Love in a mystery box MasterChef's Love Week starts off with an empty feeling. Love. Is it what drives us in our daily life? Is it what we treasure more than anything else? Is it why we are still watching Masterchef? That's more some kind of unidentified pathology. Christina is handed custard apples, which infuriates her, as custard apples are an imaginary fruit. Anyway, this week is Love Week, which one can only assume means five nights of darkly ironic horror. At the MasterChef house, Rishi is bossing people around as usual. He compares MasterChef to a juggling game, in that on one hand he got an immunity pin, but on the other hand Samira is back in the competition. He fails to enlighten us as to how this is like a juggling game - having won an immunity pin he is now too arrogant to both with making sense. It wouldn't really be Love Week if there wasn't the potential for heart break. Arriving in the kitchen, mystery boxes await, and so does Gary, who asks the contestants who they love in a stupid voice. I mean Gary asks in a stupid voice, the contestants don't love people in a stupid voice. Emma loves her boyfriend. Gary asks why. Emma answers. No idea what she says. Christina loves her children, because one's a fighter and one's six going on sixteen. She bursts into tears as she thinks of the child's tragic ageing disease. Nobody else says who they love because nobody else's loved ones are interesting. They open their mystery boxes, which are empty. Matt assures them this is not a metaphor for love being empty, but we all know that in fact it is. The task is to select six ingredients including one which is weird and nobody would want to eat. Kelty immediately begins speaking extremely fast so as to get a headstart. Off they rush to select their disgusting ingredients: Noelene picks brains because she got confused and thought it was Wizard of Oz week. George is not feeling the love for Vern's dish. This is when Matt drops the bombshell: their ingredients are not for them, but to be given to a competitor. The contestants react with shock, but not a day goes by without some stupid twist in this series, so they should have seen it coming. Samira gives hers to Vern knowing that he hates desserts. Vern gives his to Noelene, who says "I hate you," adding "I seriously hate you" just in case Vern thought she was joking. Now Noelene must make her decision, as George bounces up and down squealing like a castrated puppy and Kelty says "I don't want those brains." As I said, ironic. In the end Noelene gives the brains to Kelty, as these two are locked in a deadly battle to win the crown of MasterChef Champion Irritant 2013. The rest of the contestants proceed to assign their ingredients in as dull a manner as possible. Lynton gives his to Emma. "When Lynton gives me his box I'm really happy," she says, and we know how she feels. Lucy and Neha then do a confusing swap, thus proving that I didn't really understand what was going on in the first place. And off they go with cooking! It's really one of the weak points of MasterChef that they've kept this "food preparation" segment in the show. It definitely makes for a flat spot in between the important bits. Rishi begins his meal by carefully cutting into his Western Star butter with the label facing the camera as recommended by all Michelin-starred chefs. Kelty begins his by whining about having brains, thus justifying his nickname "Kelty Anti-Scarecrow." Lucy babbles something about sugar. Emma babbles something about god-knows-what in response. Lucy is cooking with something called "dragon fruit" - pretty sure this is also fictional - but is shocked to find it is not white, in a distressing call for racial purity. She is also making a pav, as is Neha. Neha is upset about this - "I'm going up against the dessert queen!" she cries, in accordance with MasterChef bylaw 34.9, which states that at least one contestant in every season shall be designated the "dessert queen," no matter how vast a departure from reality this designation is. Nobody has any idea why it's Lucy who is the dessert queen this year, but she seems to have drawn that straw, and therefore anybody competing with her on desserts is required to roll their eyes around and pretend to be feeling powerful emotions. A quick break for an ad for a MasterChef Dining competition, in which you could win the chance to give Matt Preston a free meal, and then one for Ripper Street, so as to make the food on the show even more appetising, and back to the kitchen, where Gary is accusing everyone of getting confused. He means the contestants I think, but it applies to everyone at the moment. Samira pops up to let us know exactly what's going on, or more accurately what was going on 15 minutes ago. Gary comes to Samira's bench to tell her to find out where the sea urchin's mouth is - nice prank Gary: sea urchins have no mouths! Samira decides to taste the sea urchin. "It's an acquired taste," she says, not knowing what that phrase means. She crumbs the sea urchin and finds it doesn't help. She decides to leave the sea urchin raw, the lazy cow. Noelene is also cooking with sea urchins. She loves the taste of them, not surprisingly, since many members of her immediate family live on the sea floor. Meanwhile Vern has decided to go out on a limb like some kind of idiot. He's going to make some ice cream balls, in an idiosyncratic definition of limb-going-out-on. His custard boils over (not a euphemism) and he doesn't have the time to do anything about it. Gary and George are having some fun gloating over their cruel treatment of the contestants. George likes the idea that Vern is making ice cream. He hates ice cream but he likes the idea of it. "What we want is dishes with lots of love," says George, reminding us of the theme, which as yet has not entered into the challenge in any way whatsoever. Apparently "Love Week" on MasterChef is just going to be a week in which people occasionally say the word "love." "I've decided I'm going to egg and breadcrumb these brains, then deep-fry them," says Kelty, and is only barely restrained from drilling into his own skull. "The brains on the plate!" the judges cry. Will you be a heartbreaker, or will you have your heart broken? George yells, once more failing utterly to connect this in any way with the activity being engaged in. Rishi has a vision of the perfect pasta dish, believing that the ability to visualise the perfect pasta dish will necessitate its existence. But will the judges warm to Rishi's appeal to St Anselm's ontological argument? Christina wants to know if she can ask Vern something. Vern tells her she can't. He's too busy making ice cream to use with his rambutan, which I believe is a form of south-east Asian wicker furniture. Vern's ice cream is not going to be ready in time. In fact nothing is going to be ready in time, unless by chance he suddenly manages to pull something off dramatically in the nick of time. Ooh the suspense! Another break, this time so we can be assured that we have nothing to lose with Lite 'n' Easy: the advertisers apparently not having heard of the concept of self-respect. Also Under The Dome is on 8.30 Tuesday on Ten, if you're into rip-offs of the Simpsons Movie. Back in the kitchen and George tells them "We love delicious food." Give it up George - they've known that for months and it hasn't helped. Rishi has made something which sort of looks like pasta, but also sort of looks like toilet paper. He's a bit worried he'll go into elimination, but not too worried, because he's well aware God has ordained him winner of MasterChef. Meanwhile, Vern has no idea how to save his dish and is considering setting fire to the building. A lightbulb moment occurs: he will cook a lightbulb! No, actually, he will default to the standard MasterChef move: arranging a bunch of rubbish on a weird-shaped plate. As the judges babble incoherently about love for no obvious reason, time ticks down, and suddenly it's all over. Vern is unhappy. Samira is paranoid about sea urchin, as you tend to be. Neha is continuing to insist that Lucy is the dessert queen. First up for tasting is Samira and her raw sea urchin with other stuff. "It's a very interesting dish," George lies. He believes the sea urchin "makes so much sense" - Samira has taken the time to teach her dish the basics of formal logic, and it has paid off. Next is Noelene, who also has sea urchin and some other stuff. What Gary likes is that the sea urchin is steeped in vinegar - again, it "makes sense," apparently. What Gary doesn't like is the rest of the dish, or Noelene's attitude presumably. Kelty steps up and boasts "the brains are working well." Careful there, Kelty. He's put chutney in his dish, in case the brains weren't disgusting enough to start with. The judges love Kelty's dish, destroying any credibility they might have possessed. Kelty is proud of himself, which is an outcome nobody ever wants. Rishi brings up his pappardelle with chicken hearts - the least creative dish Gary's seen from Rishi, which should be a plus given what most of these people come up with when they get creative. "It better taste good," Gary says, unexpectedly changing the rules. Unfortunately it doesn't taste good. Gary doesn't think the chicken hearts are shining through. This is a good thing, but the judges were long ago driven insane, so they think it's bad. Christina bring sup her crispy skin salmon with a custard apple puree, which the insane judges say is "the prettiest thing cooked today," because actually it looks just as foul as it sounds. But the judges love it so much that inspirational guitar riffs play in the background. Matt says if they walked into somewhere swanky and got Christina's dish, they'd go "wow!" Which is confusing - surely if it was good, it should be something you'd expect in a swanky place, not something surprising. Next come Daniel, Emma and Lynton, who are not part of the soap opera tonight and so are finished with in seconds. Neha and Lucy serve at the same time in order to artificially generate fake tension. Neha is nervous because her dish is going to be compared to Lucy's. It's also going to be compared to everyone else's - this is, in fact, how this show works. Neha claims Lucy can pull off a dessert in her sleep, which is neither true nor believable. Anyway Neha's pavlova is crap and Lucy's is good so I guess she is the "dessert queen" or whatever, even though she "deconstructed" her pavlova like the worst kind of pretentious pillock. Vern steps up with his random assemblage of pieces of nothing. Unlike Noelene and Samira's sea urchins, Vern's weird dish doesn't make sense. In fact George is confused by it and has a headache. He walks back, chastened. Everyone claps. He tells them not to, echoing all of our thoughts. Judgement is at hand, but first we have to watch an ad for Offspring which promises "some of the best television you'll ever see" - probably grounds for a complaint to the Advertising Standards Board in that barefaced lie. Back to the kitchen. First we learn who the good people who get nice music are. Tonight they are Daniel, Samira, Lynton and Kelty, all of whom managed to mask the essentially revolting nature of their dishes sufficiently. Also Christina, who has shocked the judges with her basic competence. But now for the nasty music and finding out who the bad people are and hearing Gary say some more stupid crap about love. The bad people are Rishi, Noelene, Neha and Vern. Vern shakes his head, disgusted at having found himself standing alongside these losers. "You could have put up a great little cheesecake," Gary says to Vern, "but you chose to do the opposite." How one determines what the "opposite" of a cheesecake is I have no idea. And then the bombshell - Noelene is not in the bottom three, and is safe, and nice music plays. And then the other bombshell - if Rishi uses his immunity pin, Noelene won't be safe and will be in the bottom three, and nasty music plays. And then the third bombshell - everyone's going to talk more nonsense about love tomorrow night! God help us all.