it back and throws it in the trash, and Ramsay gets pissed at him because only Ramsay is allowed to do that! Once he's done getting mad at Jonathon, he gets mad at Tommy, who gets right to work on another salad.
Red Kitchen: Carrie is co-coordinating appetizer times. You're never going to believe this, but there is much bickering between her and Elise. "Elise and Carrie fight, no matter what. It really brings the rest of us down," says Jennifer. It's wearying watching the condensed version every night; I can only imagine what it must have been like to live through this.
The Blue Team is managing to get their appetizers out, but the trouble starts when Monterray screws up a sea bass entrée. It falls apart on him. Sous-Chef Scott shows him how to use the spatula to prevent it, and Monterray is less than willing to admit he did anything wrong, and Scott calls him out for making out like it's the fish's fault for falling apart, and it quickly devolves into Scott and Monterray screaming at each other. You see, you don't DO that to Monterray. He don't care WHO you are! "Fuck you!" "Fuck you too!" That's how it ends. Jonathon tells us the way that went down, Ramsay should just send Monterray home right now. He also seems to get it in his head that Monterray's a dead man walking, so he starts giving Monterray grief too. Monterray certainly knows that Jonathon is no Sous-Chef Scott, so he gives it right back, and Will needs to come in and yell at everybody to get back to their stations, back to work. Janet Evans and Mark Spitz look on in horror/amusement.
Two hours into dinner, the Red Team has finally delivered their appetizers and is working on the entrees, but for some reason Gina slices up a New York strip, prompting some sarcastic clapping from Ramsay, and setting the team back several minutes. Gina tells us she wishes she could just be somewhere else, like in a bubble bath drinking champagne. Um, wouldn't that kind of be true even during a good day at work?
Blue Kitchen: Monterray gets a good sea bass up, and Chino has to get a lamb and Wellington over to the Olympians. Natalie's trying to help with times, but she's having trouble because Chino at first says he needs one minute and then a minute later says he needs at least three more minutes. She goes into lecture overload with him on getting the times right, pissing him off. Meanwhile, Spitz and Evans are not staring at the kitchen anymore, they're staring through the kitchen. They may have gone into hunger shock. And then Chino delivers a Wellington that's raw and cold, so it doesn't look the Olympians are eating any time soon.
Elise keeps struggling, delivering one dry sea bass and one raw sea bass. "I don't know what kind of frame of mind you're in, but it's not on a fucking championship performance, let me tell you," says Ramsay. "Elise will never admit that she's wrong. She just stood there with her eyebrows up, looking," Krupa tells us, pursing her lips.
Oh, Chino. Will you ever win? He delivers shitty Wellington and raw lamb to Ramsay, who pitches the plate at him and shuts down the Blue Team's service. Will, naturally, has to yell about how pissed he is about this. He's one of those guys who pretend to be completely focused on winning when what they're really concerned about is making sure everyone thinks they're completely focused on winning. "We sucked. They way I look at it, any time you get a service shut down, you suck," Will tells us, which is some kind of amazing insider analysis right there. I was sitting here thinking that they were being shut down for being too successful.
Ramsay apologizes to the Olympians, telling them the Blue Team was good last night, so he doesn't know what happened. Yeah! Especially since they were doing a great job miming! Well... except for Chino, I suppose.
So, Ramsay goes to the Red Team to give the Blue chef's table order to them, but Gina serves up raw lamb. "What an embarrassment!" he says, and since we've got champion volleyballicians sitting right there, he compares himself to a volleyball being pounded. And then he shuts down the Red Kitchen, putting Andi and Scott to work getting the entrees out.
When the dust settles, Ramsay brings the teams in to tell them that they both sucked and nobody won, and presumably they were so awful that the sporting champions sitting at their respective chef's tables were stripped of all their medals. So, you know, hang your heads in shame. He wants each team to think of two members for elimination.
The Blue Team discussion is surprisingly calm, even when Chino tells Natalie off for making him look worse after he screwed up. She maintains she was there to help him.
"She wasn't there to help, she was there to exasperate [sic] how badly I was doing," Chino tells us. Will's got Natalie's back.
And then Natalie starts to cry, because she's got a teammate who thinks she was trying to screw him over. Chino doesn't really buy it, but she tells her team that she would never to do that to someone. Most of the guys don't seem to know what to do about a crying woman, except for telling her not to cry.
The Red Team is also calmer than normal, because Jamie's come up with a system where people get a mark for everything they screwed up to try to determine who should be nominated. "The first service, everyone gets a point except me," says Elise, which... what? Carrie wants to drop-kick the yip-yip dog out of here. She -- perhaps not surprisingly -- doesn't want to use the point system. Jamie insinuates -- not inaccurately -- that it's because she knows she'd get more points. There is a lot of screaming and a lot of "Shut up, I'm talking!" and both Carrie and Elise look like horrible people who maybe need to be locked up far away from where their voices can be heard by humans.
It's time to face the music. Blue Team nominates Chino, because, as Natalie explains, he kept screwing up the meat. And Monterray, likewise with the fish.
As for the Red Team, they're nominating Carrie. "Carrie is our bottom player," Jennifer explains. We get a commercial break before their second nomination is announced, and it turns out to be Elise. "The Team feels that the arguments between Carrie and Elise is definitely part of our problem," says Jennifer.
So all four step forward.
Monterray: "I know I'm a strong cook, I just had a bad night tonight," he says, and Ramsay insists that he shut down tonight. Monterray argues that he didn't, showing some kind of balls continuing to argue with Ramsay, saying he doesn't care what Ramsay thinks (or what anybody thinks).
Chino: "It's been rough, to say the least. I feel embarrassed, and I wish I could show the guys in there what I could do," he says. Ramsay wonders what he's got left to show, and Chino says ,"Redemption."
On to Carrie: "I know I've had a rough start, I'm not going to deny that," she says. Yeah, four straight episodes. Then she crabs about Elise not being a team player. Elise starts yammering away about how she's sure if she asked her teammates who they'd rather keep, they'd pick her over Carrie. So Ramsay does put it to a vote, and the only person who votes to keep Elise is Elizabeth. Everyone unhesitatingly picks Elise to be sent home.
That sends Elise's mouth into 120 beats per minute territory, explaining that she can work on her attitude but you can't give someone common sense and talent. And she even takes a swipe at Carrie's age in an old-dog-new-tricks sense.
Anyway, Ramsay's made his decision, and he tells Elise to step forward. She starts crying instantly, and her team looks overjoyed, but it's a fakeout. He sends her back to the kitchen, and he eliminates Chino instead. "Three strikes, you're out, buddy," Ramsay tells him.
"I'm disappointed. My expectations were higher. I came here to cook, you know, and it's a shame that I didn't get to cook a little bit more," Chino tells us. Then he talks about not selling out, by which he means he's not going to start cooking at McDonald's? Probably a good thing, in terms of preventing an E. coli outbreak.
Ramsay tells the teams that things are going to get more difficult. "Now fuck off, all of you."
Jennifer, for one, is a little concerned about how things are going to be, now that Elise knows that almost everyone prefers Carrie to Elise. "It's going to be a bloodbath," she says.
And how does Elise see it? "Everybody hates a winner. I learned tonight I don't have any friends in the house. They don't know who they're fucking with." I would disagree with both the first and last sentence there.
And Ramsay's epitaph for Chino: "Chino took his time in Hell's Kitchen very seriously. The problem is he seriously couldn't cook."
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. One of his favorite Cure songs used to be "A Letter to Elise," but that's more or less ruined now. Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.