Tonight, the gang is gallivanting off the yacht, the charter season’s first opportunity for extracurricular activity. Except, of course, for Captain Kerry, who is pounding lobster in the crew mess and FaceTiming with his girlfriend. (He’s learning Turkish so he can ask her mother for her hand in marriage, which, while sweet, means we will later be ambushed with the Duolingo correct answer sound effect, and there ought to have been a warning because I am triggered.)
Over dinner, we learn more about all of them. Barbie had three nannies growing up: one to cook, one to clean, one to do her hair. (Where do I, as an adult woman, find a hair nanny?) Jared has a beloved little daughter in Alaska who he’s only met via twice-weekly FaceTimes. Fraser has a unicorn tramp stamp.
Sunny leads them all in a toast in French (smell my ass), then dances romantically with Ben in the rain. Cat sits off by herself and just digs around for something in her bag, and given that digging around in my bag is how I spend 60 percent of my waking hours, this does make me like her a little more. Also endearing: Jared, dancing solo by a bonfire and chanting “dance, monkey” to himself. I would like a commentary track for every episode this season, except instead of a commentary track, it’s just playback of whatever Jared’s mic captured him saying at any given moment. I don’t want to miss any of it.
Kyle has his heart set on wooing Barbie, but he’ll have to contend with Jared, who’s spitting some very confusing game in the back of the van. “I don’t know you from a can of paint, but I like the fact that when I look into your eyes, I find truth,” he tells Barbie. “What?” Barbie responds. That said, I don’t think she hated it.
Back on the boat, Xandi and her alarming sunburn (I haven’t seen color-blocking this extreme since the J.Crew Factory clearance section circa 2012) dance beside the hot tub, which quickly escalates into her falling into the hot tub. She is, in Kyle’s words, “pissed as a fart” — “If you fart, it goes everywhere,” he explains, unhelpfully, to the camera. (He will later mutter to himself that he’s “pissed as a [bleeped],” and I’m going to require a full taxonomy from Kyle of all the things it’s possible to be as pissed as and the poetic nuances of each.) Elsewhere on the St. David, Sunny summons Ben to her cabin “for a kiss” via text (honestly, cute) and they make out.
Maybe it’s the truth in Barbie’s eyes, or maybe it’s her commonalities with a can of paint, but Jared is off to a better start this charter. He got up early to get the boat gleaming, an effort that doesn’t go unnoticed by Captain Kerry and actually remembers how to make words come out of his mouth in time to properly communicate the boat’s position when it leaves the dock.
Our new primaries have come to Grenada to renew their vows, alongside two of their friends renewing theirs and another couple getting married for the first time. These guests seem goofy and nice (or, per Fraser, a “bit tacky, but fun”). I appreciate that they are as baffled by the automatic door that opens from the deck — surely one of the yacht’s least exciting features — as if they had just time-traveled here from the Victorian era. More importantly, I am fairly certain that I am not going to witness any of them having sex, so that’s promising.
Anthony whips up a tasty lunch of chicken cordon bleu for the crew but makes the fatal mistake of cooking far too little of it. Kerry warns him that he needs to start preparing twice as much food for family meals, or else there’ll be a “revolt.” Below Deck’s first mutiny? Anyway, I love Anthony, but I’m a little concerned about how he’s going to handle casually whipping up a wedding cake tomorrow night.
Cat says she’s used to getting really close with her crew, so it’s been hard feeling lonely on the St. David. Fraser assigns her to housekeeping duty but reverses his call when he discovers her work is wanting. For one thing, all her towels are rolled in a way that to him is so glaringly wrong it is effectively a war crime, and that, to me, a known idiot, looks fine? He puts Xandi back on housekeeping and has Cat shadow her instead. All this to say: It’s not a great day for Cat. Not that yesterday was much better.
“Hey, Cat, how are you doing?” Fraser calls out to her while she’s folding clothes in the laundry room.
“I’m okay,” she answers, obvious tears in her voice.
“Hmm,” he says, declining to engage any further.
But our chief stew isn’t giving up on her. He remembers his rough early days yachting, when he’d wished there was someone to look after him. He asks Cat to meet with him and lends a sympathetic ear. She shares her actually quite heartbreaking background: Her parents both died when she was young, leaving her and her brother to grow up in foster care. The siblings were separated, and she was placed with a very religious, generally traumatic-sounding family who forbade her from contacting him (they reunited and became close as adults). They harangued her for not being “perfect,” so now it’s a huge source of anxiety to her that she be perceived as having a good work ethic.
Well, shit. Having heard all of this, Fraser asks that Barbie be “extra sensitive” with Cat on this next character. Barbie does not take that request well. “Sorry I’m so terrible,” she retorts.
From there, Barbie manages quite deftly to transfer all the tension she’d had with Cat directly onto her boss. She chooses a particularly odd hill to die on when Fraser questions her margarita recipe — everyone on the boat should be making them the same way. She insists that it needs a splash of orange because that’s “how it’s made.” That is, for the record, not how it’s made. And by the way, Fraser can’t help but point out — that the fruit right there is a grapefruit, not an orange. She delays making the guests’ drinks even longer, instead flipping through a cocktail book of mysterious origin to find evidence that she’s correct. (I repeat: She is not correct.)
Now it’s a full-on cold war. She responds to Fraser’s directives with a frosty “yes, sir,” if she responds to them at all. When he confronts her about her attitude, she complains, “You’re treating me like I’m this bitch.”
“You’re a bitch to me,” he cooly responds. She finds she can’t really argue with that.
The “game night” tablescape — strewn with popcorn boxes, red Solo cups, and “touchdown” paper bunting — looks like a worse-than-average eight-year-old’s birthday, probably because Fraser and Barbie argued the whole time they were assembling it. Fortunately, the easy-to-please guests seem delighted enough just by Fraser wearing a referee shirt and blowing a whistle.
“I just don’t like her. I don’t like the way she is,” Fraser mutters to himself after saying good-night to Barbie. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.
At least somebody likes her, and very much so. Kyle is happier than anyone has ever been happy to be assigned the late shift because Barbie’s working it, too. This gives him the opportunity to flirt by telling her she must be “full of STDs,” and once again — the accent is probably doing its part here — I don’t think she hates it.
The next morning, Sunny takes a jetski out for a joyride, and when she returns, Jared immediately, gently reprimands her for failing to wear a lifejacket and a kill cord. Meanwhile, Ben — having witnessed her ride from a distance — takes it upon himself to broadcast over the walkie that she should’ve been wearing a lifejacket and kill cord, thereby alerting the captain to her oversight. Real snitch behavior. Sunny, who believes this should have been dealt with within their team (it already had been, in fact!), icily ignores him as they set up deckchairs together. Has their boatmance already sprung a leak?
This isn’t the only tale that will be tattled to Kerry. I have to admit, I’m a little surprised when Fraser escalates his issues with Barbie and her “quite hostile attitude” to the captain. Not because I think he’s necessarily in the wrong to do so, but maybe because Fraser’s overall admirable composure had me believing this wasn’t (at least not yet!) as grave a situation as he apparently believes it is. In fact, he says, “he’s done with this.” Guess he’s not willing to be Barbie’s emotions nanny.