Oliver rigs traps on the kitchen appliances

Oliver rigs traps on the kitchen appliances in an attempt to turn Barbara’s dinner preparations against her. The episode transforms a room organized around service into a dangerous mechanism: taps scald, blades keep spinning, and appliances activate in succession. Injured and furious, Barbara recognizes the kitchen as a weapon in their domestic war, shuts down its power, and rebuilds her plan around what remains usable. Her eventual success makes the sabotage a test not only of survival but of her independence and resourcefulness.

Causes and Preparation

Barbara is determined to provide a complete dinner service on her own terms. She has checked her china, counted the silver and crystal, and assembled a long list of ingredients, including crabmeat, beef, potatoes, capers, endives, mushrooms, eggs, and chocolate. With the children away, she can work at her own pace; she appreciates the structure and purpose of a project with a definite goal. She also wants to avoid confrontations with Oliver, while preparing for the possibility that he might interfere.

The day before the party, Barbara moves a cot into the kitchen so she can prepare food through the night and be there when her three hired staff arrive. She inspects the food and wine for tampering before beginning. Her precaution establishes the stakes: this is not simply a meal that might be delayed. The dinner is her undertaking, and she intends to prove to herself that she can deliver it independently.

The first equipment failures leave room for doubt. The cold-water taps do not work; when Barbara turns one toward hot, scalding water burns her hand. She adapts by filling a stock pot with ice cubes to make cold water for washing ingredients. A mixing head then comes loose and flies toward the ceiling, narrowly missing her. She examines its thread and reattaches it, still considering that she herself may not have tightened it properly. At this stage, the hazards have begun, but their cause has not yet become certain to her.

The Kitchen Turns Against Her

The danger sharpens when Barbara uses a Cuisinart to slice potatoes. The blade continues spinning after she turns the bowl cover to off; switching off the machine does not stop it, and she cannot pull its plug from the socket. As she grapples with the appliance, the electric stove’s burners are glowing red, and turning their knobs has little effect. When she finally pulls the wire, the Cuisinart falls. Its slicing blade comes loose, flies into the range hood, ricochets off a cabinet, and clanks into a sink.

The incidents multiply into an apparent chain reaction. Avoiding the flying blade, Barbara falls, and the knife box topples, scattering knives that cut her thighs. She burns her hand again at the faucet; as she recoils, she brushes the disposal switch, but the machine will not stop. The range-hood fan starts, along with two blenders. The toaster is hot, the coffee maker and microwave light up, and the dishwasher begins a cycle. The disposal adds its grinding noise to the appliances’ mounting racket.

With her hand scalded and blood soaking through her slacks, Barbara staggers among pots, pans, colanders, salad bowls, food, and broken plates. She strikes her head on the copper pots hanging overhead; when dizziness makes her fall, she grabs at them and brings them down with her, bruising herself. The scene makes household equipment newly conspicuous: objects meant to save labor have become sources of injury, and the kitchen’s ordinary usefulness has reversed into danger.

Unable to stop the machinery from within the kitchen, Barbara crawls to the downstairs door and makes her way down the wooden stairs, slipping near the landing and striking her head. She finds the fuse box, opens its metal door, and pulls the master switch. The house falls silent and dark. In the basement, aching and unable to tell whether the moisture on her cheeks is blood or tears, she lies still until pain convinces her she is alive. She later drags herself upstairs and surveys the damage: bruises, cuts across her thighs, welts on her arms, and a smarting hand. The kitchen is wrecked, but the bodily harm is not the deepest consequence; her anger now governs what she does next.

Recognition and Response

After cleaning herself and applying antiseptic, Barbara concludes that Oliver has booby-trapped the kitchen. She interprets the tampering as an attempt to injure her, not merely spoil a meal, and recognizes in herself a capacity for revenge without guilt or remorse. Earlier, when she locked Oliver in the sauna, she had suspected that she might be capable of killing him; the kitchen attack gives that fear a new, immediate context. Her response is not retreat but a hardening of resolve.

Barbara cleans the kitchen as well as she can, then uses tools from Oliver’s workshop to pry out plugs and disconnect the tampered appliances, including the electric stove. She does not call an electrician, both because time is short and because she decides the dinner can still be prepared without the affected equipment. She buys a hand-operated meat grinder and several slicing and grating gadgets. The adaptation is practical, but it also reverses the sabotage’s intended effect: the appliances can no longer dictate whether the meal proceeds.

One sink remains operational, and the gas stove and oven have escaped the tampering. Barbara checks them carefully and relies on the gas stove to continue. Working late into the night, she reflects on the labor-saving devices made for modern women and the irony that such devices were invented by men. Rather than let that thought weaken her, she turns it toward an affirmation of her own creativity and resourcefulness. She sleeps on the kitchen cot with her eyes open, listening for any sign that Oliver might come.

Consequences and Significance

At dawn, Barbara returns to the work: finishing the foie gras, pounding puff-pastry dough for the beef, filling clamshells for crab imperial, and preparing the partly cooked fillet for its pastry wrapping. The vichyssoise has been put safely in the refrigerator. When the two white-gloved waiters and a maid arrive by midmorning, she feels the triumph of having kept her head and completed the preparations despite the attack.

The sabotage therefore fails to prevent the dinner. Barbara presides at the table in an old Galanos, with her hair done by a hairdresser, and converses with the Greek ambassador and the Thai ambassador. The Washington Post food editor asks detailed questions about the dishes and appears impressed by her answers. The beef Wellington is perfect; guests also admire the house and the silver and china arranged on the table. The formal success contrasts sharply with the blood, burns, and wreckage from which it emerged.

The episode’s decisive reversal is that an assault meant to disable Barbara instead demonstrates her ability to continue without the technology that failed her. The danger remains real: the appliances have produced injuries, and she believes Oliver deliberately made the kitchen a weapon. Yet she responds by cutting off the current, removing compromised plugs, and substituting manual tools, while preserving the dinner’s central purpose. The meal becomes evidence of her determination, achieved not through a safe or cooperative household but in defiance of the hazards inside it.