Bec and Danny's romantic moment turns sour after a joke about Bec's cousin.
A Married At First Sight wife’s visit to her hometown of Adelaide is bookended by disaster when she’s greeted at the airport by her arch-nemesis on a billboard before her husband refuses to say he loves her and instead declares: “Ya cousin wants to f*** me!”
It’s Homestays Week – where the MAFS freaks discover their spouse’s real-life crap shacks are even more depressing than their Trash Tower suites.
And it’s safe to say more than one husband winds up sleeping alone tonight – though Chris’ bunk beds take the prize for most humiliating sleeping arrangement.
Chris reluctantly allows husband Sam to stay at his farm, even though the two are still feuding. Chris very much does not want Sam here. And he makes this abundantly clear during the house tour.
“This is the second room …” Chris says, flicking on a light switch that illuminates a bunk bed.
Then he gets pointed. “Do you feel like you’re going to bump your head on that?”
And just like that, Sam has been summoned to the bunk beds. Sexy!
“It looks like we are not sharing a bed,” Sam tells us. “You could tell Chris didn’t want to do that. So … I’ll be in the spare room.”
Sam, a grown man who stands over six feet tall, will need to be folded in half like Gumby to fit on this children’s furniture.
It’s just one of many incidents Sam writes about in his journal, which has more or less turned into a Burn Book about Chris. It sounds harsh, but let’s be honest: we all have a running document in the Notes app of our phones where we log the dates and times of our partner’s annoying behaviour so we can refer to the incidents in a future fight.
As the boys sit outside by the fire, Sam decides to fill the awkward silence by reciting passages directly from this Burn Book.
“Do you accept full responsibility for your offensiveness and the aggression I felt from you last week? Do you realise my awkwardness and silence was a direct result of your behaviour? Do you see that breaking this behaviour means letting go of ego? Can you promise that if I bring up my feelings, you won’t speak to me like that again?”
Chris is not amused. “It’s not cute. I honestly felt like I was 15 and getting in trouble from a teacher. I’m so f***ing over it.”
After a week of being iced out by Chris, Sam takes the hint: “I think my feelings are pretty gone. I can’t see this working.”
Chris shrugs and tries to hold in a relieved sigh. He doesn’t want to be in this relationship. He doesn’t even want Sam in his spare room bunk beds. So, he banishes his unwanted husband from the farm and tosses the Burn Book into the bonfire.
Down in Adelaide, Alissa brings David to her hometown. And when they arrive at the airport, she casually points out a massive billboard that features … her face.
David can’t believe he’s dating the Elle Macpherson of the City of Churches.
“I didn’t realise how big of a deal Alissa was until I saw the massive poster with her face on it. I was stunned,” David gushes. “Are we gonna walk down the street and get mobbed by a group of teen girls wanting to get Alissa’s autograph? I feel like I’m with a celebrity in Adelaide.”
Suddenly, we question Alissa’s true motivations for joining this experiment. Is she really here for love? Or is she just here to secure more glitzy modelling gigs for Adelaide car rental companies?
Also in Adelaide? Alissa’s arch nemesis, Bec. If producers don’t trick them into going to the same RSL tavern for dinner tonight, it will be the biggest missed opportunity of the series. But we’re left disappointed. We’re not even treated to footage of Bec walking out of the Jetstar terminal and being confronted with Alissa’s face on that giant Hertz billboard.
Anyway, Bec brings Danny back to her home, which is located directly under a flight path. Their conversations keep getting interrupted by the roar of jet engines, which really sets the mood for romance.
She brags to her family about how perfect everything is. “I feel like this is it! I feel like the luckiest girl in the world!”
There’s just one tiny problem: Danny still refuses to say he loves her.
That evening, Bec stages the perfect romantic moment on the patio over wine. The lighting is soft. The atmosphere is intimate. The rumble of a Qantas Airbus A380 provides a sultry soundtrack. And Bec is ready to finally hear those three little words.
Danny can sense where this is going. He tries to offer some soft words of reassurance and says he can see himself fitting in with Bec’s family. This earnest confession makes him cringe internally. He tries to relieve the sappiness with some humour about Bec’s cousin Danielle.
“I think, obviously, ‘cause Danielle fancied me, she didn’t wanna ...”
Before he can finish the sentence, Bec begins death staring her husband, shocked and confused.
“I’m jokin’! I’m jokin’!” Danny backtracks.
They begin roaring at each other like the jet engines flying overhead.
“This is a serious moment!” Bec rouses. “You should be able to say something nice and be genuine about it, and not then have to say, ‘Oh, ya cousin wants to f*** me!’.”
This crude twist on Danny’s words leaves him mortified about how he’s going to look on TV.
“Who’s going to get crucified in the edit? Thanks, Bec. Really, thanks for that,” he snaps.
They begin whispering and bickering in hushed tones on the patio, thinking the camera crew won’t hear them. Spoiler: they can.
“He’s more worried about how he’s gonna look on camera now because he knows he made a mistake,” Bec dobs.
“There’s a camera in my f***in’ face and you’re abusing me over a joke!” Danny hisses. He lowers his voice to a mumble, hoping the mic doesn’t pick it up. “Let’s talk about it later, let’s talk about it later.”
But Bec doesn’t want to do this later. She wants it done NOW.
“You crack jokes when you shouldn’t be!” she fumes.
Danny doesn’t miss a beat.
“And YOU haven’t done that?” he snaps sarcastically, calling out Bec’s “fingerbang” remark that derailed the experiment for a week.
He’s furious that after standing by Bec through all her various controversies, she’d turn around and villainise him like this.
Bec then pulls her signature move – shooting up, stumbling off and yelling: “I’m done! I’m done!”
Danny’s left sitting alone on the patio, processing what just happened.
“I don’t want to be here with her right now. I feel very uncomfortable being here because I’m in her realm, her house. I’m here by myself,” he confides in us.
May we suggest flagging down one of the Qantas Airbus A380s and flying back to Trash Tower?
“And if she can just turn on me like that, I’m not sure if I wanna move here,” he says.
Right now, Danny would give anything for Chris’s spare room bunk beds.
Married at First Sight screens Sundays to Wednesdays on Three and Three Now