Sir RaiderDuck OMS

Things I learned from this episode: A steel knife can lay in an abandoned cave for decades and not rust or be covered by detritus or carried off by an animal. If you're bitten by a cobra, you'll have a weird dream but otherwise suffer no ill effects. Old Korean martial arts instructors have huge mustaches that are falling off their faces (seriously, show: did no one notice the left side dangling off his face in one scene?). Community colleges have fraternities (neither my wife nor I remember seeing one at the community colleges we attended, and I don't remember seeing one at my daughter's, either). If you're a student at a community college, you can physically assault an employee without provocation in front of a group of people without being expelled, arrested, or even reprimanded. They have open houses for rental properties, complete with overbearing real estate agents. Daniel's son continues to alternate between omnipresent and completely invisible, depending on the needs of the current storyline. Cobra Kai has always taken place in an alternate universe with significant differences from ours, but this final season seems to be dialing it up to 11. But we've watched the first 52 episodes, so we might as well watch the final eight.

The Mrs. and I are divided on whether Sofia was always going to kill Johnny. My wife thinks she was, but I think Sofia wanted to keep him around but on a very short leash, which expired as soon as he sharply questioned her in front of everyone. He inadvertently made it obvious that his change of heart was just an act, and he still viewed her as a lightweight to be pushed around. One bullet to the head later, and his opinions are no longer her concern.

Wow. Serious shades of Rosemary Kennedy in this episode.* Those restraints looked like the most useless things ever. You can see why Sofia was so devastated at her brother's death, though. He was the only person in the universe on her side (except for maybe Dr. Rush placing a distant second). * For those who don't know: Rosemary Kennedy was JFK's younger sister, and RFK and Ted Kennedy's older sister. She became an emotionally unstable party girl in her early 20, so her father, worried that she'd do something to embarrass the family and damage its political ambitions, shipped her off to an asylum (without telling her mother) where she was literally lobotomized. She lived another 60 years but never spoke another intelligible word.

That's why the multiple subway rides as shown in the last episode. If you ride 2-3 subways during a busy time then go out to a surface parking lot, it'll be pretty hard for someone, cop or not, to tail you without being obvious. In other words, a cop tailing him would see him enter the subway station and might even track him for the first ride but would lose him afterwards, especially if Oz changes up the stops and whatnot. They'll know he's up to something but won't know where or with whom.

Are you sure about that? I've literally never seen a Shark Tank episode without Kevin. My impression is that the lineup is basically Mark in the far left chair, Kevin in the middle, Robert in the far right chair when he's there, Lori in mid-right, Barbara in mid-left, and Daymond either in the far right (if Robert's not present) or in the empty seat (if Robert is present). Guest sharks are usually in the mid-left except for Kevin Hart who goes in the far right chair (if Robert is absent). But I've never seen anyone but Kevin O'Leary in that center chair.

Remember that the one big Shark Tank rule is you're not allowed to take a deal for less money than your initial ask. So asking for a lot of money for a small percentage and allowing yourself to be talked into giving up a bigger chunk is an acceptable gambit as long as the sharks aren't turned off by your initial valuation. The lip balm guy made a mistake. Retail is where the big money is at in stuff like lip balm which most people never think about until they need it, but when they do need it, they're not going to wait days to get it from Amazon. They want it right now. Kevin's deal would have helped him get into retail. CVS, Walgreen's, and Safeway won't return Lip Balm Guy's calls. They will return Kevin O'Leary's calls. The sharks liked Sugardoh, but if you gross $5.6 million and still run a $400K deficit, there's something fundamentally wrong with your business model. The sharks know a money pit when they see one. I went to the Doatnuts website last night. New orders won't ship for 4-6 weeks. Didn't go further than that.

Kevin offering to buy the patent outright from the Moonies people was basically him saying "I can make money with your idea, but you're a couple of idiots I never want to see again." Also, remember that a standard Shark Tank pitch is about 45 minutes or so, edited down to 8-10 minutes for the show. My guess is Kevin wanted to market it to gay men exclusively and they pushed back. He then offered to buy the patent outright so he wouldn't have to care what they thought about anything. As for the mushroom grower: Robert was 100% correct that he shouldn't have had to cross-examine the guy to discover he hadn't shipped any units yet. And the owner turning down Kevin's decent offer over valuation concerns means he likely raised a bunch of working capital by selling shares that were based on his inflated valuation. If he sells a chunk of the company to Kevin for a hefty discount, he's looking at lawsuits or at least some unhappy investors on the phone saying "I paid you $350,000 for 5%. Why is O'Leary getting triple that amount for half of what I paid???" As others have pointed out, he screamed "shady" from the get-go.

I think Kevin is really the only irreplaceable shark. He sits in the middle and is basically the host (i.e. he's the one usually saying "OK, you have two offers. What are you gonna do?"). The seafood boils looked good to me and the Mrs., but $184 (on the website) for their Shark Tank Special which would would be one meal for the two of us??? Here in the Phoenix area, there are several excellent seafood places (including a chain called Angry Crab that does all manner of boils) where we would spend maybe half that much. I agree that you'd get the Not Fried Chicken ice cream maybe once as a novelty but that's it. I think Todd didn't go in on it (despite the theme being perfect for his chain) because he'd have to install ice cream freezers at all of his locations and train high-turnover employees how not to wreck one more machine. As he said, his chain works because they sell exactly one thing (two if you count the fries). They have a lot of Raising Cane's here. I personally think their chicken fingers are good but not great.

Also: It cannot be healthy to be breathing in that poop. Remember that there's no such thing as "odor." When you smell something, it's your nasal passages reacting to microscopic amounts of that substance being absorbed into your body. By the time you smell it, you've already been exposed to it, and animal feces is going to have all manner of unhealthy bacteria as you pointed out. Maybe they changed the ingredient listed on the barrel after it was hit? At some point, Gordon may switch Egypt over to the Red team to see if his personality clashes with the Blue team are more about him or them.

These challenges irritate me. Yes, I'm sure most restaurants have deliveries through the front door (as opposed to a service entrance near the kitchen) and don't have carts to put your stuff on. /s Shant's injury appeared legit. When the guy was helping him get into the van, Shant wasn't even moving his arm. I'm thinking either a pinched nerve or a completely torn muscle. Uri may have been more a case of self-elimination. If I had a hard time standing in one place because of my back (which is what he claimed), I'd damn sure get medical attention. Egypt is cooking well, but he's acting like he's already won this competition and is James' unofficial Assistant Sous-Chef or something. He's rubbing the other chefs the wrong way, and the minute he screws up during a service, they're all going to point the finger at him. Corbin was beyond useless, though.

FYI: The official YouTube Hell's Kitchen page has a great re-edit of Season 2 called Hell's Kitchen Raw. Each 45-minute episode features only that night's service: No challenges, no house drama, no punishments or rewards, nothing else (the episode literally starts as they walk in and start lining up at their stations for the dinner service). The longer edit shows how Ramsay, while as stern as ever, really teaches the chefs and tries to get them thinking that way. (Example: He'll say "Now I just said 'Two Carbonara.' I know you're still finishing up the previous appetizers, but NOW is when you should get your gears spinning and think whether you have your pasta ready to go. If not, drop it in the water right now so it's ready when you are.") And when he finally blows up, it's not out of nowhere like on the show. You can see his frustration gradually building up with each new easily-avoidable mistake. Anyway, it's highly recommended for any HK fan.

Cam, you moron: You either decided to take breaks or you had the yips. But you can't start your story one way and then change it midstream.

Christina Wilson is (I believe) currently the Executive VP of Ramsay's entire US restaurant operation. With a bunch of GR's restaurants located in Vegas, she may not have had time to jet back east to do the show. It's a bit odd seeing Michelle Tribble as a sous chef. A couple of years ago, she was a contestant on Food Network's Chopped where (continuing Ramsay and Food Network's longstanding practice of each pretending the other does not exist) her HK run and subsequent position with a Ramsay restaurant were not mentioned in any way. She stated her reason for competing on Chopped was to use the $10,000 prize money for Dietitian school to become a Registered Dietitian, leaving her cooking career behind. She didn't win her episode. As for two seasons being filmed back-to-back: I understand the two Vegas seasons were done the same way. Moving the HK production facilities to a remote location ("remote" meaning someplace not normally used for filming, not "remote" meaning the wilderness or anything) is probably spendy, but amortizing the expense across two seasons would help. As for the chefs: No strong feelings about any of them, save for being disgusted by the Alaska chef's septum piercing (which looked totally unhygienic and inappropriate for a fine dining restaurant). If you want to sport such a piercing when you're off the clock, whatevs. It's your body and your choice. But try to look professional when you're on the clock, please. As soon as the Blue Team chef mocked the idea of chocolate sauce on duck and said "We've got this" or whatever, it was obviously the Red Team was going to win. Finally: The show made a big deal of some of the chefs cramming the recipe books while others were goofing around. I assume there will be a payoff in the next ep.

The minute Jankie said "Let's have a dance party!", I'd reply "No thanks. I'll just sit over here." What exactly is he/she/it going to do?

It sounds like they only had a few hours from when Julie unexpectedly tested Positive this morning to when the show aired. You're not going to have time to contact Arisa Cox or her agent, come to a monetary agreement, fly her in, etc. Better to just go with someone already on the studio lot that day.