Last week I remarked that while I've been enjoying the cast for the New York season, I've been underwhelmed by the food they're producing. This episode didn't necessarily change that assessment, but the proceedings as a whole were much more entertaining. It's like someone finally spiked the show with a bit of chili powder.

The Quickfire featured a twist on the typical palette test by combining it with "Name That Tune"-style gameplay. The chefs were paired up and had to taste a sauce. They then had to bid on how many ingredients in the sauce they could successfully name. Nothing much of consequence happened, aside from just about everybody singling out Stefan as being a boastful bully, and Stefan basically calling them all a bunch of babies to the camera. And this is when I fell in love with Stefan. It came down the cueball German and Hosea for the win, and Hosea pulled it out, gaining immunity.

The chefs were then split into teams AGAIN (I forgot how tiresome all the team challenges are this early in the season) for the Elimination Challenge, in which Padma tasked them to cater the wedding shower she was throwing for judge Gail Simmons. The four teams were saddled with the additional challenge of building their dishes around one of the parts in the classic wedding mantra "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." It's a clever idea, but the folks on Team Blue got totally screwed.

Since there are no blue foods (Tom Collichio even argued that blueberries aren't actually blue, they're purple, which I disagree with), that team - Fabio, Leah, and Melissa - did the only sensible thing by basing their dish around seafood (sea, water, blue, duh). However, what they turned out looked unappetizing - a hunk of brown/gray fish on top of a drab plate of corn reduction - and apparently had the consistency of nursing home food, landing them in the bottom.

Faring better were team Old (Stefan, Jeff, and Hosea, who did a trio of heirloom tomato dishes) and team Borrowed (Jamie, Radhika, and Arianne, who "borrowed" from Radhika's Indian culture for a lamb dish), who placed in the top. In a pretty awesome Judges Table moment, Jamie whispered to Arianne that only she deserved the win, and then the judges turned around and gave it to...Arianne! HA! I like Jamie, and she seems like a killer chef. But she has a bee in her bonnet about perpetually getting overlooked, and I think it's starting to drive her a little nuts. I look forward to her losing her shit in a few more weeks.

Joining Team Blue in the loser bin was Team New (Eugene, Carla, and Danny), who put out one of the most spectacular disasters this show has ever seen. From conception - a surf and turf sushi roll with mango barbecue sauce and a frisee salad; what the hell does that have to do with "new"? - to execution, it was a trainwreck. Things got bad when Eugene botched the rice, worse when he decided to "salvage" it by throwing in other ingredients to mask its stickiness, and then things boiled into full-blown catastrophe when he had the genius idea that the women at the shower should just make the rolls themselves. The chefs would just put all the ingredients on the plate and people could pick and choose what they wanted.

Two problems with that: 1. People don't know how to make sushi, and women at a wedding shower probably aren't eager to be getting their hands all gross with rice and such. 2. He neglected to explain to them what to do with anything on the plate, so it was basically just a pile of random ingredients.

Eugene arguably should have gone home for his terrible decisions throughout the task. (Actually, Tom barked that ALL THREE should have gone home, citing Carla's failure to speak up when she saw just about everything going wrong.) But it was Danny who got the axe, and rightfully so. It wasn't a surprise, since the editing team worked double-hard making him look like a total buffoon this episode. Although I don't think it was that much of a feat. During his exit, Danny compared his "unfair" booting to a bad call in football, and then went on about things happen that referees don't see. But Danny, we saw you. We saw you suggest pickles as the central ingredient in a concept with the theme "new." We saw you decide to put bad-tasting mushrooms at the bottom of your teammate's salad without her approval. We saw you defend an indefensible dish. We saw you generally looking like an idiot. We saw you. You were on TV. I wonder if you knew that...