Photo: Bravo
Three charters in, it’s over for Caio, as many of us had predicted. The bosun is fired after a frazzled few days of mismanagement, not that he ever fully found his groove. While Jess, Damo, and Kyle were frustrated with their supervisor, no one was more exasperated than Kerry. Docking the boat in Sint Maarten in preparation to pick up the guests, Kerry cursed constantly under his breath, calling Caio a “fucking idiot” several times, not to his face, but you get the sentiment.
It’s the first firing of the season, and while we could’ve seen it coming a mile away, I feel bad for Caio. His incompetence doesn’t seem a result of lack of skill as much as it does lack of clarity. Not knowing exactly what was demanded of him, instead of asking, he focused on the wrong tasks, so he was always falling short. I’m wondering now if Kerry will promote Jess. She’s competent, a clear communicator, and willing to step up when she needs to. At the beach excursion on the first day of the charter, she confronted Caio about the lack of break structure in front of the rest of the deck crew. Caio thought it would’ve been more appropriate for her to speak to him alone, having apparently forgotten that she had already done that once before. It’s impossible to say whether or not she calculated it this way, but that move positions her well to be the next supervisor: the boys know she has their back.
I like this season of Below Deck because the two main departments — interior and exterior — are falling apart in complementary ways. Good drama on this show is made out of interpersonal conflict and workplace drama, and here we have both: the deck crew is struggling to do their jobs while the stews are having problems with each other. This week, thank God, we’re spared of Solène’s incompetence, but a major rift emerges: it’s the Girls vs. Rainbeau. What Solène doesn’t have in experience, skill, or instinct, she more than makes up for in charisma. Rainbeau gets left out because Solène doesn’t like her, and Solène is the sun around which the social dynamics of the entire boat orbit.
But let’s take a step back and assess how we got here. We pick up this week on the crew’s day off, which starts with brunch and shopping in St. Barthes. There, already, Solène and Bárbara tease each other affectionately while Fraser fawns over their friendship and Rainbeau looks on awkwardly. In a confessional, Rainbeau tells us that she’s always had a problem “connecting with other girls,” the first of a few times she’ll repeat this refrain this week. Immediate red flags erupt everywhere. For the rest of the episode, perhaps the rest of time, when I look at Rainbeau, all I can think of is red flag.
But I still feel for her isolation. At brunch, she even tries to engage Caio, who can’t give her anything to work with because he is so stressed out about losing his job. As the days go on, Rainbeau tries to repair her frayed relationship with Solène, but she comes on way too strong. Having spent a lot of time being (rightfully) stern and frustrated with her, now she’s all kisses and “I love you,” a crazy thing to say to someone who is making your job and your life miserable and who you’ve known for barely a week. Towards the end of the charter, she goes out of her way to kiss Solène good morning, which Solène then tells Bárbara was “strange.” The affection is too forced — Rainbeau would be much better off having an honest talk with her teammates about being overworked, which would encourage more organic bonds to form between them.
You would think that the chief stew would be right there, facilitating this kind of reconciliation, but Fraser has other things on his mind. Though he maintains that making out with Damo wasn’t cheating because Damo is straight, he decides to do the hard but right thing and break up with his long-distance boyfriend. Meanwhile, Anthony tries to wedge some distance between himself and Fraser. He mentions that he’d be fine moving cabins even while on charter and later dismisses Fraser when he tries to give him a pep talk before the guests’ Cuban-themed dinner with the captain. Last season, things started to fall apart for Anthony when Kerry joined the guests for a bad dinner, so Anthony feels the pressure to redeem himself. When Fraser — sweetly, I think — comes to the galley to hype him up for the night, Anthony, who is clearly very stressed out, shoos him away. The dinner goes splendidly — afterward, Kerry stops by the galley to pay his compliments to the chef — but there’s a clear imbalance between how Fraser and Anthony regard each other. Anthony came on board with plans to give Fraser a piece of his mind, but we’ve yet to see him act on them.
On the boatmance side of things, Solène and Kyle have a nice date on their evening off. Fraser thinks they’re not a good match, but I disagree: they seem very well suited for one another. They’re both playful, lively people filled with “sexual ideas,” as Solène puts it. They spend the night together in a guest cabin, and the next morning, they tell their respective departments that they had a great night. Kyle already seems extremely involved, stealing kisses and hugs and little moments with Solène throughout the charter, but she tells Anthony that she is “in no rush” to commit to anything. If next week’s preview is any indication, this couple will fall apart before it can even be one. Poor Kyle, always the last romantic on deck.
The dramatic climax of this episode, though, and the moment we’ve been building toward over the past couple of weeks, is Caio’s firing. His bad luck begins even before the charter, as they’re bringing the boat to Sint Maarten to pick up the guests. They make it through the bridge okay, but as Kerry swings the boat to dock, Caio loses track of communications. Then, when they manage to slide the boat into position, Kerry notices that some of the fenders are too high up, nowhere near close to protecting the boat from contact. Earlier, Caio had asked Jess to check the placement of the fenders, and she’d left them high for the bridge crossing but didn’t take them down for the docking. Even Solène, who barely knows the difference between a blanket and a fitted sheet, is called to help lower the fenders.
The boat is docked without any major damage, but Kerry is pissed. He calls Caio to the bridge and tells him that the charter will be his last chance to prove he can do the job. Maybe Caio didn’t fully process the seriousness of the ultimatum, or maybe he simply isn’t cut out for being a bosun, but his performance worsens almost immediately. He calls another deck team meeting to tell the crew they need to “do better” and to try to identify what went wrong during the docking. He tells Jess that if it weren’t for the too-high fenders, none of this would have happened, which, I suspect, is what ticks her off for the rest of the charter. So far, Jess had been frustrated but very game to help Caio find a better way forward, but when he puts the blame solely on her for a disastrous performance — which was maybe 40 percent fender, 60 percent Caio ignoring his radio — she understandably loses her patience.
Still, Jess carries herself with grace. After they have successfully put the charter guests on board, made it through the bridge, and anchored out at sea, Kerry takes Jess on a beach scout in order to ask her about Caio’s leadership. She is honest but measured: Caio is clearly not used to managing a lot of people and seems “scatterbrained,” and she agrees when Kerry suggests he is “out of his depth.” Later, at the beach picnic, she takes a stand about the lack of breaks, perhaps emboldened by Kerry’s consideration of her opinion. Caio continues to make things bad for himself when he fumbles with the tender lines taking people to and from the beach with Kerry, and even Fraser and Rainbeau notice that something is off with the deck team. Though Damo and Kyle chat briefly about Caio’s inefficiency, and Damo even says that sometimes he sees Caio doing something wrong and chooses to “let it go to failure” rather than say anything, this isn’t a particularly gossipy bunch. Jess tells Damo about the conversation she had with Kerry on the tender, but for the most part, the deck crew is very decent about the whole thing.
The last straw is the docking at the very end of the charter, which welcomed primary Jack Finn, his sweet wife Darlene, and their family. The Finns are the perfect charter guests, inasmuch as they might as well not have been there; they are cordial, fun, and appreciative. Darlene cries when saying goodbye, and they leave a generous $28,000 tip, which helps make up for last week’s thievery. Amongst the charter’s activities were lots of lying out, swimming, and playing beach volleyball. It’s an embarrassment to Brazilians everywhere that a team with two Brazilians couldn’t win at beach volleyball, one of our national pastimes, but no amount of cultural muscle-memory could have defended against Solène’s fear of the ball; besides, maybe they have to let the guests win anyway. The second day of the charter is compressed into a montage, which seems to be a new thing Below Deck is doing. I don’t hate it — I’m more interested in what’s going on with the crew anyway — but I agree with some of our readers’ comments that the editing pace is too frantic.
Caio helps Kerry get the St. David through the bridge and the swinging okay, but at docking, he doesn’t have the sternline taut enough at the right time. It takes him a while to fix the problem, and the delay angers Kerry, who’d expected the lines to be all set before docking anyway. “I’m losing faith in you,” Kerry tells Caio before letting him go. Tchau tchau, Caio, as we say in Brazil — it was a valiant effort.
