Ben repeatedly blows up at Daisy’s efforts to make sure he is providing the guests with super-yacht-standard service.
Photo: Bravo
Ben has had a turbulent return to Below Deck, to put it mildly. A franchise legend, the chef built his reputation on being often annoying but always charming. Toward the end of this week’s episode, Daisy calls him out on his tendency to make up for volatility with charm. Daisy and Ben, two people who clearly love each other and also clearly cannot stand one another, have a siblinglike dynamic, one that Ben knows well from years of working with fellow franchise legend Kate Chastain. In fact, Kate is on Ben’s mind this week. She was an under-communicator, whereas Daisy is an over-communicator, turning up the pressure even when Ben is already about to boil over.
This week, Ben repeatedly blows up at Daisy’s efforts to make sure he is providing the guests with super-yacht-standard service. Given that he served soap on the last charter, Ben doesn’t seem as worried as Daisy about the galley’s performance. But it’s not just Ben flailing; there’s a crankiness (hangover induced, I’d venture) in the air. After two full days off, the crew struggles to regain focus. Jason is the first person up in the morning, and he is greeted by a royal mess in the main salon. Not only that, everyone is late to the 7 a.m. start time the captain had set. We rarely see Jason get this angry, and it’s not even the only time this week that he’ll remind the crew he is not actually their buddy, but their boss. After picking up some bottles, he knocks on every cabin, waking people up and calling them to the crew mess, where he gives them a good ol’ talking to. No one says a word, not even Mike, whose first words that morning were “since when do I start at 7 o’clock?”
Jenna had to ask Eddy to make sure the hallway was clear of the captain before getting back to her own room. About that: Jenna snuck into the primary cabin with Ben at 5 a.m., kissed a little, reassured him in between kisses that “the Eddy thing” does not “overwhelm” her at all, then beelined for Eddy’s cabin and snuggled with him for two more hours. You almost have to respect the gall. She proceeds to avoid Eddy for most of the morning, even venting to Daisy that his “love bombing,” as she put it to Ben, is too much. The nail in the coffin is when Eddy brings her a coffee with a note (“Appreciate you x”). She tells him that she doesn’t see a future for them outside the boat, as their lifestyles are too different. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have gone for a guy like Eddy. Her type is more like Ben, who is all giggly when the producers ask him about Jenna. Eddy feels blindsided by Jenna’s sudden turn. He tells Mike that Jenna said he couldn’t afford her luxurious lifestyle, a mischaracterization that sounds like projection. The fact that he said this to Mike is like Katina’s gun again: It’s bound to go off at some point …
Daisy reassures Jenna that she did the right thing. On a boatmance, emotional attachments form and intensify at a breakneck pace: Jenna tells Daisy she’s never had to break up with someone so early on; they only went on one date! That’s also why the drama between Ellie and João feels so out of proportion — they only kissed once, but for the amount of grief it created, you would’ve thought they shared a mortgage and a dog. Ellie is not interested even in saying good morning to João. When he tries, on the way to the preference-sheet meeting, she ignores him; later, when she sees him flirting with Daisy in the crew mess, she huffs to Ben that it’s “lowlife behavior” coming from a “pathetic manipulative trash can.”
Incoming for a short, two-day charter are four couples, all of them co-primaries, from Arizona. They’re celebrating Joanna’s birthday, joined by her daughter, husband, and their childhood friends. When we see them getting ready for the trip, Joanna is set up to be a difficult, high-maintenance matriarch: Her daughter, Shanel, looks like she’d rather be anywhere but stuck on a boat with her mother. They emphasize that Joanna is finicky about food, but she turns out to be mostly chill despite the aggressive setup. Jason puts the pressure on department heads, encouraging them to push their teams and reiterating that he will “make changes” if necessary. It seems like these much-teased changes are coming, given how often we’ve heard Jason repeat that line over the past couple of weeks.
Determined to rise to the occasion and work out every possible kink, Daisy sets out to resolve conflicts between the stews and in the galley. First, she sits down with Mike and Alesia to reiterate how badly they need to get their shit together. She asks them to check their egos and come together as a team, and for Mike to stop “pot stirring,” though that seems about as possible as flying pigs. Alesia, meanwhile, is annoyed that she is in trouble because of Mike’s shenanigans, which is certainly one way of looking at the situation. As soon as Daisy leaves, Mike tells Alesia, “Let’s not worry about it, let’s just move on from it,” which sounds awfully like let’s just ignore it.
Then, Daisy speaks with Ben, hoping to smooth over the service before the guests’ arrival. She suggests he take time in the morning to plan the day’s menu, so he won’t have to “think on the fly.” Ben retorts that he can’t plan ahead when guests are so unpredictable and full of ideas. This is fair. So Daisy suggests he talk over the menu with the primary in the morning, a solution that would allow him to take requests and have a plan for the day. But Ben is not feeling this brainstorming session; he doesn’t take her notes. Amazingly, given the conversation they just had, Ben — still chirpy from getting kissed by a beautiful young woman — gets to work on a birthday cake for Joanna, a chocolate-mousse cheesecake that looks beautiful but is not the vanilla-essence cake with ice cream she requested on her preference sheet. Daisy wonders if he shouldn’t have checked with Joanna before making her a different cake than what she wanted, but Ben insists she will love it. Ellie takes Ben’s side, which only annoys Daisy more.
Daisy obviously has a point. Ben comes to his senses and makes the cake Joanna requested, which gives him double the work for no apparent reason. Why on earth would he make a chocolate cake if the primary specified vanilla?! Later, Daisy gets the delicious, rare opportunity to hold back an “I told you so” when one of the guests asks if they’ll have Italian food for Joanna’s leopard-themed birthday dinner. Ben tells him what’s on the menu — non-Italian dishes like crispy duck spring rolls and wahoo (fish) — but the guests want pasta; specifically, anchovy-lemon pasta. Only ten minutes before dinner, this request creates another scramble that could have been avoided by a simple conversation. Ben still serves the spring rolls and the fish, plus the pasta, which he has to boil twice because he forgets to set a timer the first time. The guests do love the pasta when it comes, but they have complaints about the fish (overcooked; tough), the service (too slow), and the portion size (too small). They also love the vanilla cake, which Ben does his best to shape as a leopard, but it ends up looking more like a sphinx. Betul’s perfect reaction: “Wow. So good.” As requested, Joanna gets a dance from Magic Mike (and Eddy) with her cake, which is awkward since her husband and child are in the room. But she loves it.
During breakfast the next morning, the guests mention to Daisy that they’d love some cookies. Daisy relays the message to the chef, just as he and Ellie are taking a 15-minute break. Ben wonders if the guests asked for cookies or if it’s an idea Daisy had to please them. I realize I sound like Daisy’s defense attorney in this recap, but even if it was her idea to please the guests, what’s so wrong with that? She’s only trying to lift Ben up! He makes the cookies, complaining the whole time. A bit later, when Daisy can’t tell him what time the guests want the cookies, he gets upset. He shoos her out of the galley, complete with a whistle and a hand swat. Daisy is caught so off guard that her first reaction is to laugh, which irritates Ben. She vows not to give him anymore suggestions on how to be better at his job.
The guests enjoy their lunchtime roast beef so much that they clap. When the cookies arrive, they nearly lose their minds with excitement. They leave happily fed. Ben tells João about his argument with Daisy, and João suggests the three of them have a head of department (HOD) dinner that night, to debrief and reset. João pitches the same idea to Daisy, who agrees after telling him her side of the cookie debacle. Putting himself down for a nap in the primary cabin, as he is wont to do, Ben jokes with Mike that he should be allowed to come to the HOD dinner, since he is the head of his own deck/stew department. Despite apparently not knowing that you have to scrub a toilet as well as bleach it, Mike likes the joke so much that it’s dead before they even leave the Katina for the night.
The comment cards all criticize the food, which is partly why Jason is so mad that Ben’s primary-suite nap made him late for the tip meeting. He startles the crew by stating that he doesn’t “give a fuck” that Ben is not there. When Ben finally joins, Jason singles him out, first suggesting that they all clap for him and then scolding that Ben is supposed to set a standard for the group. He tells the chef the same thing Daisy did, which is that he needs to be more organized and communicative with the guests. Despite their reservations, the guests tip a whopping $28,000, which comes out to $2,100 each. In their comment cards, they wrote that the MVP was “Magic Mike,” which is the last thing Mike needs to hear. In a confessional, he says he plans to spend his big tip on hair spray.
Jason lightens up a bit, giving Ben the disco helmet. At the HOD dinner — for which João and Ben match Daisy’s color palette in an attempt to lift the mood — Daisy asks Ben to apologize for shooing her out of the galley and expresses concern that he’s sending a message to Ellie that it’s okay to undermine her authority, a point she made to Jenna earlier. To his credit, Ben is open to being told that he is wrong. He apologizes and hugs Daisy, even tells her that he loves her. For all of his armor, he is willing to listen. But when he walks outside to see Daisy and João talking about how mad Jason was at the tip meeting, and how badly he screwed up, he starts to feel ganged up on, like this whole dinner was planned to attack him. He leaves Daisy and João with the bill and storms out.
Back on the Katina, Betul — who, bless her soul, has had about two minutes’ worth of screen time this season, despite being an audience favorite — doesn’t feel well and decides not to go out. Mike continues to harp on the HOD joke, to the point of driving Jenna half-crazy, especially when he says that Jenna couldn’t work on deck. Eddy has been doing his best to make Jenna laugh all day, hopeful that he might still have a chance, but the fact that he thinks Mike is funny is not helping his case. Between the Eddy-Jenna-Ben love triangle and the tension with João, Daisy, and Ellie, it looks like it will be an eventful night out.
Sign up for the Housewives Institute Bulletin
Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice
