There has been plenty of personal and professional growth on the Katina this season. João has come into his new personality as a reliable, sensible second officer; Betul has grown more confident as a deckie; Ellie has gone from washing dishes to cutting sushi. But as the crew reflects on the season before embarking on their final charter, some of them come to… interesting conclusions. Alesia, for example, thinks she’s ready to be second stew. Alesia came in as an ostensible sous-chef, got demoted to galley-hand, nearly blew a gasket, and demanded to be switched over to the interior department, where she and Mike constantly bickered. But she tends to be a hit with the guests, and with Mike gone, she has been able to focus on work. She has undeniably grown as a professional. Is that enough to get promoted?
The question at the heart of this week’s episode is: What separates a good job from an excellent one? What’s the difference between “bare minimum,” “appropriate,” and “above and beyond”? I’d argue that deboning fish for the guests, for example, is the bare minimum. I’m still not sure what possessed Ben to serve bone-in fish on a superyacht, though he maintains that a superyacht server should know how to filet them tableside. He goes as far as to suggest that Daisy is bad at her job for not knowing how to. Why didn’t Ellie come up to help if it was so simple? After dinner, Jason tells Ben that service was “a bit low,” but doesn’t press him too much, because the fish, presentation be damned, was excellent.
To borrow João’s words, Ben and Daisy’s conflict is a “battle of two very big egos.” Instead of collaborating on a solution to the fish problem, they each insisted they knew better, and the result was that neither of them got what they wanted: Good service. When Daisy asks João whether Ben was bitching about her in the galley (he was), João assures her that Ben was just venting, much like she is doing now. The tension between Daisy and Ben becomes so extreme that they can’t communicate about basic things, like the morning schedule. During dinner, the guests tell Daisy they want breakfast at 8 a.m., but she mistakenly tells Ellie and Ben 9 a.m. Ellie corrects her, based on what Jason told them. Top-three worst feelings: Making a mistake when you’re trying to prove you’re right. It doesn’t help that Ben refuses to take matters into his own hands and confirm a schedule with the guests himself. Still, what really annoys Daisy is that Ellie doesn’t seem to respect her rank.
Despite the horrendous vibes in the galley, the evening goes well. The guests enjoy the food and don’t seem inconvenienced by the fish bones. They love it when Jason surprises them by bringing up Garrett’s birthday cake (un)dressed as Adam. When the guests ask Daisy who the second stew is and she replies she doesn’t currently have one, Alesia starts to wonder what Jenna has that she doesn’t; in fact, she thinks she would be an even stronger second stew than Jenna was.
Alesia’s dream of getting promoted will remain a dream, but Ellie has a real reason to think she might move up soon. She offers to get up early and get the guests’ continental breakfast prepped. Ben gives her an apparently daunting to-do list, but Ellie feels ready to take it on, and when the chef wakes up in the morning, she has nailed every task. In a confessional, Ellie says that this season has taught her how to see things from a new perspective, but it seems more like it was Ben’s perspective of her role in the galley that changed. Pleased with Ellie’s breakfast performance, Ben tells Jason he wants to promote her to sous-chef. Just then, Daisy comes onto the bridge to offer the captain a cup of coffee and overhears Ben’s suggestion. “I’ll throw a fucking tantrum,” she seethes to Jenna in the pantry. Ben’s argument is that Ellie’s role has “transformed” to include cooking, but as Jenna points out to Daisy, Ellie has yet to make a crew meal or to actually cook anything that’s not João’s ill-advised birthday cake. Daisy also thinks that the promotion would be a big “fuck you” to her, since Ellie has tested the chief stew’s authority time and again to no repercussion.
Jason rejects Ben’s plan. He reminds the chef that Ellie’s freak-out was only four charters ago. By working hard, she hasn’t done anything that wasn’t required of her, by the job or the need to redeem herself from inappropriate conduct. Besides, it might affect the team’s morale to promote Ellie so close after demoting Jenna, and it’s not like Ellie’s hard work is going unrecognized. Ben is constantly singing her praises, and just that morning, when the guests oohed and aahed at the breakfast spread, Ellie’s enemy Daisy made sure to give Ellie credit. In the pantry, Jenna jokes with Daisy: If the standard to get a promotion is “do your job,” can she have her stripes back?
Despite being categorically shut down by the captain, Ben continues to build up Ellie’s expectations by calling her chef and asking for help with the lunch sushi. Meanwhile, Alesia vents to Barbie that Daisy has made it clear she’s nowhere near getting second stew. If any stew other than Jenna is poised to be second, it’s obviously Barbie, who can tell that Alesia is not ready. Daisy’s point that Alesia has to work on her “forgetfulness” before getting a second stripe is proved a little later, when the guests ask Alesia to make the jacuzzi cold before lunch. She opens the water and forgets it running; the guests notice it when it’s about to overflow. The water is also… still hot.
Tensions between the galley and the interior continue to escalate over lunch service, when a radio mishap fumbles the order in which the food should go out. When Ben radios that “salad goes first,” Daisy radios back: Do it yourself, “or get your assistant to bring it up.” Jason and João, elsewhere on the boat, murmur, “That’s not good.” Ellie brings up the salad and seizes the opportunity to take credit for her part in making lunch. Thankfully, none of these skirmishes affects the guests’ satisfaction with the trip. Their five-star feedback cards shout out both Daisy and Ben as MVPs, and they leave a good $23,000 tip, which comes out to $1,700 each for the crew. Despite the positive feedback, Jason encourages Daisy and Ben to improve their communication. He awards the disco helmet to Eddy for bringing his personal issues into the job. Jason says — and I think most of us agree — that Jenna is well aware of her misbehavior, and it’s time everyone moves on.
The crew, used to two days off, looks shaken when Jason tells them they have a 24-hour turnaround: The next charter guests will arrive the next day. Daisy gathers her team to debrief in one of the cabins and asks Barbie to get the comment cards so they can go through them. But Ben is still reading them, and he refuses to share. Daisy stomps down the stairs to ask him herself, but he still refuses. Annoyed, Daisy says the interior needs to get to work, while he and Ellie will probably “fuck around” for a few hours before getting back in the galley. Indeed, after finally giving up the cards, Ben and Ellie go down for a nap.
Ben wakes up when Jason calls the heads of department to their final preference sheet meeting. Incoming are Brandon and Carmen, two “socialites and best friends” in the habit of bringing photographers to a steakhouse dinner. These are returning guests, and last time they were on a vessel captained by Jason, Brandon nearly got kicked off the boat for swimming drunk. “And you let them come back?” Daisy asks the captain, as if the decision were his. Later, in their cabin, Daisy asks João to back her up when she talks to Ben later about not promoting Ellie. João says he will, if/when warranted. Daisy and João have gotten more lovey-dovey since their What Are We talk last episode. They’ve been regularly sleeping in the same bed and, at dinner, they kiss in front of everyone. Ben doesn’t like it one bit. If João was already prone to siding with Daisy before kissing, now he has no chance.
Speaking of “couples,” during the charter, things between Eddy and Jenna got better. Eddy feels embarrassed for letting his emotions have the best of him and even somewhat responsible for Jenna’s demotion. He tells her he’s sorry about her losing her stripes, and over dinner, Jenna vows to take “full fucking responsibility” for what happened. As they’re talking, Alesia asks them to be “present” for the evening, since on the last crew night out, they were anything but. Ellie joins in, telling them they need to “stop bringing the vibe down” every time they’re out. Ellie and Jenna get into it a bit, but it blows over. Meanwhile, Ben and Barbie, sitting across from each other, have a running gag — every couple of minutes they pull their table a bit farther from the group, so that by the end of dinner, they’re over three feet apart from the rest of the crew.
The fact that everyone is drinking espresso martinis freaks me out. They have work early in the morning! The evening started out pleasantly enough, with João praising Alesia for how far she has come and Ellie lying to Eddy that her tension with Daisy is “completely one-sided” on Daisy’s part. João’s praise emboldens Alesia to ask Daisy why she’s not second stew material. Daisy tells her that she needs to learn how to be calmer and more collected. “Just by being frantic, it doesn’t mean you’re working harder,” she says. Alesia ultimately accepts Daisy’s assessment that she’s not ready to be a second stew, and they hug it out and say I love you. If only Ben and Daisy’s conversation could have such a happy ending…
Seeing Ellie and Jenna get into it reminds Daisy that she had a bone to pick with Ben. She asks him to go somewhere, but sensing a confrontation, he tells her that if she wants to talk about work, it’ll have to wait until the morning, as he’s “not working” right now. In a confessional, he says that he feels like a kid with a mean Irish nanny. They start cursing at each other, and Ben heads back to the boat. Jenna follows him — whether it’s to comfort him, tell him that Ellie was coming for her at dinner, or defend Daisy, it’s unclear. But the result is that she sees him going into a made-up guest cabin. She runs after him, begging him not to — the cabins are all ready to welcome the guests in less than 13 hours. But Ben is determined to sleep on a nice bed, and he locks the door behind him.
Ben insists that it’s no big deal to sleep in a made-up guest cabin, but it’s straight-up sabotage of the interior team. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest it would be like if one of the stews went into the walk-in fridge and ate whatever Ben had prepared for the guests. Besides, Ben knows what he’s doing; there’s a reason he used to check with Daisy every time he wanted to sleep in a guest cabin. Daisy is so done with Ben that, when she learns that he’s in a made-up bed, she can hardly muster up the energy to care. “Go pull him out,” she shrugs to an exasperated Alesia. She doesn’t think it’s worth it to get into it with Ben, since he’s unlikely to budge. João offers to handle the situation. He sees Ben’s behavior as disrespectful to everyone, so he wakes up an engineer to get a key to the room Ben is in. It startles Ben to get woken up, and he’s immediately angry. “You can’t sleep on a bed that’s been made for charter,” João says, in the tone of a disappointed father. But it only takes two “fuck offs” for João to lose his patience. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” he warns, when Ben keeps calling him names. By the time Ben is unmaking the bed, lying in it, and cussing João out, the fight is bad. “I’ll remember this,” Ben says. We get one of those ominous “to be continued” title cards. Honestly, there is one charter left. Can’t they keep it together?
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