They even went through in detail how Peter and David were tied in the Showstopper, and Paul’s post-show justification felt extremely thin. I’m sure there were good reasons to pick one over the other, but they didn’t justify it well on screen at all. Ironically the contestants themselves gave them the perfect justification to go one way or the other - either say you like Dave’s decision to revisit his failures or find it insufficiently visionary and move on.
As for Laura, she was clearly incredibly out of her depth, and it’s the first time I can think of when a finalist obviously had zero chance of winning. I don’t think she had a single gel-based item set at any point during the entire series. She constantly struggled with timing and contingency planning, workspace management, and even fundamental tool use. And her judging was more heavily edited than any other contestant. This episode they literally cut everything Paul said to her other than “tastes great”, in one case obviously cutting him off mid-sentence. It became unignorable a couple episodes ago, when Laura’s signature judging was bland and inoffensive and afterwards she talks about how savage the judges were. I think the producers kept hoping she’d shape up, and by the time it became obvious that wasn’t happening...
Also I feel like contestant cooperation happened less often this season, but Laura went out of her way to belittle the other contestants- she was constantly mocking Hermine for being French and Peter for silly things like “measuring” and “planning”, and it really grated.
