A note before getting on with this week’s events: On August 26, Nathan released a statement to Rolling Stone after the outlet reported on his arrest on domestic-violence charges in December of last year. He claimed the public doesn’t have all the facts of an “extremely complicated” situation and that he has material evidence that would contradict public perception of the news, but he didn’t reply to Rolling Stone’s requests to review it. It’s hard to square the seriousness of this development with the overall silliness of the show; all I can say is that we only have a few charters left.
At this late juncture in the season, the instability of the Akira One’s revolving-door crew is taking its toll. Nathan’s absence cost him the progress he’d made as an authority figure: It wasn’t that long ago that Nathan and Joe surprised themselves with how well they were working together. Now we’ve come around full circle to where the season started — Nathan is paranoid, Joe is defensive — which is why I’m rating this episode only three stars. I’m so done with Nathan and Joe’s petty-off! Move on!
When we pick up this week, Sandy is trying her best to convince Max not to follow through on his plan to get his father out of Tunisia through the unstable Libyan desert. But Max has made up his mind, and though he thanks the captain for her advice, he leaves the boat pretty quickly after chatting with Sandy. Last week, some readers speculated that Max could be getting scammed, but he did speak with his father on the phone, so if he is getting scammed, his father would have to be in on it, which is very distressing to imagine. It’s hard to see Max so afflicted, and he’s gone almost as quickly as he arrived.
Max leaves less than three hours before the new charter’s arrival, which means that Sandy is immediately on the phone with Norma from Yachting Staffing. Remember how, in the last season of Down Under, they tried to give us a glimpse into the guests’ home life? I would welcome something similar that gives us a glimpse into Norma’s life when her phone pings for the hundredth time in a month with a request from Sandy for yet another deckhand. At least, the boat can’t leave the dock today because of an incoming storm, which means a reduced workload for the deck team. Even then, Joe is stressed: With Nathan at half-capacity and no Max, efficiently running the exterior will be “virtually impossible.”
This is when the Joe-versus-Nathan problem reignites. Nathan is offended by Joe’s concern, and it’s all downhill from there. Joe adopts an attitude. When Sandy asks him to collect some trash from the dock, he replies that he shouldn’t leave the boat unless the bosun tells him to. This is, of course, ridiculous: He’s getting the instruction from the captain. Annoyed, Sandy tells Nathan to encourage Joe to take initiative and do things when they need to be done without asking for permission; he is still lead deckhand, after all. Sandy is saying, Be a better leader, but Nathan hears, Joe is sabotaging me by making me look bad.
Even then, Joe is being unnecessarily difficult. He admits that he’s being childish as he spirals deeper into his resentment rut. As they’re getting into their whites, Joe asks Coop once again to have his back. Coop assures him that he will, when and if warranted, but he will also tell Joe when he needs to “straighten the fuck up,” meaning, stop whining and get on with your work. Nathan hasn’t been as hostile or closed off as they had expected him to be on his return, and Joe is clearly looking for issues where there aren’t any. As for his part, Coop compares himself to Bella Swan in Eclipse: Just a girl caught in the middle.
The tension gets so bad that Nathan and Joe start bickering in front of the whole crew as they wait to line up for guest arrival. Taking Sandy’s advice, Nathan tells Joe that if he sees something that needs doing, he should just do it, instead of waiting for permission; Joe replies that he’d been instructed to always go through Nathan. Sandy steps in to tell them to stop being so petty. She tells Joe that he did do a great job as bosun, but he needs to snap out of this wallowing now and be a team player. Besides, she wonders, what happened to the inseparable duo that used to be Joe and Nathan?!
Before they can explain, the guests arrive, bringing the storm with them. I have to correct a mistake from my recap last week: The primary’s name is spelled the Kardashian way, Kasandra, rather than Cassandra, as I’d written it. It seemed, from her preference sheet, that Kasandra would be bitchy and demanding, but as it turns out, the fussy one is her husband, Jeff, who cannot believe that they can’t leave the dock when he’s paid so much money for this vacation. For her part, Kasandra — who actually seems fun — decides to spend her rainy day on a superyacht in the only reasonable way: getting drunk and annoying the hell out of her husband.
A day on the dock means less work for the exterior team and twice as much work for the interior team, who has to keep the guests entertained. But at least, Aesha is back in her rightful post as chief stew, and she’s ready to mobilize her team into seven-star service. Kayley suggests a cooking class with Joy for the guests, and Aesha adds a cocktail-mixing demo to the idea. Meanwhile, to kill time and illustrate how unpleasant it is to cruise on choppy waters, Sandy offers the guests a tender ride. Joe and Kayley take them out, and Kayley tries to comfort Joe by wisely reminding him that he can’t control the facts of his situation with Nathan, only his own reaction to them. It’s what she did when Gen’s anti-Kayley sentiment was at an all-time high, and it worked. Alas, this excellent advice goes into one of Joe’s ears and out the other.
Speaking of Gen: She drops a whole tray of welcome drinks as they’re waiting for the guests to come back from the tender ride. Apparently, Gen was in an ATV accident in Bali that messed up her wrist, and she’s supposed to be wearing a stabilizing brace (she is not, for the most part). For the rest of the episode, she complains about swelling and pain, but Kat is not exactly buying it. “I think Gen’s wrist does hurt … a little bit,” she says, emphasizing how difficult it is to separate Gen’s chronic bad attitude from any actual problem; she’s the girl who cried wolf.
The rain comes down in the afternoon, but the guests barely notice it because they’re having so much fun with Aesha and Joy’s cocktail-mixing and cooking class. Not even Jeff being annoyed at Kasandra’s drunkenness can ruin the mood. The vibes continue to pick up during the guests’ predinner fashion show, for which the crew sets up a red carpet. By the end of it, even Jeff is smiling from ear to ear. Even better, though the interior team had to hustle to switch the dinner décor from outside to inside once it started raining again, the tablescape looks impeccable and the guests love their food. Jeff loves his filet mignon so much that he chokes on it. He runs to the bathroom and proceeds to vomit in the sink. “The sink is clogged,” he announces to Aesha, matter-of-factly, as if he had nothing to do with it. Aesha sends Kayley to deal with it, but a regular sink plunger can’t do the job — Nathan has to suction the stuff out with the wet vacuum. Kayley and Nathan’s efforts are intercut with Kasandra opening her birthday present from Jeff (whose airways are now totally clear), a $100,000 diamond necklace. That’s that upstairs-downstairs snark I come to this show for!
While the guests have dinner, Sandy checks in, again, on the state of Nathan’s relationship with Joe, which is, basically, worse: Nathan is increasingly paranoid that Joe is trying to turn the crew against him. Again, at Sandy’s suggestion, Nathan pulls Joe aside to ask, through a sarcastic grin, if he did or said anything wrong. At first, Joe defaults to his regular stance, which is that he is simply keeping out of Nathan’s way as instructed. But he finally approaches something close to frankness when he admits that Nathan’s aggressive temper makes him hesitant to be truly open. He stops short of admitting that he thinks he should be bosun; instead, he throws Coop in the middle of it, telling Nathan to “go ask Cooper” what he thinks. But Cooper, being a former football player, has plenty of experience with aggressive guys with huge egos. Confronted by Nathan, he doesn’t deny that the bosun can be aggressive, but he’s also clear that he intends to put his head down and get on with his work without getting in the middle of Nathan and Joe.
The next morning, crew and guests wake up to better weather. They leave the dock by 8:30 a.m., and, in even better news, Norma has found a “very experienced” deckhand who will join the crew that same afternoon. Gen, forgetting her swollen wrist, perks up at the thought of having a new person to ruin sheets with. It’s still relatively gray, windy, and drizzly, but nothing that can stop Jeff from having an absolute blast on the Jet Ski. It’s endearing, even, how much fun he has. In other words, everyone is happy except for Nathan and Joe.
Joe tells Kayley that he’s reaching his limit “faking a friendship” with Nathan, and that if it were up to him, he’d leave the boat (um, it is up to you, Joe). Nathan overhears a snippet of this exchange, which convinces him that Joe is engaged in an all-out smear campaign against him. When he finds himself sitting in the crew mess alone with Kayley, Nathan asks her if Joe has been talking shit about him to her. Kayley gracefully dodges the question, reminding him that it’s not her place to get involved, which unfortunately only fuels Nathan’s suspicions. He confronts Joe again, which makes it the third time in this episode that Joe and Nathan have a little talk. This time, Joe throws it back at Nathan: Has Nathan been talking shit about him? Joe accuses Nathan of being insecure; Nathan throws the accusation back. They reverse-Uno each other for a bit until their argument is cut short by the arrival of the new, as-yet mysterious deckhand.
