The unthinkable has happened. Marion is gone. Skewered by a satay, no less.
When last night's two-stage MasterChef elimination reduced the four members of the blue team to just two, and then demanded they each produce a satay sauce in 15 minutes, the conspiracy theorists (and there are many) must have thought the fix was in. How could Marion – with her technical brilliance, her grace under pressure, her Thai cook for a mother – not win? Aaron was a goner, for sure.
But Gary and George decreed that Aaron had produced the better sauce (that's sure how it looked in viewerland, too), and the conspiracy theorists were proved wrong.
Or were they? Rather than losing its star talent, has MasterChef in fact just pulled off an absolute masterstroke?
Consider this. Marion Grasby has been the clear favourite to take out the MasterChef crown almost from the beginning. The 27-year-old former ABC journalist was the first to win a celebrity chef challenge (sorry to bring that up again, Frank Camorra) and the sight of her winning yet another competition had become as much a staple of the show as that of watching Jonathan "the Eliminator" fight his way back from the brink yet again (last night's elimination battle was, from recollection, his seventh of the season).
That air of predictability threatened to rob the show of much of its tension as it enters its final fortnight. But now it's anyone's game. As back-from-the-dead contestant Jimmy said last night, "I see two looks on everyone's faces. It's a look of shock and a look of relief. 'Marion's gone . . . now I stand a chance to win this'."
MasterChef has been ratings gold for Ten this season, and three times this week has topped the 2 million figure (with a series high of 2.14 million last night), an astonishing result for a show that runs six nights a week. But the benchmark that the series has set itself is massive: last year's grand finale was watched by a staggering 3.7 million people in the five mainland capitals (the traditional guide to "all people" ratings figures), and by an estimated 4.2 million people in the entire country. That's almost one in five Australians.
It achieved that result because a lot of people who had followed the show sporadically returned for the finale. That happens with all long-form reality contests – Dancing With the Stars, Australian Idol, Australia's Got Talent – but numbers like that are rare. Only the first season of Idol has come close to matching them.
This season, MasterChef's ratings have been consistently strong, averaging in recent weeks 1.8 million or so per night. But there was a danger that, as Marion's inevitable victory drew near, those figures wouldn't spike in the way they did last year. The rusted-on viewers would keep watching, but the casuals would not.
Now, though, it's a different game. There's a genuine excitement again to the question "who do you think will win?" It's always been compelling television, but now MasterChef has got back the one ingredient it looked to have lost: surprise.
In offices, at kitchen tables, in schoolyards, everyone will be talking about MasterChef today.
Conspiracy or not, for everyone associated with the show that is the tastiest result imaginable.
Karl Quinn is the entertainment editor at The Age
Email a friend
Favourites
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Digg
StumbleUpon
MySpace
Reddit
Newsvine
LinkedIn
Kwoff
Twitter