The monstrous tequila-swilling charter guests are still having their Great Gatsby-themed dinner when we return to Below Deck Mediterranean this week, which means a few things are certain: Adam will curse over a pan of fish, the centerpiece will reach a level of tackiness super-yachts have known not of, and the signature “Bravo new money†look of wearing super-expensive clothes that somehow look like they came from Mystique Boutique will be on unabashed display.
In keeping with the theme, Hannah’s strapped a black feather to her head and is meandering about the boat saying things in French. The guests are so late to dinner that Adam has to spend his time keeping their cream sauces from congealing on the stovetop instead of making a crew meal, so the deck crew takes out pizza for everyone. João says he can’t believe Adam is allowed to get away with not making him a meal. Given that Adam told us he was “picking my nose†instead of making said crew meal, maybe it’s the crew who lucked out this time around?
The guests finally appear in silver sequined dresses that look like an old Halloween costume you’ve been meaning to throw out for three years. Curiously, the primary has patent-leather nude peep-toe pumps on, which goes unaddressed, though I suppose it’s possible Hannah stuffed wee Conrad under the black tablecloth with a spoon to take care of her scuff marks.
The main course finally goes out after midnight, and a man in a red velvet jacket asks for french fries before eating any of it. Infuriated by the request, Adam says, “Guests like these are the reason I live in a van,†and, “I’m perfectly happy with nothing.†He’s the Marie Kondo of the high seas! Which leads me to think that, even if he marries Brooke, the tablescapes at their wedding won’t include Mardi Gras beads and their initials spelled out in glitter.
Then comes the moment I was most excited for this season based on all the previews so far, and it was extremely anticlimactic, Bravo. Even if that’s how it played out in real life, Bravo is doing shady editing anyway (more on that later), so why didn’t they shadily edit this to make it seem like the huge giant flaming trash can of a disaster the previews did?! After failing to light a birthday candle for the primary’s red cake, Hannah goes downstairs to root around for sparklers and lights them inside the boat before taking them outside. Now, common sense would lead most people to light sparklers outside versus inside, whether they were at land or sea. And Hannah, who’s surely been forced to light sparklers for many a horrendous rich person at many a stupid theme party, should know this! Alas, she sets the fire alarm off, which causes both Captain Sandy and a topless João to stir from their chambers.
Sandy says she’s “fucking pissed†and pulls Hannah away from dinner service to tell her she fucked the fuck up! As exciting as this is, Sandy apologizes the next morning so her anger was of no consequence. Shouldn’t Hannah have been punished with night watch? Or, even worse, night watch with João?
(Can someone also tell me why these guests, who seem like such godawful nightmares, keep inviting Hannah and the crew to L.A.? Is this just condescending rich-person nonsense where they pretend like they actually want to befriend the help, but if they ever did hear from any of them in L.A. they’d cancel long-held plans at the last minute after getting stuck in the traffic on the way home from a blood facial?)
Jamie and Brooke stay up until 4:40 a.m. bagging up the table beads, which means Kasey has to get up early and do breakfast service by herself. Her first order of business is to page “all crew, all crew†on her headset to ask if anyone knows how to make a Bloody Mary, which is exactly the sort of thing a sensible yacht worker would feel enough embarrassment about to secretly ask exactly one person.
Now, here’s where Bravo indulges in really lazy editing. Maybe Kasey’s energy rubbed off on the person tasked with this scene, but as she’s struggling to figure out how to make the Bloody Mary, Bravo cuts to a shot of her cell phone to suggest that she’s Googling it. However, if you stop on the shots of her phone you can clearly see that she was Googling the ingredients for a café long. This suggests she didn’t bother Googling the Bloody Mary ingredients at all, which actually makes her look worse than if she had tried to look them up. Surely if she looked them up she would have had something unfortunate to say like, “I thought celery was a vegetable, not a salt.â€
She decides to serve the guest tomato juice with vodka in it, which, next to Adam’s nose pickings, sounds like just about the worst thing you can have first thing in the morning. The guest says he doesn’t like his vodka tomato juice so Kasey wakes up Hannah to tell her that two guests are up and she doesn’t know what goes in a Bloody Mary.
Then the vegan guest orders brown rice for breakfast, which sends Adam into a rage because, I guess, this being a “super-yacht,†he doesn’t stock Uncle Ben’s. Since brown rice takes 45 minutes to cook, he forces Hannah to talk him into having potatoes instead.
Somewhere between all the soda orders and João flopping around on a paddle board like a dead fish we learn Brooke is missing her sister’s wedding. To be on this boat — with these people! It’s the saddest moment of Bravo since like 10 of Liza Vanderpump’s dogs died in one day.
The guests have lunch at a table adorned with a piece of coral and some bright blue aquarium gravel. That night, Brooke decorates the table for the requested Shabbat dinner with flowers and conch shells, which she decides aren’t very Jewish. I will never understand why the girls on this show can’t order flowers and leave them on the table alone rather than turning every dinner setting into a Tampa Bay craft fair.
Down below, Hannah — who has “expensive clothes and expensive taste†— is enraged to learn that Kasey has put the caftans she’s using to seduce Conrad in the dryer. The next day, the primary parades about in a sheer, floor-length leopard caftan before leaving the boat. When she finally gets off she once again invites the crew to let her know if they’re ever in L.A. before insulting them and leaving them a shitty tip.
Now that these people are gone, Hannah has time to hate-LinkedIn search Kasey (or whatever the boat version of LinkedIn is — and it may just be a printed casting sheet from Bravo with a photo of Kasey in a bikini). Brooke wanders into the bridge as Hannah is doing this and they are scandalized to learn that Kasey may as well be a common waitress plucked from any TGIFriday’s because her prior boat waitressing experience consists of a booze cruise and some other vessel that never left the dock. Honestly, I wasn’t as scandalized by this information as I was by the revelation that despite Hannah’s “expensive taste†her preferred dinner décor is a nice big bowl of shells.
Then it’s time for the crew to put on their going-out tops and endure dinner with João before going to an empty neon-lit club. They pour Grey Goose into each other’s mouths straight from the bottle because, I guess, the ice-block shot was occupied.
The episode ends with Brooke and Adam talking about sex, and Hannah and Conrad making out in front of everyone, even though Conrad claims he didn’t want anyone to see. Well, I have a feeling that, though João may be too drunk to remember fist pumping, he’s not too drunk to file away a mental screengrab of that moment to use against Conrad with Captain Sandy later. Judging by next week’s preview, the S.S. Jezabob is coming, and we should all be as scared as that sounds.