'Ben and Kate' Season 1, Episode 3: 'The Fox Hunt' Recap

Ben and Tommy are in the garage watching TV when the door opens. It is a delivery man, confused about the cryptic address. Ben tells him he found the right place—and he passed the test. He says his sister and her kid live in the house, and he wants to know about shady characters on the block. The delivery man insists he can’t talk about that kind of information, so Ben and Tommy assume his silence for a message.

In Kate’s house, Ben hangs up on a call from business school. Kate is annoyed—they were calling her back, as she wants to take management classes. She thinks she might want to run her own business someday, but Ben laughs off the idea of Kate as a leader.

“It’s just not your strong suit to think creatively or originally.”

Their childhood Fox Hunt comes up, which was a scavenger hunt their dad made for them when they were kids—Kate insists she was close to winning, and could have won the next year but it was cancelled.

She also happens to have kept the envelope from the skipped year, and declares that the Fox Hunt shall resume.

At the bar, she explains to BJ that she wants her to be her partner, and, bonus, Tommy is booked with tennis lessons so he won’t be able to be on Ben’s team—only at the word, Tommy drops his racket and runs off to his friend’s aid.

And the Fox Hunt commences. Inside the envelope are two lists, and each gets 3 hours to get as many points as possible. The prize is that the loser has to do something that’s enclosed.

Kate heads off, not very sportsman-like, but when Tommy is ready to go, Ben says he wants to let them win. His dad forced him to be a winner (flashback to a spelling bee participation ribbon going into the trash in shame), but now that he’s an adult, he doesn’t feel that pressure, but Kate needs to feel like a winner.

“Maybe now the bug can exit her butt and rejoin its family.”

Kate does want to win. She’s busy running through the store, stocking up on tomato juice, etc, before BJ points out that half the paper is a shopping list for Bloody Mary’s that their parents scribbled down.

BJ’s happens to swing by her ex Jeremy’s house when driving. She wants her stuff but, well, he thinks she is dead. So Kate makes up a story about how the most tragic part of passing is she doesn’t have anything left of her, and gets BJ’s stuff back.

In the garage, Ben and Tommy are working on one of their inventions, a recliner filled with water. Ben gets stuck in it. Tommy notes that on their list it says that the loser does housework, which Ben read as homework, and therefore didn’t see as a threat. He panics. 72 minutes left.

They head to Tommy’s club to get a mounted fish, but the room is unexpectedly full of people at an anniversary party. Ben notes that singing in front of a crowd is worth points. Tommy says white people will find it weird if a black man started singing for their entertainme—oh, wait, nope. Done. And Ben steals the fish during the distraction.

Back in the garage, the girls are stealing some of Ben’s stuff for points. BJ, still annoyed that her ex is dating someone else after her tragic accident, stabs his basketball with a hunting knife as Ben and Tommy come in. Kate and Ben argue about Ben thinking he is a do-er, what has he actually done but start a lot of things that he never finishes?

The chase resumes, but Kate gets a call from school that Maddie is sick and has to go pick her up… only, she’s fine, the school got a call she had to go on a family outing. Maddie asks if she made Kate lose the game, but Kate says no, she wasn’t having fun and she missed her anyway.

At the park with Maddie, Kate accepts that Ben will win,  but she is upset. She is not the resourceful one, not a leader. BJ says it’s stupid, and she’s a great single mom, and she didn’t make her daughter feel at all bad about making her lose the game. Kate gets drunk on single mom power.

Ben and Tommy notice Kate leading a small army of people as the teams meet to unload their goods.

Maddie wants to be carried—they run to the finish line with their stuff, Kate’s arms loaded plus her kid, BJ struggling with the single ball in her arms.

Ben is still chasing a pigeon as one of the points is for capturing a live bird (but he is afraid of birds), which retaliates and goes after him. They load up their side of the picnic table. Kate wins. The pigeon lands on his side of table, skewing the points in Ben’s favor, but she throws crumbs, and it flies off. Kate wins for sure. Kate and Maddie dance happily.

Kate comes to Ben to apologize later. She says she wants to open her own bar, and he says she’d be good at it. She gives him the spelling participation ribbon that she saved from the trash years ago. Ben cries. A lot.