Below Deck Down Under Recap: All Hands on Deck

Ahoy to everyone except Anthony, who leaves the Katina in the middle of breakfast service with an eloquent good-bye: “I’m offski,” he tells the deck crew. This might be the end of Anthony for the season, but it’s not the end of sous chefs: Jason asks around for CVs immediately, so here’s hoping that whoever comes next will be pleasanter. Anthony’s mid-service departure is stressful for Tzarina, whose rhythms are now thrown off. I wanted to remind her that she’s always done this job by herself, so she’ll be fine. This season’s crew, particularly in the absence of Anthony, is revealing itself to be a wholesome team. Everyone offers to chip in and help the chef in the galley.

The majority of the guests are scheduled to go on a diving expedition in the afternoon with Jason and Marina, which is annoying to Lara but a well-timed break overall: It gives the crew time to regroup and reset. While Erik runs some kind of life-coaching webinar scam on his laptop, his guests disclose their opinions of him. “So judgy,” a woman laments while soaking up the Seychelloise sun and being handed a skinny marg. Meanwhile, Bri worries about Harry. No one has heard from him yet, so she sends him a nice text: “Hope you get good news today!”

Perhaps partly on the strength of the morale imparted by Bri’s text, Harry comes back with a wrapped but intact thumb and extremely high spirits. I’m really rooting for these two. I hope they get married. Watching them reminds me of those heartening Instagram videos of otters holding hands. There is something innocent about how Bri keeps asking everyone if they think Harry likes her, with the same kind of thrilling insecurity once reserved for AIM chats and behind-the-bleachers encounters.

Upon Harry’s return, Johnny catches him up on Anthony’s departure (he doesn’t care; no one cares). Harry may be great, but he is still a boy, and boys are dumb, so he goes around the whole boat, talking to everyone before he gets to Bri, which confuses her. She asks Lara what she thinks: Did Harry really mean to kiss her? Lara threatens to take matters into her own hands if Harry and Bri won’t stop acting like they are in the fourth grade. “I need those baby giraffes,” she says. Same!

Scuba diving with Jason and Marina looks like a blast; Marina comes back to the boat literally jumping with joy. Erik and his guests don’t look half as excited, but then again, I’m not sure they have ever experienced fun. Harry tells Jason that the doctor advised him to keep the wound dry and avoid using that hand for a few days while it heals but that no fracture means he can stay on the boat. Jason encourages him to help out with the interior and in the galley since it’ll be harder to do deck stuff for the first few days post-injury. As Lara had already observed, one thing that is possible to make with one hand is a bed.

Let’s get into dinner. I’ll give a million dollars to the person who can correctly guess what Tzarina has in store for Monte Carlo Casino Royale night. To a beautiful tablescape carefully laid out by Lara, to whom the pleasures of nailing a theme are erotic, Tzarina brings out … soup! French onion soup with a truffle Parmesan grilled cheese on Pullman bread half-dipped in the bowl. Its presentation closely resembles the way I serve myself a bowl of soup and grilled cheese when I want to minimize the dishes. Am I going to have to step in for Anthony here? Jesus, Tzarina, put a crouton in the ramekin where it belongs. This dinner is only made more embarrassing by the fact that Jason is eating with the guests, and he can tell everyone’s reaction to a famously heavy and wintery soup is befuddlement. Not that the guests all have their wits about them: one of them, Ryan, wears a turtleneck and a blazer in 100-degree heat.

The deck crew takes up the second course, which is steak, naked from the waist up save for a bowtie. Their costuming gets next to zero reaction from the guests. We’d be able to tell even if he weren’t there, but Jason’s facial expressions confirm that these people are painfully boring. When one poor soul suggests playing Texas Hold ’Em as a way to inject the evening with even the smallest excitement, Ryan responds with a question: “Did you know that the pursuit of money and fame are the two lowest vibrating forms of energy?” I would’ve jumped off the boat.

Deck crew gives Tzarina a hand with the dishes, and Captain Jason offers some feedback. He’s willing to cut her a little slack because it’s been a tough day, but she could definitely do better. As the night winds down, Harry finally approaches Bri to talk about The Kiss and asks her out on a beach date the next day. They share an adorable, very awkward peck; you can tell Bri is shy about kissing on camera. In their cabin, Wihan and Harry high-five to Harry’s triumph, which is sweet given Wihan’s initial interest in Bri. Utilizing his game-theory approach to boatmance, Wihan goes through his prospects: Tzarina is cool. Adair is spunky. Marina is Brazilian, and how can you not like Brazilians? (Exactly.) Lara looks like a real-life Barbie. What’s a man to do? The next day, he muses that Adair, who is “definitely his type,” would have probably liked Anthony, so his absence might be an opportunity.

During breakfast, Erik enlightens us on his Theory of Women, which posits that women could have the power to control him if they completed three simple daily tasks: (1) told him he’s the man, (2) touched his steroid-ed forearms non-sexually, and (3) had sex with him. Here’s a free idea for Bravo: have women band together to fuck with this guy John Tucker style. Just listening to him speak makes Lara skip around at the prospect of having him off the boat in just a few hours.

Tzarina asks Jason what he wants for crew lunch. Hoping to make her life easier, he suggests she lay out brunch in the crew mess with the leftovers from breakfast. Usually, Tzarina would prepare something for everyone after the tip meeting, as the schedule of their nights off — drinking early and eating late — are a great way to guarantee a bad hangover. Instead of explaining this to Jason and assuring him she doesn’t mind cooking later, she complains to Lara that when everyone feels awful the next day, they’ll claim it’s “her fault.” Jason overhears her bitching and tells her she can cook after the tip meeting if she wants; he was just trying to help. The mere tone of his voice makes her burst into tears. Tzarina is obviously in one of those moods where nothing good can happen. I get it, but she needs to get herself together, especially when the captain is still within earshot. “I’m my biggest villain,” she admits in a confessional. At least she’s self-aware!

After a smooth docking, Erik proves just how shallow his powers of perception are when he confidently claims that “there is not one toxic trait on this crew.” This is Bravo, Erik! “One of the best exit speeches on earth just happened,” he claims as he gets in the van to go home. I wish I could trade bodies with him for one day, like in Freaky Friday, just to know what it’s like to live in a world so completely outside of reality. During the tip meeting, Tzarina apologizes to Jason for her outburst in front of the crew, which gets her back in his good graces. The tip comes out to $22,000, and with Anthony’s share divided among them, they each bank $1,830. Jason had planned to give Anthony the helmet, but since he’s gone, he decides to let them off the hook for this charter. I’m surprised he didn’t give it to Tzarina.

As the crew heads out for the night, we get a glimpse of the Katina’s developing boatmance landscape. Tzarina has eyes on Wihan (she remarks that he is short and muscly, just like someone we used to know), as does Marina. They go head to head, demonstrating their interest each in their own way: Tzarina literally jumps at Wihan while Marina retreats, gearing up for attack. Tzarina’s strategy pays off that night as she sits next to Wihan at dinner and kisses him in a game of Truth or Dare back in the boat’s hot tub. She also gets a lap dance from Johnny, on Lara’s dare, the sight of which gives Lara the ick. I’m starting to really like Lara: She is reserved but fun, and though the first episode implied she might have a mean-girl streak, she’s been nothing but kind to everyone.

The next day, Harry secures Jason’s approval to take Bri out on a date to the beach. Jason is so encouraging that he even lends Harry some linen pants to up his game. Unfortunately, it’s raining, so Harry takes Bri out for ice cream instead. They have a nice time talking about how they got into yachting and generally being cute. While they’re out, Marina makes her move: She asks Wihan to the bar. There, she gives him a beaded bracelet she made for him with the word beijos, meaning kisses, on it. I will never not defend Marina because I am loyal to my compatriots, but geez, are you proposing to him? Little much, no? It reminded me of Culver’s “yes or no” card asking Jaimee to be his girlfriend last season: a sweet gesture that gives you second-hand embarrassment. Wihan doesn’t seem to find it that embarrassing, though, because they kiss right away. I like Wihan so far, but I’m worried about what all of this attention will do to his ego …

Back in the crew mess, Harry and Bri tell Tzarina that Marina and Wihan have gone out on a date, which really upsets her. I feel for Tzarina; it does seem like she always ends up being second best, and that’s an awful feeling. Still, I’m not sure whatever she and Wihan had — one kiss in a drunken game of Truth or Dare — was serious enough to justify calling Marina “a backstabbing bitch.” Then again, we know boatmances develop at three times the speed with which any relationship would evolve in “real life.” The plot thickens!