Oh, Eliza Wilson, we hardly knew thee.
(Except for the fact that we totally did because season nine of Masterchef Australia has been on our screens almost every night for 10 weeks.)
But if there’s one thing fans of the show are feeling after last night’s elimination, is that Eliza was robbed. ROBBED I TELL YOU.
Because the 30-year-old theatre nurse from Victoria was never meant to be up for elimination in the first place. She was only subbed in because her fellow contestant, Sarah Tiong, decided to play the all-powerful immunity pin.
Wilson had never experienced a pressure test or an elimination cook-off during her whole time on the show—but last night, her first became her very last and she was sent home.
It's one of the cruelest twists of fate we've seen on the show and fans were definitely feeling it.
Others claimed that fellow contestant Tamara Graffen should have been sent home instead.
Even the Masterchef judges themselves were shocked that they had to send Wilson home.
"None of you deserves to go home but it is a competition and one of you has to," George Calombaris told the three chefs "cooking for their lives."
LISTEN: The Binge hosts Clare and Laura have some advice for the Masterchef contestants...
"After nine years, we're used to shocks in this competition and today's elimination is a shock," Matt Preston added.
"We don't think anyone has cooked as consistently and as well in the competition as you have."
It seems the only person not floored by the results of last night's cook-off was Wilson herself.
She told News Corp Australia that she has no hard feelings against Tiong for throwing her into the sudden death round.
"We had a chat about it the night before and I fully supported her decision," Wilson said.
"[Sarah] was feeling really bad about it... I tried to reassure her she was making the right decision.
"That is what she had the pin for and she had worked so hard to get it."
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Top Comments
Immunity pins shouldn't exist - if it's a show about cooking, then "game play" shouldn't come into it. That was my biggest bug-bear about Biggest Loser, it quickly moved from "losing weight" to see who could outwit the best to get to the end, with the majority of the show "tempting" them to make bad decisions to win money, etc, rather than change of lifestyle. At least survivor is open and honest about their expectations for their participants.
It's felt like the last couple of weeks have had a lot of manufactured drama, and that's not why I watched Masterchef instead of MKR etc.
The first time Sarah had the choice to play her immunity pin, they didn't say one of the others would be put into elimination in her place or try to make her feel responsible for the producers' cruel decisions. This time they did all of that, and you could see it got to her. It felt mean.
Then the decision to put Eliza into the elimination in place of Sarah despite her dish the previous night being really good and coming 3rd. and then kicking her out when the judges could have pretty easily said Tamara's dish looked nothing like pastry-shop-window macarons (because they didn't) and it was a pretty simple-looking dish for this stage of the competition (it was).... ugh.
There's usually one elimination-for-the-sake-of-controversy at this stage of Masterchef and we just got it. Hate that.