Anatomy of a Great British Baking Show Flameout

Spoilers follow for this season of The Great British Baking Show, the finale of which debuted on Netflix on Friday, November 29. 

First off: Dylan will be fine. Our Jason Momoa/Rufio mashup with the painterly skills and the surprising flavor combinations has more than 100,000 Instagram followers, a new job in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and I have to assume he’s weighing various hair-product-line endorsements against each other. (And if not, why not?) But also: Poor Dylan. At what point should we consider that Paul Hollywood’s handshakes may be curse, and that being the GBBS frontrunner isn’t actually the best place to be?

Despite his two Star Baker wins, three handshakes — the most of the season — and his overall vibe as a lovable scamp and maybe Paul’s protege, Dylan struggled quite a lot in the final in a way that wasn’t dissimilar to how he struggled in the patisserie semifinals. Last week, he didn’t have enough time to finish his croissant signature or his entremet showstopper; his dough on the former was underproved and he delivered one fewer than required in the latter, a mistake I’m surprised the judges mostly glossed over. This week, his scones were also unfinished, and his Colours of Murano hanging cake was far smaller and rougher around the edges than either Georgie’s or Christiaan’s. He came in last in the technical and delivered misshapen plaited rolls, much like how he underperformed in the bread week technical. And although his showstopper had interesting flavor pairings of Earl Grey tea and candied orange, he chose the exact wrong type of cake, so his genoise sponge, which had pockets of flour, became too densely condensed when stacked. In final judging, Paul insisted that Dylan, Georgie, and Christiaan were “closer than you’d think,” but in a competition that now hinges almost entirely on amazing showstoppers, Paul’s insistence on tension didn’t really feel genuine.

None of this is to rag on Dylan, who seems like an ambitious guy who could get a little too emotionally invested in his work and couldn’t figure out how to pivot from his original ideas into something more manageable. His mistakes mostly derived from timing issues and blindspots in his baking fundamentals, which makes sense, because he’s only 20 years old. But perhaps, too, there was a bit of overconfidence at play here, and that’s also understandable — how many times did Paul and Prue explicitly tell Dylan his flavors and his ideas were amazing, and implicitly tell him those were more important than the actual execution of his bakes by sending him through to the next week? Bread week was a perfect example: He placed last in technical and still was awarded Star Baker over Nelly, who was top in technical and whose signature and showstopper were both impressive (and whose own reputation as a favorite had as much, if not more, to do with her personality as her track record with the judges).

Watching a dejected Dylan talk about being “humbled” by the final showstopper challenge and admit “I think I’m out,” I was reminded how much kinder and gentler the judging has seemed this season, and how infrequently we saw Paul and Prue really analyze someone’s mistakes so they could improve. If the judges had made a bigger deal about Dylan’s various technical issues throughout, does he go into the finale with a clearer sense of what he can actually accomplish? If Paul and Prue had been more forthcoming in their criticisms — or if the GBBS editors had been more forthcoming in showing us those criticisms —maybe everyone could have adjusted their expectations so that it was not so shocking when the pressure got to Dylan in the end.

Again, none of this is an attack on Dylan as a contestant; anyone can have a bad weekend in the tent, and nerves certainly play a part in all this. It is to point out, though, that the frontrunner meltdown is something of a GBBS tradition, especially when it comes to younger contestants with less baking experience whom the judges gas up all season, essentially deem the presumed winner, and don’t adequately prepare for the pressures of the final. Before Dylan was anointed the wunderkind who then became the runner-up, there were last season’s Tasha and Josh, who seemed like clear favorites (they each got the GBBS trifecta of handshake, technical winner, and Star Baker) and rode high on their unexpected flavor combinations — until Tasha’s inverted puff pastry, with butter on the outside, got her sent home the penultimate week, and Josh’s slightly childishly decorated showstopper cake denied him the final win. In 2019, Steph won Star Baker four times, including three times in a row, but then couldn’t get out of her own head in the finale. And way back in 2013, there was college student Ruby, whom the judges couldn’t stop praising for her perseverance — she was practicing her bakes in her dorm room! — but whose showstopper wedding cake didn’t match the artistry of her competitors’ offerings in the final. Her silent weeping haunts me to this day!

On the other hand, there is also a GBBS tradition of young and/or new-to-baking competitors winning the whole show, which may have contributed to the sense that Dylan would prevail: 2023’s Matty, with his pastel-explosion showstopper cake; 2022’s Syabira, of the chicken satay macarons; 2020’s Peter, whose consistently strong showing in technicals showed a surprising baseline baking knowledge for a 20-year-old. Dylan echoed elements of each contestant — Matty’s surprise whenever he was praised, Syabira’s eagerness to try out wacky flavors, Peter’s puppy-dog enthusiasm — and felt sometimes like GBBS’s version of Top Chef’s Brooke or Buddha, an upstart whose thinking is so outside of the box that you expect them to do well. That’s why there’s such cognitive dissonance when we’re repeatedly assured by Paul and Prue that a contestant like Dylan, Steph, or Ruby is so far above their competitors, and then they struggle in the endgame; when the GBBS frontrunner can’t clinch the win, it feels a little like the show has steered us into a fakeout.

Judging is both subjective and based on factors, like taste, that can’t translate through a TV screen, so it’s never going to make complete sense to us as the audience. That makes us reliant on the arbitrary ways the judges bestow praise, turning handshakes, pats, and calling someone “decent” into the primary barometers through which someone is considered a sure bet or not. GBBS realizes this, of course, and uses these achievements as cornerstones of the season’s narrative arc. Think of how the finale opening dwells on Georgie never getting a handshake this season — Paul left her hanging twice with an extended, and then a withdrawn, hand! Even though she had the same number of Star Baker and technical wins as Dylan, both she and Christiaan were depicted as underdogs poised to usurp him, which is precisely what they did.

In the end, though, that dark-horse positioning made Georgie’s performance in the finale feel as triumphant as Dylan’s was disappointing: Her signature Mediterranean savory and raspberry sweet scones sounded and looked delightful, and her hanging showstopper cake was absolutely gorgeous. Though she may have never received that cursed handshake from Paul, Georgie proved to be something even better than a frontrunner: a winner.