The customer is always right, especially when it comes to their food. If you make food for people to order, I will die on the hill that the customer is always right. This is the final outing for our director of the week, Tricia Brock, as she goes on to direct Breaking Bad, Pushing Daisies, Community, The Walking Dead, Mr Robot, Orange Is the New Black, and The Witcher, to name a few. The writing this week comes from Tracy Poust and Jon Kinnally, the two who wrote “A Tree Grows in Guadalajara” with a further five episodes of Ugly Betty after this.

It is one of those episodes this week where everything is flying at us at high speed. Betty has to baby the man who gets drunk on flavored water, while Amanda sits with Daniel as the two read the results of the Dadford paternity test. We have a little Napoleon of making sandwiches being demanding, as Daniel has regressed once again before helping Justin come out of his shell. While Claire is trying to sneak in a word with Bradford, and – say it with me, kids – Wilhelmina is scheming once again to run the magazine.

You’d think I’d get bored with the scheming, but I do love Vanessa Williams. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying that for this episode (of all of them), but I do – questionable lines about Alexis aside. Yes, we continue the story of retrograde amnesia as Alexis recovers from the accident, indirectly forgiving Bradford despite his very horrible words to Alexis before she transitioned. As it turns out, Wilhelmina’s scheming this time is due to Bradford postponing the wedding so he can focus on Alexis getting better.

Shall we just get it out of the way early once again? Moping around after a little gay, in the form of Suzuki St Pierre, tells the fashion world about the wedding being canned and exposition about the charity ball tonight, Wilhelmina gets a pep talk from her other gay, Marc. Getting a little too comfortable and confident, he grabs Wilhelmina and tells her, “Now you listen to me, lady. The Wilhelmina Slater I know and occasionally wish I was does not throw in the towel just because the old man she’s scamming has suddenly gone all soft for his tranmnesiac daughter.”

Again, I’m going back to the Jordan meeting, and we’re bringing up the whole punching-up, punching-down, and punching sideways thing. Having the royal flush of privilege, I’ve no place to say whether or not trans people should or shouldn’t view that line as problematic; it seems more punching sideways than anything, and is a portmanteau. In terms of being offensive, it is not the worst thing said this time, but given the sensitive nature of the actors and the license it gives some people, it is edgy but tame.

With the pep talk in mind, Wilhelmina gets the idea to fake a friendship that includes line dancing, gay marches, and a whole lot of Photoshop. This also includes a makeover for Alexis in the hospital bed from a full team, which Wilhelmina dismisses with the line “She’s a tranny, not a drag queen.” Yeah, through gritted teeth, that’s like me calling Suzuki the Italian pasta shape “Fagottini” minus the “-ottini” part. If you’re straight, White, and it is 2007, that line is “fine,” but in 2026, that’s a line that has been crossed a little too happily and casually.

Once again, I’m not blindly defending everything Ugly Betty and its creatives did in 2007. Lines like this and storylines like this don’t exactly age well at the best of times. However, even in context and with the historical aspect taken into consideration, where that was the shorthand commonly used (rightly or wrongly – wrongly), it still feels icky. You could try to defend it by saying Wilhelmina isn’t really punching down, but you’ll be drinking a lot of water, given that she’s using Alexis as a tool for her own personal gain. Put simply, it is reflective of the time, but you don’t have to like that time.

Let’s move on to something a bit more fun and lighthearted. Amanda wouldn’t be having Daniel’s incest baby, YAY! Dodged a bullet there, but it does leave us asking once again, Who’s the Daddy? That’s the question on the mind of Amanda, but Marc is asking what being Fey’s daughter gets Amanda, and by Amanda, he means himself by proxy. If only there were a charity ball tonight for sick kids that Amanda would try and make all about herself, and evidently have the dress literally pulled off of her so she’s standing there in front of cameras in the nip.

Or maybe with her nip(s) out. It’s less degrading than some things I’ve seen someone do in this show, but not by much. Again, it is a fun little side story that I adore as we progress. No real special guests this time, just Holston the rat and the catty parade scheming to be popular and rich. Nothing new, but nothing that gets too old yet.

As I said last week, I jumped the gun on the scene with the gun and was about to spoil a major plot point here. Though I have been saying for weeks now that the man Ignacio killed isn’t so dead, but let’s be honest, where else was this story going to go? So I guess there you go, no murder case stopping the immigration process, let him back in. Who hasn’t committed a bit of attempted murder once in a while?

Anyway, last week I said Ramiro returns here, and we get him teasing out the revenge for a long time – there was a reason I was going to call him Mexican Bret Hart. You’d hold a grudge for 30 years, too, if Ignacio tried to kill you and steal your wife before fleeing to Queens. I guess you’d also hold a grudge if you were kicked in the head that hard, too, I suppose. So Ramiro Vasquez comes back into the picture with Rosa’s step-son waving a gun, threatening to kill Ignacio, but only if he doesn’t make Ramiro’s favorite dish, flan.

Indeed, something, something, kill him anyway, something, something, Hector turns the gun on his own dad, and Ignacio flees back to the US. “Legally,” this time with the help of Wilhelmina. Maybe I’m forgetting something, but I think this is the last we’ll see of that entire storyline. I like that because we’ve got Papi back, but if memory is correct, we’re also going to basically forget about the complexity of being an immigrant in the US. We do get the snarky and grossly inappropriate lines about Betty’s racial and ethnic makeup, but that’s as far as I think we’ll get from now on.

Speaking of the titular character, can I moan about Henry some more? So at the end of “Family/Affair,” Henry showed up drunk because he confronted Charlie about the baby, and she was honest about the affair with the “gay Orthodontist.” As I called him rather crudely in “Icing on the Cake.” That’s it, that’s all we get because American TV is the worst and will drag out love triangle storylines like clowns draw out taking their hanky out to blow their nose.

Not that it matters, because as they say, when one buff Superman closes, a sandwich Napoleon opens. Why is there even a guy who goes around with a cart making sandwiches in Mode anyway? Half the people in these offices are thinner than A4 paper and feel like they binge eat themselves fat when drinking water and looking at pictures of food. Ok, that was harsh. They are only thinner than a stack of 30 sheets of A4 paper. Why am I annoyed with this little dictator anyway? Well, when Betty tells him how she normally likes her sandwiches, he proclaims that it would ruin the flavor.

Listen up, Thumbelina, is it going inside you? Are you the one eating it? Are you the one tasting it? No? Put the extra cherry tomato on the sandwich and take the $7.50; you’re robbing everyone else at that price for 2007. Have I liked any of the implied love interests of Betty yet? I’m starting to think that when any man she gets close to with any sense of liking them, I just turn into a protective mother telling her he’s no good, he’s too short, he’s not rich enough, and he’s just too pick-me.

This, however, is the introduction of Freddy Rodriguez’s Gio Rossi. A little fella about the same height as Betty and small teenagers who is one of these people you know now would be listening to umpteen podcasts about how to make more Cryptocurrency with AI. Gio is one of these “Five-year plan” people who seem to think having that with a small hint of ambition is enough to make it happen, instead of just going out and working towards it straight away. Spoiler, it is not. Go outside and achieve it, or it won’t happen.

He only gets the kick up the backside to do it when Betty complains to Daniel about this angry little man, and Daniel, being about as socially aware as a blind, autistic child, can’t see that it was just Betty venting frustration. So Daniel makes a call, Gio gets fired, Napoleon comes to the office to confront Betty, and right in front of Marc and Amanda, he calls Betty just another Mode-y. Well, maybe, sir king of the dwarves, Betty wouldn’t have vented to Daniel if you did your job and just made her sandwich how she liked it. Ever think of that?

Gio is characterized here in his introduction as a very angry little man who is just looking for confrontation, assuming he’s always better than anyone and everyone at Mode. In his eyes, maybe. However, we have yet to see that proof in that pudding. We get that he’s from the same area as Betty, thus obviously they must be attracted to each other eventually, but that’s quite literally it in terms of “redeeming” qualities. He helps Betty get Daniel the electric wheelchair he wanted, but only after Betty got Gio the job he didn’t want back. I hate him already!

As Daniel preps for the charity ball tonight for sick kids, Justin is in the office with Santos’ basketball – the one item Justin chose to keep from Santos’ stuff. He takes it to Daniel, and sheepishly, Justin asks Daniel to teach him how to play. That’s it, ask the White guy in the wheelchair how to play the game dominated by people who are tall and can jump. Woody Harrelson, Daniel is not. Then again, it is Disney around this time, so of course, we get the second reference to High School Musical with a montage of Justin missing baskets to “Get’cha Head in The Game.”

The punchline? It’s a miracle! Daniel leaps for the loose ball and scores as the wheelchair he’s been in for weeks rolls backwards. Didn’t I just say last week that he’s grown a lot from “Pilot?” Why is Betty going to New Jersey (eww) with creepy Gio in his van with shag-pile carpeting on the walls to pick up this motorized wheelchair, then?

As much as Daniel does grow from a literal manchild (oh boy) in that first episode, he’s not instantly the personification of Jesus Henry Christ. He has flaws, and his biggest flaw is that he isn’t fully grown up; he isn’t always able to express his emotions, and he isn’t always able to own up to his faults. Something I see a lot with TV now, and it could be a fault of shorter runs, is that once a character grows from their faults, they either stay perfect or quickly regress and never actually grow. Showing those flaws and continuing to grow is a bit more realistic.

I guess the big heartbreak this week comes at the charity ball thing, and not because of the guest star of the week. While I could say something about Kenneth Cole, the disaster PR machine that he is, I’d rather not talk about someone who is so closely related to either Andrew or Chris Cuomo for too long. Instead, the yearly Black and White ball is a masked event (it is a rich pervert thing) that is the perfect thing for Claire to sneak in and finally get to talk to Bradford. All to convince him to completely break it off with Wilhelmina and call off the divorce.

Given how protracted even the simplest divorces are, you’d think this upcoming wedding wouldn’t be going ahead for years. I’ll forgive unrealistic timelines like that, given season 1 happened in the space of about 6-9 months; We’d be about May-July by now, given Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, then fashion week. As you might guess, Bradford isn’t a big softy – I hear he’s a small softy after his blue pill – and we get Judith Light being dejected after being rejected. The wind under her sails that made her take this chance only dies when Wilhelmina steals the spotlight on stage by announcing the wedding is back on.

What a cruel, vindictive, horrible, scheming woman… I love it! It is a horrible thing for Claire, and I’m sure my editor had a moment of thinking I’d use another C-word to describe Wilhelmina, but I am honestly here for all the scheming. Especially the drama and emotion it brings. It is fun and a little trashy in a horrible, catty way, but that’s what makes it all that much morish.

On the whole, “Betty’s Wait Problem“ isn’t up there with the greatest of the show, but we’ve found the standard bearer for Ugly Betty season 2. As I said last time out, I wanted a bit more climax and culmination to some stories, so we can pick up the pace on the overall storylines rather than just the high pace of individual episodes. Papi is home, and we get that happy ending. Daniel is back to normal instead of pretending he’s legless, and it kind of goes unsaid, but this is the last we’ll see of Alexis in that hospital bed, too.

Ultimately, despite the very problematic line early on, “Betty’s Wait Problem” doesn’t make us wait too long to pick up the pace and progress the show along like we were doing several episodes ago. If only we could keep that pace up, and we didn’t have a story about a bear coming up with major guest stars. It is a fine episode, one that’s moving us along and has the odd memorable moment for good and bad, but nothing that’s going to be in a top 10 list of episodes.

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Ugly Betty “Betty’s Wait Problem”

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Wilhelmina's scheming.
• Daniel jumping out of that chair.

Cons

• Lines that age like boiled milk.
• Shut up, do the job, Gio, and take the money.