I've been thinking more about the Super Bowl smackdown on this week's Top Chef. Which really bugged me when I watched it. I felt like it wasn't fair. If two of (as far as I could tell from watching the episodes so far) best chefs end up in the bottom three, then something's got to be wrong. But I've thought about other ways of looking at the episode. And it seems to me that the producers could well have looked at the potential arc of the season while they were planning and thought that by the time they reached this point, there was a good chance that the top four and the bottom three would have pretty clearly separated themselves. If that happens, and I'd argue that it has this season, then unless someone chokes or injures themselves or something out-of-the-blue happens your left with three fairly predictable weeks of television. One way to deal with that is to shake up the elimination process. Which is exactly what they did. Instead of having them all compete with each other, they created these head-to-head matches. Plus, if the judges tied then the contest was decided by 5 culinary students of unknown skill levels picking which dish they liked better. Seen from that perspective, they actually did a pretty good job of shaking things up without radically deviating from the spirit of the show.
Barring any further weirdness, I still think it's Stefan, Jamie and Hosea in the top 4. With Jeff gone, it's a toss up between Fabio and Carla for the 4th spot. They don't seem to have the cooking chops but they've got as much personality as any 2 of the other chefs combined. Leah seems to have neither mad cooking skills nor much of a personality so I'm not sure how she's gotten this far.