Diksha Sundriyal
Hulu’s ‘Welcome to Chippendales’ escalates the situation for Steve Banerjee in its sixth episode. The Chippendales creator and owner finds himself in one challenging situation after another as his bad decisions keep coming back to haunt him. The episode also highlights Steve’s inability to trust or include or collaborate with others when making new decisions and this is what paves the path for his eventual downfall. On one hand, it shows us how glorious it could have been for him if only he’d done it right. On the other hand, it explains just why Steve met with such a stupendous downfall. Here’s what the ending of this episode means for him. SPOILERS AHEAD
Welcome to Chippendales Episode 6 Recap
Angry with Nick about taking all the credit for Chippendales, Steve starts to poke into the New York Chippendales on a regular basis. This irks Nick, who had hoped that the distance between New York and LA would have been enough to keep Steve at bay. He goes back to the idea of starting the US Male, but Bradford advises otherwise. He proposes to turn Chippendales into a touring company which would mean that Steve would never be able to catch up with him.
With the discriminatory lawsuit draining all of his resources, Steve is glad to have an option in the form of a touring company. Nick assures him that Steve doesn’t need to pay a dime and yet, he can reap half of the profits that come from it. In his enthusiasm to get things back on the right track and make Irene happy in the process, Steve agrees to strike that deal. He makes the mistake of not involving his lawyer, and instead, signs a made-up deal on a napkin.
Welcome to Chippendales Episode 6 Ending
The walls come crashing down on Steve as he feels attacked from every front. In this episode, everything that could go wrong does go wrong for Steve. Despite his efforts to keep everything in place, the situation only worsens with each step he takes. Still, he keeps his head up. This is not the end, he tells himself as well as his employees. However, a call from his mother undoes everything for him.
Steve left India years ago to live the American dream. He wanted to run a business that was created from scratch. He wanted to be successful, rich, and famous. He wanted to be everything that he couldn’t be in India, and he’d hoped that all of his hard work and sacrifice would one day be recognized. In the previous episode, Nick takes that away from him when he becomes the face of Chippendales. Steve tries, rather desperately, to have himself recognized too. But it’s too late on that front.
While he couldn’t get the Americans to know his name, he’d hoped that his success would make his family proud of him. The last time he visited India, to attend his father’s funeral, he told his mother about how rich he was now. He wanted her to be proud of him and hold him in high regard. Yet, she only expressed her disappointment at the fact that he didn’t stick around to run his father’s business and was living so far away from family. Now, his mother has found another reason to be disappointed in him.
Steve knew that being the owner of a male exotic club wouldn’t be acceptable to his family. So, he told his mother that he was running a backgammon club. It was still something that his mother didn’t approve of, still, it wasn’t something that would be completely unacceptable to her. He tries to keep his endeavors, no matter how successful, a secret from her. Yet, the truth is revealed to her and she reacts just as, if not more harshly, as Steve had expected.
His mother phones him from India and reveals that an acquaintance of hers recently went to America and read about Chippendales in the papers. The news of the bankruptcy was sent back to India, and that’s how Steve’s mother found out that her son was not running a backgammon club, but something a lot more explicit. A female strip club was already taboo, but her son being the owner of a male strip club makes her even more uncomfortable about the way that Steve has been making money.
Steve had tried to keep himself together with all the things that happened. Be it the lawsuit that not only tarnished his business’ reputation but also put it in financial jeopardy, or the foolish mistake of setting all months to thirty-one days in the Chippendales calendar, Steve tried to find things that would keep him afloat. However, when he finds out that the napkin deal he made with Nick meant that he had given up the partnership of the touring company to him in perpetuity, he realizes just how he has been fooled all this while.
On top of another betrayal from Nick, Steve is chided by his mother. This breaks his spirit and he finds himself in a dark place once again. He’ll need someone to put the blame on for all the things that have happened until now. Nick is the only choice at the moment. In the next episode, a wounded Steve will take drastic measures to exact his revenge on Nick, while also taking back what he believes was owed to him.
Read More: Was Electric Tomato a Real Nightclub? Did Steve Banerjee Burn it Down?
