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The Quickfire Challenge seems ominously simple. Since Las Vegas affords visitors to indulge the "good" and "bad" sides of their personality, cook a dish that illustrates their own struggles with their good and bad side. The angel and devil on either shoulder, if you will.

Since I'm in the middle of applying to law school, I'm a bit surprised that most chefs seem to take a theoretical, abstract approach to this challenge. Instead of actually portraying their own vices and virtues, telling the judges something sincere and honest about themselves as I'm trying to do in my application essays, the chefs seem to be trying to tackle good and evil in conceptual ways.

For example, Bryan is doing something with dark chocolate and vanilla mousse, which looks delicious but says nothing about himself. Likewise with Kevin, Eli and Pompous Mike. In fact, the only person that seems to be actually cooking for the angel and devil on their respective shoulder is everyone's favorite outcast: Robin.

Robin relates to us the fact that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she had to really think about the type of food she was consuming, pulling herself away from the sweets that she used to eat. Thus, she does a beautiful (but simple) salad plus an apple crisp that makes my mouth water just looking at it. Is it complex and revolutionary? No. Does it make me want to eat it? Hell yes.

The chefs that least impressed Michele Bernstein were Ash, Bryan (who never seems to do well in Quickfires) and Laurine. On top were Pompous Mike, Eli and Robin. And Robin ends up winning. The cameras quickly pan to everyone else's POed reactions. Eli instantly takes offense, saying sarcastically that if he'd said that he had breast cancer, he could have won, too.

I've never made it a secret that I dislike Eli. I find him childish and smart-alecky. But now I hate him. Robin deserved to win. She had a story, she built a dish around it and it tasted good. Period. Bottom line. So what if it was simple? Remember Carla last year? The chef that almost won the whole thing? Yeah, she cooked with simplicity, too.

So shut your pie-hole, Eli.

Penn and Teller, the famous magician duo, come out and perform a really cool version of the classic cup-and-ball trick. I'm flashing back to the Magician episode of Top Chef Masters when Anita Lo won with her scallop-looking daikon and wondering if this challenge will top that.

Nope. Taking cue from Penn and Teller's habit of deconstructing magic tricks for their audience, the chefs will each be given a classic American dish and asked to deconstruct it. The key with deconstruction, we learn, is to isolate the individual flavors of a dish and compose them in a way that the diners can taste each one on its own, but also combine them to reconstitute the taste of the whole dish. We've seen deconstruction on this show many times before, most memorably perhaps by Dale's deconstructed ratatouille in the Season 3 finale, so I'm thinking that most chefs shouldn't have a huge problem with this challenge.

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