Below Deck Down Under Recap: The Great Divide

Mates, the day has come for our patience to be rewarded. At first, we might have even been charmed by him; then we were disturbed and finally revolted. We kept watching even as he enveloped the Katina in a demented cloud of chaos. And now we reap the rewards — Wihan is gone. Not only is he gone, he is fired with cutting words from Jason.

“It’s like an infection,” the captain explains. “I need to cut the infection out.” I understand Wihan is a real person with a real job and real feelings, so I’m embarrassed to admit that I got up from my chair and clapped when he was fired. Because nothing can ever be perfect, in losing him, we had to lose Johnny, too. The minute I saw that Johnny’s cabinet-punching — indisputably excessive but not entirely incomprehensible — had woken up the captain, I knew this would happen. Johnny’s outburst tied Jason’s hands, but if nothing else, seeing Jason exercise his discernment after weeks of neglect was a relief.

The first half of this week’s episode depicts the fallout of the Johnny-Wihan-Alesia bunk-bed situation, which, on a different kind of television show, perhaps one with a live audience and multiple cameras, might’ve been funny. Jason puts Johnny in a hotel room for the night to cool off, and Alesia catches the girls up on what happened. In a drunken game of telephone, whispers and opinions course through the boat. At one point, Wihan calls Alesia to … say nothing useful or helpful. He doesn’t even bother to get up from his bed to talk to her. While he goes soundly back to sleep, Alesia vents to the girls about how guilty she feels.

Harry, still ensconced in the master bedroom, gets the story from Lara and Tzarina, who go back to check on him, lest he be offended by all the noise. Bri follows them, but there is no acknowledgment whatsoever of the fact that she was crying or, for that matter, that Harry had a nasty fight with Wihan and then was consoled by one of her co-workers and her supervisor. Weirdest of all, Bri goes back to sleep in her own cabin rather than stay with Harry for the night, even though Lara is right there and would probably encourage them to have some privacy after emotions ran so high. Something (the preview at the end of the episode) tells me the relationship between Harry and Bri is about to sour again.

In the morning, Jason gets everyone’s account of what happened the night before while Marina cheerily makes pancakes in the galley, as if suspended above the problems plaguing the boat. In the bridge, Alesia tells Jason about the mix-up — including that, thinking she was talking to Johnny, she mentioned to Wihan that Harry was crying. Putting on his Detective Obvious hat, Jason follows the thread to Lara’s report of the night, then Harry’s, and finally Tzarina’s. They all repeat to the same complaints they had already made about Wihan — he doesn’t take any responsibility, he’s difficult to be around, he yells at Harry — though for some reason both Lara and Harry say he is “just not nice,” which seems like a gross misinterpretation of his issue. If only that were it!

Johnny gets fired first, for the sake of “the safety of the crew,” as Jason puts it. Johnny looks disappointed in himself, but takes the firing on the chin. “What teaches a person how to become a better human being is the bad days and the accidents,” he says, almost wise enough to make you forget he punched a cabinet. When Alesia goes to say good-bye to him, he calls her “sweet Alesia” and tells her, “I remembered the self of mine that I’m not. That’s why I’m leaving.” That’s not really why he’s leaving — he got fired — but I would never begrudge Johnny his poetics. Sort of a beautiful articulation of the ultimate instability of the self, the impossibility of wholeness, the fact that one can be a mystery even to oneself. He will be so missed!

All Wihan can say, meanwhile, is goo goo gah gah. Let me backtrack slightly to emphasize that, shortly before getting called to the bridge, he tells Adair that he knew full well it was Alesia climbing into his bed the previous night, and that he figured she just wanted to talk to someone other than Johnny or Harry. So, when he later tells Adair he doesn’t “understand where all of this is coming from,” he is 100 percent telling self-effacing lies. His delusion that everyone is embroiled in a senseless plot against him only makes things worse: Jason’s ultimate argument is that he doesn’t take accountability for anything. Hugging a totally indifferent Adair, who might as well have been putting her arms around a tree trunk, he insists he doesn’t get why he is being fired. She, on the other hand, does: He couldn’t convince himself, her, or anyone that he is not the problem.

Jason calls a quick crew meeting to let everyone know about the firings before they head off on their day trip, which is still happening despite the horrid vibes. They all pile into vans, including Jason, which I found interesting. Some team bonding is definitely in order after a chaotic morning, but I wondered if, rather than being at a turtle sanctuary, he shouldn’t be back on the boat trying to find a new bosun and deckhand before new guests arrive in under 24 hours. He does leave after getting some CVs from the agency and seeing two ginormous 300-year-old turtles go at it. The rest of the crew chills on the beach, swimming and tanning and trying to recover their sanities.

The next morning, still in the absence of a bosun, Jason calls Harry to join the preference-sheet meeting. The incoming primary is a woman named Nikita celebrating her PR firm’s fourth anniversary with all the other executives from the company. The heads of department and Harry also look at the CVs of the two new deck guys, who arrive shortly thereafter. The bosun is an Australian lumberjack type named Nate with seven years of yachting experience. He makes his whole introduction about having grown up with sisters, which is sweet as long as it doesn’t belie a more entrenched darkness … He comes aided by Nicolas, or Nick, who is very new to yachting — this is only his second season — and introduces himself like this: “Believe it or not, in high school I wasn’t very popular.” Trust me, Nick: I believe you. Once Nikita and her girls get onboard, he is immediately smitten by all of them.

The show must go on, and with a refreshed team, morale seems high for everyone except Tzarina and Lara. Already irritated by Alesia, who is very distracted by Johnny’s departure, Tzarina feels hurt when Lara compares her to The Brady Bunch’s Jan, the weird sister to the perfect Marcia. It’s a slight overreaction from Tzarina, whose redeeming quality is her ability to laugh at herself, but it is always hurtful to hear our insecurities mocked. Lara, on the other hand, becomes piqued when Jason tells her to pull Marina out of housekeeping for some service shifts (hallelujah!). Even though he explains that it’s important for crew members to feel as though their hard work is recognized and to grow in all areas of the department, Lara takes his suggestion begrudgingly; it even seems like she might not accept it. In a confessional, she tells us she doesn’t “need the extra challenge” of moving Marina up to service when there are two new crew members (who aren’t even in her department) on the boat. By refusing to be fair to Marina, Lara is creating an issue with two Brazilian women.

The tension that builds between Lara and Tzarina culminates during dinner service. First, Lara criticizes Tzarina’s choice of plates and gets her to change them. Then, as Jason is bringing up a salt-crusted red snapper that Tzarina will cook in front of the guests, Lara tries to stop him, saying that the guests aren’t done with the previous course yet. Tzarina snaps that the fish still needs to be cooked, so Lara will have plenty of time to change their plates. These two misunderstandings are small enough to die down, especially between friends; but again, something (the preview at the end of the episode) tells me they’ll actually snowball into a much bigger problem …

Tzarina pulls out all the stops for Mob Wives night, having made arancini, pasta, and surf and turf besides the snapper. It’s amazing how lobster and steak can never be absent from a Below Deck table, even when they have nothing at all to do with the rest of the meal. The guests love it. After dinner, they want to play drinking games, so Bri and Nick stay up with them. When Nate and Nick ask Jason whether they should be part of the evening’s entertainment, Jason is very clear: “Don’t drink, behave yourself, and enjoy the rest.”

It takes no time at all for Nick to violate those rules. One of the guests makes a deal with him: If she makes a shot into one of the cups, then he has to take a shot. He agrees, she makes the shot, he downs the tequila. Bri is stunned. Discreetly, she reminds him that they’re not supposed to drink on charter. He is all “I can’t believe I did this” about it, and very unconvincing. He tells her that he’ll confess to the captain in the morning, which at least means she doesn’t have to worry about having seen it. I don’t really buy Nick’s whole persona. It seems that he is going for a bumbling, awkward, sensitive guy who acts like the sidekick and looks like the leading man. It’s a tough act to pull off, and I’m not sure he can: No one who is actually very awkward walks around talking about how awkward they are.

It looks like we’re in for a turbulent second half of the season. The preview at the end of the episode teases a new fling between Alesia and Nate, an escalation of the fight between Lara and Tzarina, and Harry making mistakes. Here’s hoping it’s all enough to save the season. For all that happened, I thought the pace of this episode was a little awkward, if not flat-out slow at times. I need more from these people. Crew — look alive!