MasterChef Junior

The mystery box gets this episode off to a thrillingly cliché start when the judges unveil an array of icky ingredients — snails, kidney, eggplant (?), blue cheese, etc. The kids react about as well as you’d expect television children would. No cursing from the stoner-in-training Troy, but a lot of general cringing and “ew”-ing.

Rather tellingly, the simplest dishes did the best while the most ambitious plates failed. Dara’s soufflé went pear shaped, while Troy’s Snail Chowder and Sara’s Fried Sardines went the distance. However, I don’t think a win or lose would change much here.

I mean, when has a mystery challenge reward actually worked out well for its winner? It’s supposed to be a “game-changer” that allows the winner to effectively dick over one of his/her competitors. That never happens on MasterChef Senior.

In fact, the editor seems to take sadistic glee out of pointing out how awfully any tactical move plays out during the elimination challenge. You could only expect that this trend holds when ill-prepared kids are put in the driver’s seat.

So, when Sara decides that she wants to screw over Alexander and Troy, I rolled my eyes. Yeah, you’d like to get Alexander and Troy out. I’d like to use Bastianich’s shiny head as a bowling ball.

When presented with the choice between cupcakes, layer cake and fruit tarts, Sara picks layer cake because Elliot’s pitch sounded so gosh darn compelling; cut to Alexander freaking out in that precocious, telegenic not-actually-freaking-out way so germane to MasterChef Junior.

Lo and behold, Alexander botches his first dough. Could this mean that Sara’s gambit actually worked? Have you ever watched MasterChef?

While I was just riveted thinking about these possibilities, the camera cuts to Sofia royally effing up her cake mix — to the point that Ramsay has to help her hands-on lest a child genuinely breaks down on national television. To her credit — Sofia appears to have seen the writing on the wall and does a good job welling up those eyes for her last five minutes of airtime.

Meanwhile, Sara and Ramsay engage in an exchange involving gummy bears and a trite idiom that’s over overtly scripted and edited, it might as well have come from a Hollywood adaptation of MasterChef Junior.

When the clock runs out, it’s no surprise that almost all the cakes look atrocious. Dara’s chocolate heart attack looks the best, but Ramsay had to pause to dig through his extensive British vocabulary to find any, even half-way appropriate compliment: valiant.

Alexander’s cake looks a mess and tastes a mess, but is no match for Sofia’s chocolate monstrosity and Kaylen’s pink, globular thing. And so nerd-spice and black-spice get kicked off the island.

One of the more curious and weirdly commendable aspects of MasterChef has been the degree to which the show refuses to dramatize anything outside of the kitchen. The show very rarely cuts away to the rooms where the contestants are staying to show that X is sleeping with Y or what have you.

On the one hand, it means the drama on the show is confined to something related the competition; MasterChef doesn’t have the Hell’s Kitchen problem in which every feud seems to go down in a Jacuzzi.

On the other hand, the limited purview means that we get less of a sense of character. This is especially a problem given how abbreviated and abrupt MasterChef Junior is. We only get to know about one or two of the kids, so we both end up knowing who makes it far into the rather and not feeling all that much when one of them gets eliminated.

I couldn’t care less who gets kicked out every week, and that becomes a serious problem in episodes, like this one, that rely overwhelmingly on fabricated tension over who’s going home.

Tidbits

· What is so objectionable about eggplant? The sardine, offal and blue cheese I can understand, but why eggplants?

· Isn’t it incredible that children can cook? The judges can’t seem to get over this fact, as they’ve made very explicitly clear throughout each and every god damn episode.

· I’m going to bet that Alexander cries when he gets eliminated. Mean spirited? Sure, but if you’re asking that question, you haven’t watched enough of this show.

· Now that most of the sadism is off the table, scumbag editor only has scummy commercial breaks with which to get his jollies.

· Giving the youngest contestant a giant vat of gummy bears just spells disaster.

· “My only hope is that someone screwed up bigger than I did.”

· When the tensest moment of your show is whether or not a 10 year old in a Hawaiian shirt is going to drop a basket…