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With the next dish up, Amanda is screaming and running around the kitchen like crazy, worried about their fish, worried about their beans in the pressure cooker - she is a madwoman. I feel bad for Jim, but he seems to be holding up well by dialing down his energy to compensate for Amanda’s abundance of it. They serve a seared gray tiefish with tomato and fennel broth. All the diners criticize the undercooked beans, which, in Mike’s words, are hard to get past.

Casey, Miss Immunity, is last up, and she’s a mess as well. She barely has time to char her amberjack before serving it with kimchi and charred rabe, noting as she leaves the kitchen that she wishes she could just throw it out the window. Many fish on the diners’ plates are raw and Padma says that Casey’s porridge is “horrible.” She apologizes, “I don’t know how else to say it, it’s gummy and has no flavor.” Ughh. Casey knows that if she didn’t have immunity, she’d be sent home. And she’s right.

We have some good news to get through before we’re there, though. At the top of the group are Sheldon and Shirley, who put out a well-planned, well-executed fish, John and Katsuji, with a delicious sauce, and Jamie and Sylva, who cooked every component of their dish perfectly. Katsuji takes home the crown due to his amazing fresh tomato sauce.

With Padma noting that Casey picked a good day to have immunity, the other three teams are brought before the judges. Jim and Amanda erred with their undercooked beans and pedestrian mussels, which brought a “South Jersey” flavor to the dish. Emily and Brooke suffered from a lack of editing, with way too much going on in the dish and nothing making sense. Silvia and BJ’s fish ate “like overcooked chicken breast,” which was painful to get through because it was so tough.

Unlike last week’s triumph, with great dishes all the way around, each one this week had major flaws. Tom asks Mike which fish, in his opinion, was the worst of all, and Mike singles out BJ and Silvia’s barrel fish. Tom notes that it wouldn’t have been so tough if BJ hadn’t overreduced the sauce, leaving no liquid for the fish to bathe in.

And that’s enough. BJ is going home. His team had the worst fish and he was the biggest reason for that error. BJ notes that it “sucks” going home this early - he spent ten years trying to get on the show and thought he’d come in and win the whole damn thing. Instead, he’s headed off to Last Chance Kitchen. He’s proud that he was able to hold his own with some very talented chefs, but he’s going to have to do that and more if he hopes to get back into the competition.

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