You can talk all you want about inspiration, heartwarming journeys, and skilful use of a hibachi, but when you come down to it, great reality television is about one thing: making people cry. And tonight is the night when MasterChef 2024 really gets into gear, as tonight is the night of the first elimination, when the first contestant is sent home to forever bear the title of “number one loser”.

The contestants arrive to find that, regretfully, the producers have been at it again: a projector shines their own stated food dreams up on a black sheet for them to read. It’s a poignant moment as we realise that one person’s dreams are about to be crushed for our entertainment.

The audience’s salivary glands go into overdrive as the fragrance of impending failure wafts to our nostrils. The challenge is to produce a dish that represents the cook’s food dream. The least impressive dish will see its maker sent home to contemplate the inadequacy of their own aspirations.

It immediately becomes a battle of backstories at ten paces. Juan fires the first salvo with tales of growing up in Argentina with nine siblings and asthma. Josh returns serve, winning the audience’s sympathy with his inability to pronounce “fondant” and then revealing his true tragedy — he is Tasmanian.

Sumeet reveals that she is making three dishes. Jamie asks why she is making her life so complicated. Sumeet tells him that fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and Sumeet gotta make unrealistic amounts of butter chicken. Unnerved by this exchange, Jamie goes over to Mimi and teaches her to dismember a crab, thus fulfilling her food dream in its entirety.

Snezana reveals that the dish she’s making to represent her food dream is… bread and butter. Frantically I rewind the tape to see if she really said that. Yep. She’s making bread and butter. Uh. Yeah. Cool. I guess.

In stark contrast, David’s food dream is to own a restaurant in which
the food is, like, really good. Poh and Andy agree with him that making food really good is a great goal to shoot for. David flashes back to his work in cancer research, an extremely important job which he hopes to leave behind forever so he can spend his life elevating pumpkins or whatever. He is taking a chance with unusual flavour combinations, but he’s confident that his scientific knowledge will serve him well: analysis of the ingredients shows that his dish is technically non-lethal.

With 20 minutes to go, steam fills the room. Sumeet is blending, Josh is jazzing his meat and Khristian is whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a loaf of bread. The kitchen is a hive of activity and the contestants have, without exception, descended into terrifying madness.

Elimination looms and everyone is quivering with fear that they may be about to suffer the fate of all: having to see their family again. “I don’t want to state the obvious,” says Andy, but does anyway.

Time is almost up, as Justin stuffs his squid, so to speak, and Sumeet realises that she doesn’t have time to roll her pasta. Luckily, she’s making butter chicken, which doesn’t have pasta in it, so she should be fine. Josh cuts his steak and finds that it is raw, which upsets him despite the fact that during the first week the judges seemed to prefer raw meat to anything cooked.

The judges count down from ten in French, in a case of political correctness gone mad. The cook is over. The tasting must now, sadly, begin.

David serves his pumpkin soup with chocolate cream and is put into a straitjacket. The judges say they like it so as not to look uncool. “It’s good to confuse people,” says Poh, confusingly.

Next Khristian serves a panini, which is Italian for “sandwiches”, a testament to English speakers’ refusal to acknowledge plurals. “I like your energy,” says Jamie, by which he means, “I hate your sandwich”. Nat intrigues the judges with her noodles, while Steve arouses them with his duck.

It is the moment of truth for Josh. The judges think his steak and three veg looks absolutely beautiful. In fact, the only minor criticism they can make of the dish is that it tastes bad, but they assure him that that doesn’t matter much on MasterChef.

Snezana serves her bread and butter. The judges look at it and cannot deny that it is bread, and it is also butter. Mind you, it’s three different kinds of butter, all of which look weird enough for judges to enjoy. The bread and butter is delicious and does not contain any raw steak, so it’s a winner.

Harry serves an “ocean parcel”, which is what he calls fish. Poh compliments him by insulting his mental health. Sofia thinks it’s great how he’s put food on a plate and the food tastes good. Steph steps forward, whoever Steph might be. Her crab pasta is not very good, but she hasn’t been in this episode anywhere near enough to be eliminated. The same is true for Sue, whose duck ragu is basically fine, and Alex, whose lamb is good but whose flatbread is disgusting. Lourdes has made a cake, which is a bit of a shock, but although it tastes nice, Poh doesn’t care.

Sumeet serves the butter chicken, which she has paired with both pasta and a cheese toastie for reasons best known to herself. Jean-Christophe slams her lack of imagination. Andy doesn’t want to offend her, but tells her that this is not a business audition: putting her resumė into the sauce was a misstep. All the judges are disappointed that Sumeet didn’t do anything truly brilliant, like chocolate pumpkin or bread and butter.

We come to Juan, who has brought his own theme music. Jamie makes a pun on Juan’s name and then the judges taste his empanadas and declare that, like Keira Knightley in Love Actually, they are perfect.

All that is left is for Mimi, Jonathan Lily and Lachlan to get a full five seconds of screentime between them, before James, chasing his food dream of one day being allowed inside a fish and chip shop, plates up his stuffed squid. Andy cuts into the squid. He is confused. Has he discovered an ancient treasure map, swallowed by the squid centuries ago? No, it’s just that the squid is raw. And squid is disgusting enough when it’s cooked. Also the flavours are too big and are interfering with Andy’s fantasies of the seafaring life.

Time for the final judgment, and the difficult task of deciding who has revolted the judges the most out of this competitive field. The worst three are Josh with his raw steak, James with his raw squid, and Sumeet with her raw disregard for basic dignity. In the end, James’s squid is the worst sin against nature, and so he must go home to a life of sleepless nights with visions of squid swimming before his eyes, taunting him with sarcastic tentacle gestures. His exit from the show is almost as moving as it would’ve been if we’d had any idea who he was before tonight.

Tune in tomorrow, when Jamie shows off sickeningly.