MasterChef recap: An elimination so tense, you could hear an immunity pin drop

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Tonight's episode hinges on one crucial and nerve-shredding question: will Therese play her pin? It would be a shame if she did, because that would mean that we'd have to spend the rest of the year without the suspense of asking whether someone is going to play an immunity pin. But it would be an even bigger shame if she needed to play it and then didn't. Unless you don't like Therese, but how can you not like Therese, right?

At the beginning of the day it seems unlikely that the pin will have to be played, because Therese is the Dessert Queen – a title bestowed via the display of the words "Dessert Queen" on the screen during commercials for MasterChef – and the pressure test is a dessert challenge. It is to be set by Kirsten Tibballs, master chocolatier and a woman whose predatory smile speaks of a woman who likes nothing better than turning chocolate into someone else's misery. She walks into the kitchen determined to crush a dream, and so she shall. But surely it won't be Therese, whose skill with desserts has been evident since day one when she made that weird mushroom thing?

The challenge is extremely difficult to the point of being kind of stupid. The amateurs must make Kirsten's Exotique mousse cake… and her Style Rebellion lollipops… and her ruby financier. Three complicated and pretentious desserts to make, in three and a half hours. Jock asks Kirsten whether it's even doable. Kirsten answers that it's definitely doable for anyone with three decades' experience as a professional chocolatier. She shows the amateurs how to decorate a cake using screen printing, which she seems to think is a helpful hint rather than a clear demonstration that the entire exercise is completely ridiculous. As the old saying goes: once screen printing is involved, it's time to stop making desserts.

The aim of the challenge is, obviously, to convince all of the contestants to give up and go home, yet bizarrely they choose to actually try to make the three desserts. This includes Therese, who can whip out her pin at any stage but has decided to have a horrible day instead.

"I dunno about you guys, but I can hear a pin drop in here," says Andy to the other judges, who cannot hear a pin drop because Andy is talking. Kirsten's eye roves around the kitchen as she wonders who she will devour first. Meanwhile Justin has his financiers in the oven and so must look elsewhere for funding.

Brent and Therese complete their screen printing without death or major injury. Justin does his and panics that it hasn't worked, but luckily for him Kirsten is right there to look smug at him. Somehow, despite his anxiety, when he lifts the screen up, the print has worked perfectly, suggesting that maybe this is actually really easy. To emphasise the point, Dan's works perfectly too. This whole challenge is a piece of piss, clearly.

Kirsten comes to Brent's bench to flirt. "So you're very good at measurements?" she simpers, and follows up with, "Do you think we can be friends after this?". There's a definite whiff of lust in the air as Kirsten eyes Brent's luxuriant beard with sin on her mind.

Dan begins making his peanut butter and jelly cream, a crucial part of all three desserts. It quickly becomes apparent that his peanut butter jelly cream is turning out to be more a sort of peanut butter and jelly gravel. Fortunately he remembers the No.1 rule of cooking: everything can be fixed by pouring some water on it. He does this and all is well.

Therese begins filling her Style Rebellion lollipops, which Kirsten named after some words she saw on a t-shirt once. "Let's make Willy Wonka proud!" Kirsten suddenly shouts, confirming the doubts over her ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. A major part of making the lollipops is tempering chocolate, which as anyone who's ever watched MasterChef knows, is a process that is both difficult and impossible. Many excellent cooks have been driven mad by chocolate-tempering, and it looks like Therese is about to join their ranks. Her coloured chocolate is too cold. The only solution: to understand the essential pointlessness of this entire exercise and give up. But no, she persists.

Meanwhile, Brent is performing brilliantly with his chocolate, while Kirsten watches him intently, wishing it were her piping bags he's squeezing.

Therese dips a lollipop into her multi-coloured chocolate. "Nice, Therese!" calls a voice from the balcony. "No, it's not nice," snaps Therese, who knows the difference between a nice lollipop and a not-nice one. She's in the weeds, her lollipops looking even rougher than those produced by Dan, who is hurling chocolate around with a spatula like Jackson Pollock but still coming out looking lovely. On the other hand, his balls keep falling off their sticks, and he regrets not having this problem seen to by a doctor before he started.

There are 10 minutes left, which means Therese has only 10 minutes to play her pin and escape this nightmare. Justin is carefully constructing his pink lattice tube, the purpose of which is to demonstrate the contestant's total obedience to the recipe and abandonment of independent thought.

Therese, having not played her pin, gets her mousse cake out of the chiller and discovers she put her pattern on the wrong way round. Her cake has no pattern and she can't glaze it. She has five minutes to play her pin. She asks the balcony if she should play it. Those who like her tell her she should. Those who want to see her humiliated tell her she shouldn't. We cut to Brent making his lattice, as if anyone gives a crap about Brent's lattice. Suddenly Justin begins screaming, "WHERE'S THE RASPBERRIES?!" as his psychotic break really starts to bite.

With 30 seconds to go, Therese still hasn't played her pin even though her cake is ugly, her lattice is too thick and her lollipops are barely up to Chupa Chup standard. As the room counts down from 10, her head explodes – ad break. The balcony screams at Therese to play the pin. She's not playing the pin. Four, three, two, one… ZERO.

She didn't play the pin.

She didn't play the pin.

She… she…

Time for some extremely tense tasting. Justin serves his desserts first. They are fantastic, which surprises nobody more than Justin. Brent is next. His desserts are wonderful, plus Kirsten wants to bury herself in his beard, so he's definitely safe.

And now… Therese. There is no glaze on her cake, or pattern around the outside, making it a dull brown cylinder. Her financier is a sloppy mess with a thick and unattractive lattice tube. Her lollipops appear to have developed some kind of tumour. She will have to fall back on the least important part of any dish: the taste. Which frankly ain't gonna cut it.

Therese's only hope now is that Dan is incredibly bad at this. And hey, he's not great, but… he's much too good to save the Dessert Queen. The entire kitchen stands stunned, mouths agape. Some are in tears for fairly stupid reasons. Dan whispers an apology to Therese for being better than her. "So stupid… so stupid," says Therese, and look, she's not wrong.

And so Therese, creator of the famous Weird Mushroom, loses her crown of Dessert Queen, which must now pass, confusingly, to Brent. It's a devastating blow for Therese, who steadfastly refused to save herself with her immunity pin, even when it became blatantly obvious that her dishes were not going to turn out well. But despite the disappointment and embarrassment of this crushing defeat, at least she will go home with the consolation of knowing that she will relive today's events every night for the rest of her life as she lies awake in bed staring into the darkness. So that's something.

Tune in tomorrow, when everyone tries to find a way to go on.

• Catch up on Ben Pobjie's previous MasterChef Australia 2021 recaps