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Richard’s season has not been a cakewalk, either. As we notated several times throughout the competition, he has been held to a higher standard than his competitors. When special guest judge Jimmy Fallon sampled Richard’s food, he sounded disappointed and dejected by the offering. In that episode, Richard had reached too far in the Quickfire challenge, so he pulled back in the Elimination Challenge, returning a measured dish. Unfortunately, his reputation preceded him, which led Fallon to note: “I think I was expecting like a smoke machine and laser beams. To come out as a Richard fan, I have all his baseball cards. I have everything…posters. This wasn’t a homerun. This was bunted, and I really wanted him to swing for the fences.” This aptly summarizes the raised expectations judges have for Richard Blais. It came to a head in the Island Fever episode as Lorena Garcia had such unrealistic standards for Richard’s food that she came away disappointed by all of it. This is the problem in any competition that lacks standardized judging.

To his credit, Mr. Blais was a strong performer throughout the competition anyway. He has won three Elimination Challenges as well as a Quickfire. Even more impressively, he was only in the bottom grouping once the entire season. In episode six, We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat, Richard’s dish was described as having too many components. I should also note that there were three people on Richard’s team, so the blame wasn’t even exclusively his in the only Elimination Challenge where he fell in the bottom group. Of course, Richard also convinced himself he was going home in the Give Me Your Huddled Masses episode, and Padma magnified that when she tricked Richard with a “please pack your knives” start before ending with “you’re going to the Bahamas”.

In the entire season, Richard didn’t have much reason to sweat although his personality caused him to do so needlessly each and every challenge. While Dale was the stronger performer in terms of wins, he came closer to elimination multiple times before finally being eliminated. Richard was always ahead of the pack in terms of consistent excellence, which is why we have had him as the favorite to win since the preseason rankings.

To a larger point, we had speculated in our preseason evaluation that all three of us were hoping to see an All-Stars season that featured frequent match-ups between the best competitors from seasons four and six. As it turned out, that wasn’t much of a competition. Jennifer Carroll was eliminated at least ten episodes sooner than would have been reasonably expected. Meanwhile, Dale and Antonia proved themselves to be chefs on the same talent level as Richard Blais and actually outperformed Mike Isabella by quite a bit during the season.

As of this moment, contenders from season four have won eight out of the 14 elimination challenges as well as four out of ten individual Quickfire challenges plus a fifth one when the seasons competed against one another in the first episode. Season six’s wins all come from Mike. He has two Quickfire victories and two Elimination Challenge wins. No matter what happens in the finale, season four has staked a claim to having the deepest cast ever due to those 13 All-Stars victories as opposed to the four from season six. Yes, I realize that none of the top three contestants from season six competed in All-Stars, but here is my counter to this. One of the two players that did return didn’t make it out of the second episode while the one who did wasn’t a factor until we were down to a handful of players. Conversely, three of the final six players came from season four while even Spike, whose elimination was questionable, outlasted Jen by two episodes. Overall, season four has demonstrated superiority over season six during Top Chef All Stars. The only remaining question is whether that theme continues tonight or whether Mike pulls off the huge upset.

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