Is This Woman the Next Great Reality TV Villain?

It's a little too soon to tell who's got the serious leverage in the new season of Next Food Network Star, but the only reason I'm watching it at all is because of one woman: Dzintra Dzenis, an Austin chef who I think has the potential to be among the most deplorable -- and successful -- reality-show contestants in recent memory. Good luck, Dzintra!

Listen, I don't know her personally; she's possibly different off-camera. But the whole point of NFNS, of course, is to narrow these newbies' gaps between their televised personas and their real-life personas enough to where viewers at home would want spend time with them. Schizophrenia isn't going to work for anyone -- unless, that is, we're talking about the two-faced nature of reality TV's most cutthroat competitors, in which case dramatic disingenuousness is as vital a strategy as any.

Take Dzintra's stunningly ignominious debut last week, in which she complained about being chosen to make dessert for a team competition, and then wound up in the hospital with eye irritation while she should have been working on her course. It seemed urgent at the time, but then, when she came back looking fine and still couldn't cook (doctor's orders!) for Wolfgang Puck of all people, she bitched that her teammates made her disowned dish all wrong. Dzintra didn't even compete and she defeated the cast-off Alexis, who himself could have probably advanced had he had anyone to blame for his "unedible" beignets. Even Dzintra's pleading in the bottom three was abrasive, all clasped hands and prayers and "pleasepleasepleases" to Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis and their co-panelists from the network front office.

Flash ahead to last night: Dzintra's eye has healed, and the chefs are given a challenge to make veggie lasagna -- one step at a time, one chef at a time -- on camera. Obviously on purpose Dzintra drew the crushingly difficult task of opening a can of tomtoes, which she instantly griped about because, well, why wouldn't she? "I go in there like a bulldozer," she says, then adding, "But it's the most banal step... I can't show what I can do!" Come on, Dzintra! I think we all know by now that you're truly at your best when complaining, protesting or crying -- concurrently if possible.

But it got better. Duff Goldman walks out and says the crew is gonna cater a party on the Santa Monica Pier for 100 people. Their dishes all need to take some inspiration from an array of carnival sweets they'll be assigned at random. Among the banana splits, circus peanuts, caramel apples, etc., Dzintra draws cotton candy. ""It's the most difficult [element] on the table!" she protests. Listen, honey: If your competitor Aarti -- whose lack of confidence virtually brings the show to a halt -- can make bad-ass Indian food off the idea of a funnel cake, then you can make something off the idea of cotton candy. Yet according to Dzintra, who you can tell is still Public Enemy No. 1 among the other chefs, it doesn't quite fit into her mandate to "prove herself." So she goes ahead and makes a three-course meal featuring duck mousse, duck breast and sweet meringue. For a festival-themed party on the Santa Monica Pier! The skin crawls, and I'm not talking about the duck's.

The invitees can't stand her (she's "super-slow and awkward" says one, while another groans that "her personality makes you want to walk away"), and she's instructed twice by the judges to keep plating her food while talking to them. It really is excruciating, if only because you can't help but sense that Dzintra's ditziness is a smokescreen for the ambition and ruthlessness she's going to bring to the next few weeks of the series. The judges want her to get out of her way, and to the extent she's just been sandbagging this whole time in the hospital or on the pier, expect exactly that result. It didn't hurt her cause that Alexis and this week's exile Doreen were genuinely incompetent at TV chefdom, but you can already smell the tension coming next week as Dzintra is re-teamed with the front-runner Aria, who got thrown under the bus on dessert and admits her apprehensions about working with Dzintra again.

Will it be epic? Probably not. But it could -- nay, it will -- get ugly. Here's hoping!