‘MasterChef’ season 7, episode 9 exclusive preview: Things get testy for Nathan, Andrea

At the end of last week’s episode of “MasterChef,” there was a preview suggesting some drama was ahead for Nathan and Andrea during the Team Challenge. Specifically, she proclaimed that Nathan “hit” her, but there wasn’t a whole lot of context as to what actually happened.

Well, rest assured that we now certainly have much more of an understanding as to what goes down. In the exclusive sneak peek below for Wednesday night’s new episode, you can see precisely what happens — the two teams complete the challenge, and afterwards Nathan seems to be acting out of frustration by hitting Andrea in the back. Our guess is that he was frustrated with her during the challenge, and it seemed at the end of it he also wasn’t happy with her overall attitude.

It doesn’t look like he hits her hard or in a particularly violent way, but you gotta know that touching someone else is not the right thing to do for conflict resolution … and that people are going to react to this sort of thing. Andrea specifically reacts harshly, shouting “don’t hit me” as she strikes him back. At this point, the other home cooks and the judges seem to intervene in some way.

Do we think that anyone is going be harshly punished for any of this? Probably not. It’s not as though the two are about to get into some full-on altercation, and they’re just acting in the moment out of frustration. Hopefully, cooler heads prevail, apologies abound, and then they can just get on to the rest of the competition. These ultimately are people who are probably not used to this pressure or these conditions; if there’s a pattern of anything, that’s a different story, but this looks to just be a one-time issue.