“Below the Deck of the Mediterranean” recap, season 10, episode. 3: dead weight
Implosion of bravadoThe deck team scratches an old, familiar itch. After several seasons of mostly personal drama, both in the spinoff and pilot series, Mediterranean Sea It leads to age-old chaos: people clashing over their jobs. Part of Below deckThe appeal of the film is that the difficulties inherent in yachting are emphasized by the presence of the camera and the need to perform a character. Some cast members, like Ayesha, thrive on authenticity; Some, like Max, acknowledge the hoax of reality TV and embrace the performance. All of this makes the regular daily demands of the job all the richer: arguing about whether or not Christian washed the exterior panels becomes an opportunity for character reinforcement. I love the way this season is developing.
What’s more, although Kizzi raised the possibility of drama in the boating world and promised to get drunk, the crew’s first night out was uneventful. We start off this week with Christian and Max continuing to fight while turning the boat over. After Nathan’s gentle intervention—”They’re not lions, they’re cats”—the crew prepares to head out. On his way to dinner, Max tells Nathan and Aisha that he is confused about how to deal with Christian. Nathan says it’s been a problem for him to discover this, and Aisha confirms his difficulties by saying that department heads don’t have time to train anyone. It’s good that she’s got her friend’s back, but she’s been training V without any hiccups.
The only thing strong enough to get Max, Christian, and Nathan on the same page is Kizzy discovering that she has a “gentleman” back home. This happened after Nathan – having managed to sit across from her at the table, leaving Christian and Max killing each other at the other end – overheard her plans to “dazzle” her parts with the word bravado. The boys go out to get a cigarette to process the boyfriend news. “Let’s not believe it,” Max advises wisely. “Create your own reality, brother.” This spirit of illusion calms Max and Christian enough to lead them to resolve their differences. They can talk to each other like adults, right? Or at least they can dance together while drunk?
V, while calm and focused at work – asking Ayesha for feedback and volunteers to clean up forgotten corners – is alive in the club. She clamors for the spotlight on Kizzi, but not with hostility; They enjoy attracting male attention together. Kizzy insists that Tommy, her gentleman, “trusts” her completely, and that she’s not just after sex – she loves real connection. She loves to hug! She showed this passion by doing a handstand on Aisha. I was almost ready to believe that this Tommy never existed at all, and that perhaps Kizzy had concocted some sort of scheme with a friend back home to provide intrigue for her on-screen persona, when Tommy revealed himself on FaceTime. Although it may be easy to forget him in the daily happenings of the boat, something about hearing Tommy ask if the men on the boat know he exists tugs at Kizzy’s heart. No one ever goes out to the jacuzzi.
Meanwhile, Nathan – who has abandoned Kizzy’s interest throughout the night, despite assuring Aisha that he’s “not losing” – is on the phone with his old lover, Gayle. In his confessional, he says he misses her, but is trying to move on from their relationship after screwing things up. It’s hard to see how moving forward equates to FaceTiming her in the middle of the night, but by the next morning, Nathan appears to have gained a second wind. Maybe it’s hearing Gayle’s voice that lights a fire under his ass, maybe it’s the caustic clarity of the hangover, but Nathan emerges in the next charter as a reformed Bossun. I mentioned last week that he had lost his responsibilities as a leader – somewhere between the club and the bow, he had found them. He assembles his team and sets clear expectations for the next charter: more urgency, more initiative. He tells Christian and Tessa to do whatever Max says, because he’s going to be Nathan’s point person on the team (Christian displays sanctimonious levels of self-control that bear with Max’s smug self-satisfaction at this point). The first trip got off to a rocky start, between Nathan and Tessa’s illness and the fact that they were on a brand new boat. Now they have no excuses.
He’s a good pep talk, but he rarely gets along with the crew. Almost immediately afterward, Sandy notices that the exterior panels have a water mark and asks to wash them. While Nathan talks to the captain about how much Tessa and Christian have to learn, Tessa stirs things up by telling Max that Christian told him HaThe day before, the exterior panels only needed to be rinsed, not washed. Angry, Max pulls Christian aside to ask why he would say such a thing. What Max wants from this conversation is for Christian to apologize to him, because he is the “unofficial key worker.” Christian, wise to Max’s Napoleon complex, tells him that he should simply let the “volcano inside him” “explode.” The tension between these two wreaks havoc on the deck team, but it’s funny. Their arguments are characterized by the substance and seriousness of the altercations between Harry and Marv Alone at home. As they finally wash the exterior panels, Max tells Christian not to call him “brother” anymore, that way she knows things can’t be fixed. Looking like a frustrated teacher, Nathan told them that if they fought again during the voyage, he would go straight to the captain.
Returning as guest star is Jack Freeman, a “Sydney socialite” who we met in the notoriously horrific second season of Sydney. At the bottom. Aisha remembers him immediately. It’s a lot – the kind of guest who asks the chefs to unpack his luggage, of which he brings no less than seven items containing 40 pairs of shoes – but it’s nice enough. He doesn’t order anything unusual besides an eight-course dinner menu. The ship’s team is able to disembark without major disaster, and although Josh is worried about proving his mastery of Spanish cuisine, his lunchtime paella is a hit. Aisha is thrilled with Josh’s performance but worries that he will eventually burn out, even though it is the rule, not the exception, for chefs to be neurotic.
Imagine the wonderful things that could happen if a tiny slice of Josh’s drive for perfection could be taken and drilled into Christian and Tessa’s brains. Nathan leaves the two with the guests while he and Max launch the tender. Makes sure to tell them to keep a close eye on guests, making sure they are wearing jackets, helmets, etc. Within about 10 minutes, Sandy noticed one of the guests floating away on the tin plate. This same guest told Christian when he was boarding the plane that he didn’t know how to use the controls, and Christian simply told him, “You’ll get it.” Tessa notices one of the guests walking away, so she says it’s not her responsibility to do anything about it, let alone that’s exactly what “guest monitoring” entails. Christian watches as he scratches his head until Sandy barks, “Help him!”
But even the captain cannot motivate Christian to work. Sandy calls Nathan to return to the rear and pick up the guest stranded 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. Aisha brings news of the ship’s disaster to the kitchen. When Tessa admits that they didn’t show the guest how to use the chips, Nathan reprimands her with quiet firmness: “I told you to do it.” He gathered the whole team to say that they needed to improve their game if they were going to stop looking like amateurs. Tessa is confused as to why she is being blamed for everything that happened. It’s just a ghost on deck! She can’t even pick up solid objects. While she complains in her confessional about Nathan’s lack of direction, we move on to a series of instances when Nathan instructed his employees on exactly what to do.
After an eventful afternoon, guests prepare for a white party-themed caviar and truffle dinner. Kizzi sets a wonderful table and Josh serves pumpkin risotto with salmon, caviar and truffles. He forgets to put truffles in one of the dishes, which is great news for Max, who eats them in the kitchen. 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 stealing it? But that’s simply not the kind of thing that would worry Josh, who is always prepared. The man who makes Plan B desserts just in case there are spare truffles.
Jack orders a piece of caviar paired with a cold shot of vodka, which I’m sorry to admit sounds delicious. He does one, then two, then three, and then, when all 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 chicken with Christian’s help. But their plans are interrupted by Nathan, who fears that a) they will give Jack food poisoning and b) it will distract Christian from the list of damned jobs, which they carefully went through earlier and which he begs Christian to return to. Kizzi checks the crew’s refrigerator and decides to give Jack some chili instead, thinking he’s too drunk to tell the difference. As it turns out, he’s too drunk to eat at all: when I arrive at his room with the food, Jack is asleep. She makes Kizzy laugh because she’s such a good sport. She was generally great, except for the annoying comment she made the next morning when Tessa told her she went to high school in Bali. “Was it a regular school,” Kizzy asks, as if she were in one Love Island The test, “Or were you in the huts?”
As the sun rises on the second day of the charter, Josh is killing it on three and a half hours of sleep while Christian continues to lose it. The jacuzzi didn’t fill up, even though that was the job In the job list, Which he cannot pay attention to. It’s as if he’s never heard of what a to-do list is or how it works. Nathan is confused when he informs Sandy of Christian’s failure, which makes him laugh. Sandy is well placed to sympathize, because when she tried to throw an inflatable chair to Christian, he watched it fall into the ocean. Sandy reminds Nathan that the bosom’s job is difficult but has its rewards, something Nathan can tell himself while watching the jet ski hook hit Christian in the face. May uses it as a mantra as he watches Christian drift away on a jet ski, after failing to start it. He might repeat it to himself when he hears Sandy’s voice coming over the radio: “We’ve got a worker floating away on a jet ski. What are you going to do about Nathan?” And it has its reward and it has its reward..