It's time for the penultimate episode of everyone's favorite show, "Top Chef Jumps the Shark in Canada By Way of Texas." And no matter how silly this season gets, it's always a blast to live-blog the show together—which we're about to do in the comments under this post. Join us!

Some of you out there with sharp vocabularies may have guessed that my use of the word "penultimate" means that the season's final episode won't arrive until next week—and you'd be right. I thought last week that the show would end tonight, since it usually does when they're down to three chefs—but apparently, we're in for an extra week in Canada before this crazy season finally dies. Or who knows—maybe they'll fly the final two chefs out to Steppes of Central Asia next week, and make them cook camel mutton in a yurt for a tribe of Mongolian nomads. The way this show's been going lately, that would make perfect sense.

This season's increasing silliness was a major topic of last week's live blog commentary, a few highlights from which I've collected in this separate post. Other notable aspects of our last chat party included these:

  • We hated all the silly challenges involving things like gondola-riding, skiing, shooting and chopping various ingredients out of ice. Adjectives commenters used to describe them included "stupid" "ludicrous" "gimmicky," "moronic," "asinine," "embarrassing," "imbecilic" and "bullshit." At one point, commenter BxgrlJeri summed things up nicely by observing that the show had "jumped the shark on cross-country skis."
  • Many of us loved Bravo's pre-commercial edit showing Beverly firing a gun followed by Sarah falling down, making it look like Bev murdered Sarah. Request to the Internet: Can somebody please GIF-animate that sequence ASAP? Thanks!
  • Sarah's description of Beverly as "the silent horse who fights like a tiger" left many of us scratching our heads. Commenter GoOnWithoutMe extended the logic of this metaphor by suggesting that Bev is also "a sad dog who roars like a giraffe," which makes about as much sense.
  • Most of us were bummed that the final three chefs who will include Sarah and Lindsay, a k a "Witchy" and "Bitchy." (I just made those nicknames up, by the way—feel free to decide for yourself which name applies to which chef.)

In addition to the continued presence of two chefs whom most of us hate, here are a few more things in store on tonight's episode (which, as usual, starts at 10 Eastern):

  • The chefs will prepare far-East-themed cuisine in a "tag team quickfire" that includes three Asian master chefs. Because making Asian dishes in Canada in a show called "Top Chef Texas" is only logical, of course.
  • The elimination challenge will (and I'm quoting Bravo here) "fuse the concept of fire and ice into one cohesive dish … as a culinary testament of their journey from Texas heat to Vancouver cold." And I'm sorry to belabor the point, but … seriously, have this show's challenge designers been smoking some of Padma's weed this season? That's the only explanation I can come up with here.
  • Paul will not be eliminated. At least, I predict he won't, because this show's producers must realize that a Sarah-Lindsay final would likely cause thousands of angry Top Chef fans to riot in the streets outside Bravo headquarters.

Speaking of riots, the riotous fun of our weekly chat party is about to get under way. So grab a non-Molotov cocktail, and I'll see you down in the comments!