'Hell's Kitchen': Prepping for the finals

What I want to see every year on the penultimate episode of "Hell's Kitchen" is the preparation for the final service. I want to see the sweating and hair-pulling and teeth-grinding involved in getting ready for the service that controls the finalists' fate. We get that, but we have to sift through a whole lot of filler, too.

I ask you, is it really necessary in the second-to-last episode to give us the full recap of what went down this season? The whole episode is so overloaded with irrelevant bits and pieces already, can't the recap wait until the final episode?

As for the good stuff... how about Danny and Paula getting liquored up after learning they were the finalists? Those clowns didn't bother doing any work on their restaurants that night, they just sat down and drank and drank and drank. That's your strategy for winning? Even if they weren't going to work that night (which was probably a mistake), Danny drinking enough so that he had a hangover the next day was dumb. Really dumb.

Danny wasn't quite working at full speed when he sat down with the designer to work out the look of the restaurant. Danny clearly didn't know what the man was talking about with the booths (as he later showed), but he was quite clear that he wanted a mounted fish on the wall. I think that was a great idea, but the designer wasn't into it. Designer-man was thinking it would end up looking like a "bait shop," but I was imagining something closer to that McDonald's filet-o-fish commercial, the one with singing fish (I love that ad). Sure, it wouldn't make the restaurant "high class," but it would make it fun.

I liked the twist tonight of having family/loved ones help design the place while Danny and Paula went to Atlantic City. I just kept thinking about how angry Danny and Paula would be if their loved ones destroyed the look of the restaurant. It wouldn't cost them the victory in the competition (the win is never based on that), but it could have lead to familial fireworks. It didn't -- at least not on camera -- but it could have.

After the side trip to Atlantic City -- where I definitely liked seeing what the chefs were cooking, I would have happily eaten any of the dishes, especially the jerked lobster -- we learned that there were no restaurant design disasters. There were even fish on the wall of Danny's place, but sadly none of the fish seemed to be of the singing variety. I'm hoping that they just hadn't had time to put in the batteries yet, but I'm not holding my breath.

As with the restaurant design, I'm never quite sure about the relevancy of the returning chefs to help out during the final service. Ramsay is smart enough to know when the helpers mess things up as opposed to the problems lying with the finalists. It is possible that Paula is slightly disadvantaged to have Lacey on her team, but I really don't think that Lacey is going to cost Paula the victory. If one of the helpers makes a mistake, what Ramsay is going to look at is how Danny or Paula dealt with the mistake, he's not going to fault the finalist for it (even Ramsay couldn't make Lacey a good cook).

Quick bites:

• Michael Schulson was the first of the tasters tonight during the challenge. Several years ago I worked with him on a television show called Go Ahead, Make My Dinner. Sadly, he never made me dinner.
• What do you think -- how relevant is the team of returning contestants each finalist gets? Could, by virtue of their being a bad chef or just plain obnoxious, one of the returnees cost Paula or Danny the victory?

The TV and Film Guy's Reviews - you wouldn't be laughing at all.