MasterChef season 8 episode 18 review: Double elimination drama

We anticipated going in that MasterChef season 8 episode 18 could bring to the table a double elimination, but that didn’t make it any less sad.

Alas, in this review we must make a toast to our former winner pick Yachecia, who fought hard and brought an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm to the show. She did really well for a long time in the kitchen, but unfortunately was tripped up by a salmon dish where her dream for a dish turned out to be (using her own words) a nightmare. The reality is that this sort of stuff happens — if you’re super-creative in the kitchen, you’re going to have a bad day every now and then. If you have a bad day at the top five, there’s a good chance you are going home.

Yachecia was joined heading out the door by Jeff, who had virtually nine lives this season in the number of times that he was almost sent home from the kitchen. We give the guy credit for hanging in there, especially since there were a ton of other people on this season who continually tried to give him a hard time and get him sent home. Did he bring about his own demise in some ways? Probably. Were he a little easier to work with in Team Challenges, maybe there’d be a little less of an effort on the part of the other contestants to get him eliminated whenever they had a chance to screw him over. Cate had that chance after winning the Mystery Box Challenge, and she gave him only 20 minutes to make his salmon dish. Despite however hard he may have tried to sell his salmon as intentionally-rare, Gordon Ramsay described it instead as raw and his opinion matters the most.

Ultimately, we realized weeks ago that Jeff probably wasn’t going to win this competition, but keeping him around did at least bring more of a rivalry to the final part of this season. Often at this point it’s just a total love fest between all of the different contestants.

Hopefully, we’re going to have interviews here at CarterMatt with both Yachecia and Jeff over the next week or so. We’ll let you know…

The family visit

Did MasterChef do enough with bringing in everyone’s families? What we would’ve preferred was seeing them be more involved in the Mystery Box rather than just standing up on the balcony. Nonetheless, this is still one of our favorite parts of the competition. You get to know these contestants in a way that you didn’t previously since so much of the show is insular and you are seeing the home cooks through the lens of whatever they are doing and cooking in the moment. Getting a different window into their world is valuable.

Overall

A fun and meaningful episode at times with an elimination that really cuts down on the field. There are only four more home cooks still to go this season, and we do think that you can make a case for any of them winning. We’ll be back later today with a review for MasterChef season 8 episode 19, the second hour of the two-parter.

Do you think that the right home cooks left the MasterChef Kitchen at this stage? Share in the comments below! (Photo: Fox.)