Ben’s scattered approach to perfecting each course makes the rest of the crew look slow and disorganized.
Photo: Bravo
Well, at least Ben is aware that his department’s lateness is compromising the performance of the entire boat. When we open on this week’s episode, it’s been 45 minutes since Annette requested her bathing suit, and lunch is already 20 minutes late. Despite Jason’s best efforts to instill a sense of urgency in the galley with his presence, Ben is still considering whether to put avocado or tuna in the wraps by the time Eddy finally makes it back to the beach with the bathing suit. Jason gets so restless that he starts covering things in plastic and placing wraps on platters. Ben is thankful but embarrassed. Later, when the food has finally gone out, he takes responsibility for dropping the ball on service. He’s off his game — it’s been years since he has done this, and he is struggling to find his bearings. “We are on the brink of being responsible for a bad tip, and I don’t want to be blamed,” he says, predicting what’s about to come.
Bearing the brunt of a 100-degree day and an insufferably whiny Annette at the beach, Daisy vents to João about the kitchen’s lateness. Ben makes the food, but she is the face of service, so his mistakes make her look bad. I’m starting to wonder if it might be beneficial for her to distort the truth a little and tell him dinner is set for 7:30 if the guests have requested 8 p.m. Risky, but maybe it would pay off? João tells a flustered Eddy to take initiative next time he gets an ambiguous instruction. Annette finally goes into the ocean and shuts up. At least the guests love their wraps, which arrive 45 minutes late. Jason hands them out in the water amid a chorus of “Mmms.” Food tends to taste better when you’re starving.
Ben is determined to redeem himself with dinner. Annette requested a salt-crusted fish for Christian’s birthday because it’s what she likes. Ben gets two strokes of luck: (1) The fishmonger delivers a gorgeous red snapper in time for salt-crusting, (2) and Ellie worked summers at her cousin’s dessert shop, so she knows how to ice a cake. Ellie is enthusiastic, even — baking cakes “heals parts of my soul that need abs more than dessert.” Whatever souls are made of, mine and hers are totally different … When Daisy comes by the galley to run through the menu with Ben, he pokes fun at himself by telling her she’ll be happy to know they’re ahead on prep. She is glad that he wants to improve and “show up” the guests, but his plan to bring up the fish to the table and break it open in front of them only gives her another thing to worry about.
She is busy enough trying to keep track of where Mike is. Unclear about what exactly his job entails, Mike follows his headless-chicken instincts, which often lead him back to his cabin to retouch his hair spray. It only makes things worse that, helping the deck crew unload the beach setup from the tender, Mike drops his radio in the water, which means he is incommunicado for a while. “I didn’t tell him to come in,” Daisy tells João when they finally find him behind the bar after Mike disappears from the deck aft. João is starting to get frustrated with Mike’s tendency to take a mile when he is given an inch, and between dealing with his inconsistency and laughing about his attempt to kiss Daisy, the frazzled Mike is teetering dangerously on the edge of becoming the butt of a joke. I want him to challenge this fate, but it’s hard to root for him when he is so uninterested in actually working.
At 6:50 p.m., Ben puts the salt-crusted fish in the oven, which should take an hour and a half to cook. Not bad, considering that dinner is at eight and the fish is the second course. At least, it was supposed to be. Ben was so close to getting this right, but who can tame the strange wills of genius? Thirty minutes before the first course, it occurs to him to serve ceviche (?) before the gazpacho, which was already made. The interior team kept the tempo: Working more efficiently by herself, Jenna had the table set by 7:10. Christian made sure the crew wouldn’t forget the “Diamonds and Denim” theme, which calls for last night’s reneged “country western” horses and a few rhinestones.
At 8:02, the guests, accompanied by a cowboy-hat-wearing Jason, sit at the table. Daisy radios the galley that they are ready for service, but the sound comes in staticky. When she comes down, she has to wait a couple of minutes for Ben and Ellie to finish up plating and encourages them to get started on the next course right away because the ceviche — served elegantly in little glasses and topped with caviar — will be eaten in two bites. Daisy’s radio is still not coming in clearly by the time she returns to grab the gazpachos. Ben expresses frustration that they can’t hear what she’s saying, though he knows it’s not her fault: It seems to be the distance between the radios that is interfering with the clarity. Trying her best to think on her feet in the middle of service, she tells him to assume she’s saying “go with service,” then offers to text him instead. But that’s not good for him either, so she loses patience and barks at him to just get the food out. At this point, every crew member helping with service is standing in the galley, waiting to take up a plate, which only adds to the circus.
As the kitchen assistant, Ellie feels as if she is the one managing Ben, who seems totally lost. He doesn’t know where anything is and gets constantly distracted by his own ideas. I’m reminded of Josh’s monastic focus in the last season of Mediterranean: At dinnertime, he required complete silence in the galley. So far, Ben has worked in an opposite manner, insisting that he can talk and plate at the same time and inviting chaos into the galley. When the fish finally makes it upstairs, it’s been 25 minutes since the gazpacho. While Ben works on breaking it open behind the bar, Jason comes up to tell him to pick up the pace lest he die of boredom making small talk with these guests. “Worth the wait,” says one of the guests when they finally get to taste the snapper. Ben, forgetting that he is dealing with the most finicky people alive, is convinced that the quality of the food will so redeem the meal that the guests won’t remember the wait. The fool!
Ellie does a great job with Christian’s birthday cake, which pleases Ben. He could never have counted on Alesia to do something like that! Ellie tells Daisy in their cabin that they felt bad about being so late, but Daisy isn’t moved. Ben has managed the first step toward improvement, which is taking responsibility, but now he needs to act and come up with a different plan. Everyone, including the captain, sees room for improvement in his department. When I saw Daisy putting the comment cards in the cabins the next morning, I just knew Annette was going to criticize service, despite Christian’s insistence that everyone “did great!” But Annette goes one step further: She has comments about the comment cards, which are not “properly sized” to fit the box without folding.
The comment cards bear out Jason’s worst expectations. Several of them rate the “overall experience” three stars, mostly because of the slow service, though there is a mention of losing Liz in the reefs. Worse, the tip matches the lukewarm feedback: They get only $1,500 each from a $20,000 tip. At the meeting, Jason encourages Ben to “get his systems right.” Despite the fact that Ben is clearly responsible for the bad tip, it’s Mike who gets the “reflection helmet” for dropping his radio in the water. It seems as though Jason is approaching the helmet more casually, even jokingly, this season as a way to blow off steam and build camaraderie rather than to single someone out. Ben reads over the comment cards. They bum him out so much he decides to skip dinner with the crew and get Daisy’s permission to camp out in a guest cabin for some well-needed regrouping.
Jenna is a bit sad that Ben stays in, but the sadness doesn’t last long. She and Ellie have been fighting for the chef’s attention. Earlier in the episode, Jenna didn’t like it that Ellie ordered her to get some plates for service, which Ellie brushed off as just another instance of “insecure women” not respecting her. In the drop-off lineup, Ellie wedged herself in between Jenna and Ben. We’ve seen this movie before, and we know where we’re headed when Jenna makes a face as Ellie tells Alesia how naturally she gets along with Ben. Still, Jenna shouldn’t bother. Ellie’s sights are on João, “a Viking manly man” type with whom she feels an urge to “merge genetics.” So far, though, he has been too much of a “gatherer” and not enough of a “hunter” to inspire any action on her part. The gender politics of Ellie’s desires are concerning, but to each their own! She shocks everyone at dinner when she tries to “spice up” their conversation by asking how many of the women present are squirters. Mike — still struck by Ellie’s polyglotism, he finally has the chance to show her he can speak a little Spanish, too — is beet-red. “Girl, you just got here,” is Betul’s perfect response.
Earlier, on the beach, João predicted that Eddy would still try something with Alesia despite the boyfriend obstacle, but the future of their dynamic rests on whether Alesia will find it in herself to put her long-distance boyfriend out of his misery and do what’s right. In a confessional, she tells us that she would rather leave the country than break up with someone, which is how she ended up in yachting in the first place. But the fact of the matter is that she is in a relationship, so she is in no position to blame Eddy and Jenna for hitting it off. But it’s in her nature to be jealous, so she starts doing things like getting in their picture and kissing Eddy’s cheek. At the club, Jenna remarks to Eddy that he has Alesia’s lipstick all over his face. He vents that she keeps flirting with him even though she has a boyfriend and is impressed when Jenna says that she would “never embarrass my man” like that. In a confessional, he admits to initially thinking Jenna was “ditsy,” but the more he gets to know her, the more she begins to seem like “an ideal woman.” The bar is on the floor, I guess, and it only requires you to give Eddy a little attention and have a bit of common sense.
Elsewhere, João and Daisy dance together. They’ve been getting along very well. It’s been only a few episodes, but it does seem that João has reformed into a responsible, considerate man, though he does drop Daisy on the ground when he flips her on the dance floor. Mike, having deluded himself into thinking that Ellie “is down for it,” shoots his shot but gets only a peck, a moment that almost killed me with secondhand embarrassment. Ellie’s devastating conclusion: “He’s more like my little brother.” Back on the boat, she decides to skip the hot tub, perhaps hoping to avoid more pecking. The rest play Truth or Dare?, which leads to João running around the tub naked and Daisy kissing him. For a truth, Jenna asks Eddy who he wants to go on a date with, and he says Jenna. Alesia thinks “that’s really rude,” but Eddy reminds her that she has a boyfriend. Daisy dares Jenna to kiss Eddy, and later they make out some more in his cabin while he holds a Cheez-It in his hand. In their cabin, Jenna tells Alesia that Eddy kissed her, which prompts Alesia to text Eddy that she can’t stop thinking about him and teasing him about flirting with Jenna. “I would drop her in a second to be an alien with you,” he writes back. Then Jenna and Alesia tell each other “I love you” and “good night.” Yikes, what a mess this already is!
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