The implosion of the Bravado’s deck team is scratching an old, familiar itch. After a few seasons of mostly interpersonal drama, both in the spinoff series and the flagship, Mediterranean is delivering vintage mess: People clashing over their jobs. Part of Below Deck’s allure is that the difficulties inherent to yachting are emphasized by the camera’s presence and the need to perform a character. Some cast members, like Aesha, thrive on authenticity; some, like Max, acknowledge reality TV’s artifice and embrace performance. All of this makes the regular, daily demands of the job that much richer: Arguing over whether or not Christian washed the outboards becomes an opportunity to advance character. I’m loving the way this season is developing.
What’s more, though Kizzi teased the possibility of boatmance drama and promised to get drunk, the crew’s first night out is uneventful. We pick up this week with Christian and Max still fighting while turning over the boat. After Nathan’s gentle intervention — “they’re not lions, they’re cats,” he explains — the crew gets ready to go out. On the way to dinner, Max tells Nathan and Aesha that he’s at a loss of how to deal with Christian. Nathan says it’s a problem for him to figure out, and Aesha validates his difficulties by saying department heads don’t have time to train anyone. It’s nice that she has her friend’s back, but she’s been training V without a hitch.
The only thing powerful enough to get Max, Christian, and Nathan on the same page is Kizzi’s revelation that she has “a gentleman” at home. This is after Nathan — having managed to sit across from her at the table, leaving Christian and Max to kill each other at the other end — has heard of her plans to “vajazzle” her, uh, parts with the word Bravado. The boys step out for a cigarette to process the news of the boyfriend. “Let’s not believe it,” Max advises, wisely. “Create your own reality, bro.” This spirit of delusion soothes Max and Christian enough to lead them to hug out their differences. They can talk to each other as adults, right? Or, at the very least, they can drunkenly dance together?
V, while quiet and focused at work — she asks Aesha for feedback and volunteers to vacuum forgotten corners — comes alive at the club. She jostles for the spotlight with Kizzi, though not with hostility; they have fun commanding male attention together. Kizzi insists that Tommy, her gentleman, “trusts” her completely, and that it’s not just sex she’s after — she likes real connection. She loves to hug! She demonstrates this passion by handstand-twerking on Aesha. I was almost ready to believe that this Tommy didn’t exist after all, that maybe Kizzi had concocted some kind of scheme with a friend at home to provide intrigue for her onscreen persona, when Tommy revealed himself on FaceTime. However easy it might be to forget about him in the daily goings-on of the boat, something about hearing Tommy ask whether the men onboard know he exists tugs on Kizzi’s heart. No one ever makes it out to the jacuzzi.
Meanwhile, Nathan — who gives up on Kizzi’s attentions for the night, despite assuring Aesha that he “doesn’t lose” — talks on the phone with his old flame, Gael. In a confessional, he says that he misses her, but that he’s trying to move on from their relationship after screwing things up. Hard to see how moving on equates to FaceTiming her in the middle of the night, but by the next morning, Nathan seems to have caught a second wind. Maybe it’s hearing Gael’s voice that lights a fire under his ass, maybe it’s the stinging clarity of a hangover, but Nathan shows up to the next charter a reformed bosun. I mentioned last week that he’d lost track of his responsibilities as a leader — somewhere between the club and the bow, he found them. He gathers his deck team and lays out clear expectations for the next charter: more urgency and more initiative. He tells Christian and Tessa to do what Max says, since he’ll be Nathan’s point person on the team (Christian shows saintly levels of restraint bearing Max’s smug self-satisfaction on this point). The first charter got off to a rough start, between Nathan and Tessa’s illness and the fact they were on a brand new boat. Now, they have no excuses.
It’s a good pep-talk, but it hardly sinks in with the crew. Almost immediately after, Sandy notices that the outboards are watermarked and asks for them to be washed. While Nathan talks to the captain about how much Tessa and Christian still have to learn, Tessa stirs shit by telling Max that Christian told her, the day before, that the outboards only needed to be rinsed, not washed. Fuming, Max pulls Christian aside to ask why he would say such a thing. What Max wants out of this conversation is for Christian to apologize to him, since he’s the “unofficial lead deckhand.” Christian, wise to Max’s Napoleon complex, tells him he should let the “volcano inside of him” simply “explode.” The tension between these two is wrecking havoc on the deck team, but it is hilarious. Their arguments have the tenor and gravity of the bickering between Harry and Marv in Home Alone. As they’re finally washing the outboards, Max tells Christian not to call him “bro” anymore, which is how you know things are irreparable. Sounding like a disappointed teacher, Nathan tells them that if they fight again during the charter he’s going straight to the captain.
Returning as a primary guest is the “Sydney socialite” Jack Freeman, who we met in the infamously horrific second season of Down Under. Aesha remembers him right away. He’s a lot — the kind of guest to ask the stews to unpack his luggage, of which he brings no fewer than seven pieces containing 40 pairs of shoes — but nice enough. He doesn’t request anything too extraordinary besides an eight-course dinner menu. The deck team is able to undock with no big disaster, and though Josh worried about proving his mastery of Spanish cuisine, his lunchtime paella is a hit. Aesha is thrilled with Josh’s performance but worried he’ll burn out eventually, though it’s the rule, not the exception, for chefs to be neurotic.
Imagine the wonderful things that might happen if it was possible to take a little slice of Josh’s perfectionistic drive and drill it into Christian and Tessa’s brains. Nathan leaves the two of them with the guests while he and Max launch the tender. He makes sure to tell them to keep a close eye on the guests, making sure they wear vests, helmets, and so on. Within, like, 10 minutes, Sandy notices that one of the guests is floating away on the foil board. This same guest told Christian when he was getting on that he didn’t know how to use the controls, to which Christian said, simply: “You’ll get it.” Noticing that a guest is floating away, Tessa says it’s not her responsibility to do anything about it, nevermind that this is exactly what “watching the guests” entails. Christian watches, scratching his head, until Sandy barks, “Help him!”
But not even the captain can motivate Christian to action. Sandy radios Nathan to come back to stern, and he picks up the stranded guest in the tender. The whole thing is “ridiculous” and “embarrassing” according to the captain, who advises Nathan never to leave Christian and Tessa alone again. Aesha brings news of the deck team’s disaster to the galley. When Tessa admits that they didn’t show the guest how to use the foil, Nathan reprimands her with quiet steeliness: “I did tell you to do it.” He gathers the whole team to say they need to up their game if they’re ever going to stop looking like amateurs. Tessa is confused as to why she’s getting the blame for any of it. She’s just a ghost on deck! She can’t even pick up solid things. As she complains in a confessional about Nathan’s lack of direction, we cut to a series of instances when Nathan instructed his deckhands on exactly what to do.
After the eventful afternoon, the guests get ready for their caviar-and-truffle, white-party themed dinner. Kizzi sets a great table and Josh serves butternut squash risotto with salmon, caviar, and truffles. He forgets to put the truffles in one of the plates, which is great news for Max, who snacks on them in the galley. When Josh comes to grab them to correct his mistake, a brief tension hangs in the air: Where are the truffles? Will Max admit to his theft? But this is simply not the kind of thing that would ever rattle Josh, who is always prepared. The guy who makes just-in-case, plan-B desserts has spare truffles.
Jack asks for a caviar bump paired with an ice-cold vodka shot, which I’m sorry to admit, sounds delicious. He does one, then two, then three, then, when all of his friends are ready to go to bed, he wants Szechuan chicken. Kizzi, eager to go above and beyond, toys with the idea of making the chicken with Christian’s help. But their plans are interrupted by Nathan, who worries that a) they’ll give Jack food poisoning and b) this will distract Christian from the damn job list, which they went through carefully earlier and which he begs Christian to return to. Kizzi checks the crew fridge and decides to give Jack some chili instead, figuring he’s too drunk to know the difference. As it turns out, he’s too drunk to eat at all: When she arrives in his room with the food, Jack is sound asleep. It makes Kizzi laugh because she is a good sport. She’s been generally great, save for a disturbing comment she makes the next morning when Tessa tells her that she went to high school in Bali. “Was it normal school,” Kizzi asks, as if she were on a Love Island audition, “or were you in huts?”
As the sun rises on the second day of the charter, Josh kills it on three and a half hours of sleep while Christian continues to lose it. He didn’t fill the jacuzzi, though the task was on the job list, which he is incapable of heeding. It’s like he has never heard of what a to-do list is or how it works. Nathan is so at a loss reporting Christian’s failure to Sandy that it makes him laugh. Sandy is in a good position to commiserate, since when she tried to toss Christian an inflatable chair, he just watched it fall into the ocean. Sandy reminds Nathan that the bosun’s job is hard but has its rewards, something Nathan can tell himself while watching the Jet Ski’s hook hit Christian in the face. He might use it as a mantra as he watches Christian drift away on the Jet Ski, after failing to start it. He might repeat it to himself when he hears Sandy’s voice come over the radio: “We’ve got a deckhand floating away on a Jet Ski, what are you going to do about that Nathan?” It has its rewards, it has its rewards…
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