Below Deck Down Under Recap: Days of Our Lives

Below Deck Down Under
The Way the Cookie Crumbles
Season 4 Episode 13
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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It finally happened. With only four charters left to go, our first firing of the season is here. A high turnover rate is a Below Deck staple: It makes for good reality television to shake things up in the middle of the season, and people can be driven to the brink by the pressures of working in a high-demand hospitality setting while having cameras shoved in their faces (remember chef Lawrence?). But pressure isn’t what got Mike fired. If anything, he didn’t feel enough pressure to perform as a deck/stew, though he had the reality-TV-personality side of the job down pat. Like the HOD joke he beat to a pulp, this week Mike takes his insubordination too far.

He caught Daisy at a bad time. When we pick up on the HOD dinner, Ben has just stormed out of the restaurant. Daisy and João had been telling him that they’d never seen Jason so mad as when Ben was late to the tip meeting earlier that day. Looking at Daisy with goo-goo eyes, João promises to support her no matter what. They join the rest of the crew at the lagoon for drinks. Betul decides to stay in — she’s tired from actually working — but Ben agrees to come out after Jenna texts him and Daisy. “The drinks are stronggg,” she writes. By the end of the night, everyone is slurring their words. 

At the lagoon, Ben tells Ellie about Daisy and João’s admonishments. Ellie could sense something like that was coming, as João is “a snake.” That is a refrain she will repeat untold times in this episode. In fact, this throwaway comment is the first sign of the spirit of terror that will possess Ellie for the rest of the hour. Ben is mercurial and sensitive; he is, if I may, without making excuses for his erratic behavior, a bit of an artist. He has a sore sense of injury from being betrayed other times in his life, and the smallest thing is enough to send him over the edge. In other words, he is a perfectly vulnerable ally; it doesn’t take much to rope him in. Still, by the end of the night, he has made up with João (who promises always to be his friend) and with Daisy (his “favorite chief stew ever”). 

Meanwhile, Jenna is at the end of her wits with Mike’s HOD jokes. As the originator of this godforsaken bit, Ben is a little like J. Robert Oppenheimer, having created a destructive bomb over which he loses control, so it only makes sense that it falls to him to write “HOD” on Mike’s forehead at the man’s request. Eddy sees an opportunity to get back into Jenna’s good graces by telling Mike to cool it. “If it makes you feel better, I did just call him out,” he eagerly announces. It doesn’t make her feel better. What makes her feel better is hearing from Daisy that Ben likes her. Eddy sits by himself on the edge of the lagoon, sulking. When Alesia comes by to grab him, he says she’s the only one who came to check on him. This is like when, as a kid, I’d be walking with my family, and I’d hang back a few steps behind to see how long it took anyone to notice my absence. Needless to say, I am a middle child. I don’t know if Eddy is, too, but he’s certainly acting like it.

That Eddy is so upset about how things turned out with Jenna only gives Mike more reason to “wind her up.” Noticing that Ben and Jenna stayed on the beach while everyone else went back to the boat, Mike tells Eddy that Jenna has been “cracking on” with Ben. Eddy looks like he’s been kicked in his sensitive parts. In his cabin, he slaps the bunk bed in frustration, lamenting that he’s sick of being the good guy. You can tell he’s actually a good guy because he’s all bark, no bite: The most he does, the next morning, is give Jenna the cold shoulder. And even that doesn’t last long.

Mike, who can’t help but get involved, is more committed than Eddy to sabotaging Jenna and Ben’s romance. His mere presence in the same room as them is enough to send Jenna to bed. Meanwhile, after finally admitting at the lagoon that they “fancy” each other, Daisy sleeps in João’s bed. We are spared gross kissing sounds because there was no kissing, only snoring. In the morning, fearing Ellie’s potential wrath, Daisy decides to get ahead of it and tell Ellie that she spent the night with João herself, though she makes sure to clarify that “nothing happened.” Ellie doesn’t react — she tells Daisy she doesn’t care, another thing she repeats a million times this week with the passion of someone who really cares — but you can see the fire burning behind her eyes. She is pissed. 

Ben makes Jenna an omelette, which is sweet and needed before things blow up with Mike. Doing cabins, Mike vents to Alesia that Jenna was too sensitive about his HOD jokes, then teases that Alesia should be second stew. By this point, Alesia knows enough not to engage with Mike’s sarcastic provocations, so she lets it go. Undeterred, Mike goes on to tell Jenna that Alesia said she’d be a better second stew. Jenna and Mike go at it, jerk-off motion and all. In a rage, Jenna storms down the stairs and into Daisy’s cabin, where she yanks the bathroom door open without knocking to tell Daisy she can’t work with Mike. Confronted by Daisy, who talked to him about his instigating problem yesterday, Mike denies any wrongdoing and repeats the HOD joke. Daisy tells him he’ll work until 9 p.m. that night. “We’ll see about that,” he huffs. When Daisy asks him to repeat himself, he doubles down: “I’m not working until 9 tonight.” Daisy instructs him to get off the boat, which he does, whistling. 

As Daisy tells Jason what happened, we see a highlight reel of Mike’s insubordination moments. Jason thinks Mike has been given enough chances and that Daisy and João have tried hard enough to instill in him some sense of duty. The captain doesn’t mince words in firing Mike. “There’s a toxicity on board, and you’re the source,” he declares. Mike apologizes to Daisy, explaining that he uses “entertainment as a release,” but in a confessional, he doesn’t seem remorseful. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been sacked for being the class clown,” he says, then adds that he will never change. He tells Alesia, mischievously, that he doesn’t feel like he did anything wrong. For all of their fighting, Alesia sends him off with an “I love you lots.” Eddy walks him out, and just as he arrives, a hurricane with an endless supply of hair spray, Magic Mike bids his adieu.

At the preference-sheet meeting, Jason tells the HODs that Mike’s replacement, arriving the next day, will likely be a stew only. This could present João’s deck team with their first actual challenge, though undocking and anchoring go smoothly in Mike’s absence. The incoming guests seem really nice. All season, I’ve been annoyed with the sequences that introduce us to the guests in their home settings, mostly because, respectfully, I don’t care. They also give producers way too much opportunity for irritating red herrings, like last week, when Joanna was made to seem like a nightmare and turned out to be mostly nice. But it was heartwarming to meet Dr. Sujay Patel, his wife, Brenna, and their family. Sujay is taking his parents, Vinod and Jayshree, on the trip. He tells them on FaceTime, and they’re so excited. They’ve never been on a superyacht before. When they come on board, Alesia offers to help them unpack. “No, no,” Vinod replies bashfully. “I will unpack everything. Not used to it!” He laughs, sipping his Champagne. I love him immediately.

It’s a good thing we have that sweet moment, because it offsets some of the sourness of the previous night. When Mike left the boat, a void opened where chaos used to live. Ellie steps up to fill it. On their last night off, she’s with Ben in the crew mess while Daisy, João, and Jenna have wine in the hot tub. Daisy gets up to go to bed. Jenna and João bond over how things went too far too fast with Ellie and Eddie. Meanwhile, Ellie and Ben watch them from the crew mess monitor, where Ellie proceeds to rile Ben up, saying that Jenna and João are “all over each other.” Daisy stops by for some food and tells Ben that Jenna and João are asking for him, but Ben is annoyed. He comes up to the hot tub to demonstrate irritation but stops short of saying anything. Later, in their cabin, Ben tries to address the situation with João, but he is not very articulate. (“I know a lot of things,” he says cryptically.) João tells him he wasn’t flirting with Jenna. Ben is reassured; he’s only being so careful because he is looking for someone to start a family with. Talk about too far, too fast! 

Meanwhile, Ellie catches Alesia up on the nonexistent drama between Jenna and João. She says that Jenna is “evil to her core” and in the habit of talking shit about Alesia with Daisy. I had to rewind and play it again, I was so caught off guard by this statement. We see a clip of Jenna telling Daisy, once, that Alesia had come across disrespectfully, which is enough for Ellie to declare, “I think she fucking hates you, Alesia.” By the way, this is the same Ellie who threatened to send an image of Alesia and João talking on the dock to Alesia’s boyfriend. It wasn’t until Daisy herself articulated this the next morning that I realized Ellie might be trying to get back at Daisy by throwing a wrench in her crew.

In the morning, Alesia tells Jenna and Daisy what Ellie said. She doesn’t explicitly identify Ellie as the “shit-stirrer,” as Daisy would say, but Daisy is shrewd enough to intuit it. In a sophisticated power play, Daisy rearranges the cabins to account for the new stew. She moves João to her cabin and Eddy to Ben’s (awkward!) and puts Ellie with the new girl. In a confessional, eye basically twitching, Ellie says the rearrangement feels personal. In the galley, she rants nonstop about João being a “trash can” and a “35-year-old fuckboy.” She tells Ben that she is proud of herself for not “reacting” to “certain things” that could have sent her over the edge. Ben is still too scared to say anything, but he notices that Ellie’s obsession with João is off-putting if not plain distracting. There are guests onboard! 

Twice that day, Daisy walks into the galley while Ellie is talking about her. In the first instance, Ellie is wondering whether she should tell Daisy that João was making a fool out of her by talking to Jenna for “over an hour” in the hot tub. In the second instance, she’s describing a dream in which Daisy was attacking her in her sleep. But the tension between them escalates during dinner service. For an ’80s-themed night, Ben makes shrimp-cocktail appetizers. Daisy offers to help place the shrimp on the cocktail glasses. At one point, all three of them — Daisy, Ben, and Ellie — are plating the shrimp, which, to be fair, is too many people. But it’s the chef’s call, and Ben is conspicuously absent when Ellie takes the shrimp out of Daisy’s hand to finish the job alone.

Daisy is immediately ticked off. She finds Alesia to get better clarity on the drama Ellie started last night. (“What the fuck do you think this is, Days of Our Lives?” she asks rhetorically. Alesia’s reply: “I don’t know what that is.”) Back in the crew mess, perhaps worried that her job could be on the line but still wearing a look of furious intensity, Ellie asks Daisy if she did anything to upset her. Daisy replies that she didn’t appreciate being booted off the galley; Ellie retorts that she could do the job faster alone. What she said and did is not all that bad — it’s the tone Ellie uses that gets to Daisy. She is sly and condescending. Amazingly, Ellie then tells Daisy to “calm down.” Daisy is so mad she tells Alesia that if Ellie keeps this up, “she’ll be fired next.” I’m just waiting for her to pull rank. Who would blame her?