The St. David is falling apart. I mean that figuratively, but Kerry was worried for a second. This week, the new wing-station controller finally comes in, much to the relief of our fearmongering captain, who cautioned that it might not be programmed correctly. Ultimately, it works out fine: The boat can run again. That’s about it for things that are fixed — hell, for things that are fixable — on this yacht. There are only a couple of charters left, and if the middle of the season dragged through Solène’s reign of chaos, its back half is plummeting toward complete destruction. Everyone is on edge. Even Hugo, so far the most levelheaded person on the whole team, looks like he’s about to lose his shit. Imagine if Lawrence had stayed on the boat?
Through the first five or so minutes of this episode, you would be forgiven for thinking that Kyle is the crew member most going through something. After his Rachel Getting Married toast, everyone tells him to rein it in before it’s too late. Fraser threatens to leave but doesn’t and ends up being the one to comfort Kyle, who cries about having hurt his friend. Fraser and Hugo agree that there must be something deeper going on with him. Their instinct seems right, and the thing with Kyle is that, although he can behave regretfully, he is a humble man; he always apologizes.
It’s tough to watch Kyle’s spiral. No matter how remorseful he might get about his own self-destructive behavior — to the point, even, of calling his mother to relieve his moral hangover — he always ends up in another bad situation, e.g., in a guest cabin with Solène for the night. That development was a bummer because it served as a reminder that the odds of true friendship blooming in and surviving the machinations of reality television are slim. Rather than find it amusing that Kyle and Solène are at it again, I think true friends would step in to intervene — these are two people who bring out the worst in each other. As an audience, we have all come together against Solène, but surely, she has her darkness too. In confessional interviews, they express their nihilistic view of their relationship: It’s already bad, so who cares?
Someone should. But what do I know! Fraser seems to, but he keeps his interventions to a bare minimum. In the van on the way back to the boat, he brings up the fact that what Jess did to Solène is not very different from what Solène did to Kyle, a point she is not willing to concede. In the other van, Damo and Rainbeau finally make out, but it leads nowhere. They both separately describe their kissing experience in fishlike terms. Damo is probably not wrong when he tells Hugo that there’s no such thing as a bad kisser, only two styles that don’t jell. His Brazilian girlfriend taught him how to kiss, he says, which is how we know his style is probably the correct one. It’s so underwhelming between them that when Jess takes over the cabin with Bárbara, and Kyle leaves his and Damo’s to go with Solène, Rainbeau prefers to sleep in the crew mess rather than in Damo’s “gross bed.” A sputtering end to the dream that something sweet might happen between those two.
On the morning of the guests’ arrival, the dynamic between Rainbeau and Solène takes a turn for the worse. It won’t get really bad until later in the chapter, but it’s the first of two times Rainbeau rats Solène out to Fraser. With everything that happened with Kyle over the last couple of episodes, I almost forgot how tense it had gotten between the two stews. It sets Rainbeau off to see Solène taking a cereal break in the crew mess two hours before her official scheduled break. Rainbeau tells Fraser, who reprimands Solène in the way you would reprimand a very sensitive child. “Darling, we’re not doing a breakfast break yet,” he explains. Solène copies but seems to finish her cereal anyway.
She had to get something in her stomach, because she uses her actual break time to have a completely pointless conversation with Jess. She tells her it’s “time to talk,” then calls her a coward for avoiding her. This accusation seems to be driven by the fact that Jess waved at Solène from the deck as the automatic doors closed, rather than stepping in to talk to her at the bar. It’s impossible to tell exactly what Solène expects to get from this conversation. Jess apologizes for sleeping with Bárbara in their cabin — that was bad and also five days ago — and then shrugs her shoulders: She has nothing else to say.
Jess’s day only gets worse. During the preference sheet meeting, we learn that primary Emily — a “renowned dentist” — just finished chemotherapy treatment and is about to undergo a mastectomy. Jess immediately wells up in tears; the mention of cancer makes her think of her grandparents, whom she lost to the disease (she tells us that her grandmother died of cancer, and her grandfather was so heartbroken that he passed soon after). Later, she will tell us how close she was to her grandparents, who managed a yacht club, but for now, she has to pay attention to Kerry’s explanation of the tricky mid-moor anchoring they will have to do at St. Barts.
This is a new anxiety for Kerry, though after the guests arrive, the production insists on a dun dun dun music cue as the St. David goes through the damn bridge. One of the guests makes a disgusting joke involving the boat and lubricant. In a precedent for a larger screwup later, Jess gets a mini-earful from Kerry for taking too long to update him on the chains during the anchoring process. It puts her on edge, and when Damo doesn’t hear her tell him something, she gets angry. Hugo pulls her aside to ask her what’s going on, and she tells him that she’s been emotionally overwhelmed, which is getting in the way of her work. Hugo speculates that she’s gotten too entangled in her romances, but she doesn’t tell him about her family history with cancer. In the crew mess later, she apologizes to Damo, and they hug it out. It’s nice.
After lunch, the guests go snorkeling. Meanwhile, Fraser goes on break and gives Solène a few tasks. Before completing them, she joins Kyle for a smoke break. Rainbeau spots them before Solène has had a chance to light her Winston and immediately radios Fraser. Solène and Kyle laugh about it in a way that reminds you of when someone got called into the principal’s office and everyone went oooh. Fraser talks some big talk about how he’s fed up with Solène and how she would have already been fired from any other boat, but once again, he treats her gently, even patronizingly. He tells her she should’ve at least finished her work before going on her illicit break. If, in the analogy above, Fraser is the principal, he’s the kind who wants to be buddy-buddy with the kids; there’s no gravity to the way he reprimands his pet student. This is probably why Solène hasn’t actually improved: She knows she can’t get into any real trouble and that the principal secretly thinks her high jinks are funny, which injures hardworking, desperate-to-impress Rainbeau’s sense of justice. Rainbeau tells Kyle — “I didn’t do anything!” — that if she sees him encouraging Solène again, they won’t be friends anymore. Solène swears that if one day she sees Rainbeau misstepping, she will run to Fraser, forgetting that the whole point of Rainbeau is that she obviously won’t.
Okay, I’m done with the school metaphor. I like Emily primarily because she is going through something very painful, but she is hilarious about it:Sshe likens everything to boobs and, when she loses her hat, thinks it’s apropos since she’s also “losing [her] tits.” It’s all bearing heavily on Jess’s mind, who messes up for real during the mid-moor anchoring that Kerry was worried about. When he asks her to prep the anchor, she accidentally drops it. She realizes the mistake right away and pulls the anchor right up, but it’s enough to demonstrate that her head is somewhere else. Kerry reprimands her (Fraser should learn), and she opens up to him about how the proximity to a cancer patient is affecting her performance. As she cries, Kerry hugs her tightly and sends her on a break, telling her to turn off her radio and take a moment for herself. Bárbara checks in on her briefly, bringing her some water, before getting back to work. It’s sad to see Jess so beaten up — it’s been a rough couple of days.
Not just for her, but for everyone — even Hugo and Rainbeau get into it in the pantry while the guests have dinner. Hugo teases Rainbeau about hating Solène, and when Rainbeau counters that she doesn’t hate her — especially after Fraser comes in to ask what they’re talking about — Hugo tells her not to bullshit him. It escalates sort of randomly, with Rainbeau telling him to stay in his lane and Hugo calling her a “joke,” which is needlessly harsh. Sometimes, it seems like something gets into Hugo, like he has a really low tolerance for the most random things. The whole thing puts Rainbeau in a foul mood for the rest of the night. Hugo blows off some steam pretending to be a horse for the guests’ Kentucky Derby–themed entertainment while Rainbeau’s anger festers.
When Solène shows her what looks to be a minor burn or injury of some sort, Rainbeau gratuitously asks if, when she gets hurt, she wonders if it’s karma doing its work. Solène asks her to come again, and Rainbeau repeats that her little injuries represent each time she has “fucked over one of [her] teammates.” They go over the night’s checklist together, and Rainbeau tells Solène that she will go to bed not once she’s checked off every item, but once Rainbeau has said so. She tells Solène that her negative energy makes her feel like Solène doesn’t care about her, and Solène proves the point by shrugging her shoulders. As Solène leaves, Rainbeau clenches her fists, talking herself out of hitting Solène and remembering the way disputes got resolved in her family. Though production wants to suggest that Rainbeau might actually do something, it’s obvious she won’t — she’s far too smart for that. Judging from next week’s preview, it’s all about to come to a head regarding Solène’s work ethic. Is it possible that we’ll see her get into real trouble?
