Below Deck Down Under Recap: Throwing in the Towels

Ahoy, mates! After episode two’s uneventfulness, this wee we recover interest and intrigue aboard the Katina: Romance emerges on the crew’s first night out. The situation between Tzarina and Anthony doesn’t escalate under the influence of alcohol, which is an affront to the Bravo name, but the Bri-Harry-Wihan triangle does. Upsetting the odds and surprising everyone, it’s Harry who kisses Bri at the club, not Wihan, the crush of almost every girl onboard. It’s hard to tell who is more surprised at Harry’s game: Bri, Wihan, or Harry himself. Now that Harry got his moment in the spotlight, by the way, I’ll start campaigning for Johnny: I just love that guy.

Disappointingly, everyone goes to bed as soon as they get back, missing the opportunity to have more fun and perhaps sneak a peek of Captain Jason in a skimpy silk robe I at first thought I had hallucinated. In the morning, Harry continues last season’s tradition of wooing his crushes by making them coffee and sits with Bri in the crew mess. It’s a nice conversation but a little awkward. Looking to protect his prospects with a cunning worthy of an Edith Wharton protagonist, Wihan asks Bri point-blank whether she likes Harry. “I really like his personality,” she replies in a refrain she will repeat countless times throughout this episode. Wihan decides to pivot and see if he has chemistry with anyone else onboard.

Now appropriately dressed, Jason chats with Tzarina about the tension in the galley. She vents about Anthony’s egoism and his endless complaining. Jason thinks Anthony needs to pipe down but also that Tzarina should assert herself more as the head of the department. I think Jason’s right, as usual: Maybe what it would take for Anthony to learn his place would be for Tzarina to unequivocally summon her authority and tell him to get used to it. That approach might be more useful than fantasizing about what could’ve been their Brit-inflected camaraderie.

Representing the fearless forwardness of Brazilian women everywhere, Marina asks Bri why she doesn’t take more initiative with Harry if she likes him. Bri catches us up on her romantic history: She was engaged to an Adonis from Amsterdam, but he wanted to settle down in her rural New Jersey town, so she broke up with him and set out to discover the world on her own. I was feeling a little lukewarm about Bri up to this moment. She is gorgeous, but we hadn’t yet gotten much of her personality. Learning more about her emotional past gave her some life. While the girls have this conversation preparing the cabins for the incoming charter, Harry asks to move into Wihan’s cabin since he is a bit cramped with Anthony and Johnny, and Wihan is bunking solo. Will they whisper about Bri in the night?

In the meantime, the heads of department gather for the preference sheet meeting. The next primary is a dude-bro by the name of Erik, an entrepreneur, life coach, and influencer who sounds intolerable but whose requests are wholesome: sunset drinks on the beach, local cuisine focus, a diving expedition. For this charter, Bri will be on service and Marina will be on housekeeping. Tzarina asks Anthony to take over beach canapés in her continued effort to make him a bigger part of the team and show Jason she can be a manager.

Anthony seems excited about it until Tzarina tasks him with unloading the provisions, which elicits another tantrum. Honestly, does this guy know that any job often involves completing annoying tasks? I’ve never worked in a professional kitchen, but I’ve read Bill Buford’s Heat and watched Ratatouille, and I don’t think there’s a head chef in the world who would acquiesce to their sous in the way Anthony expects Tzarina to. Because he is asked to unpack and do the beach canapés on top of the crew lunch, he feels “taken advantage of.” It does seem like a lot of work, but then again, everything about working on a superyacht seems like a lot of work. When Anthony asks Tzarina for help lightening the load, she tells him he doesn’t have to go to the beach to serve the canapés: They can prepare them beforehand and give them to the stews, and he could lie down for two hours and rest. Anthony finds the suggestion patronizing, which it frankly is. Tzarina’s mistake is to pretend she is not being passive-aggressive; it would be so much better if she were honest with him. His attitude sucks, but she doesn’t know how to lead their confrontations somewhere productive. Jason eavesdrops on their debate, and afterward Anthony calls a friend to vent. He reaches out to a chef to ask if he knows of any boats hiring, as he is considering jumping ship (haha), while Tzarina cleans the galley.

Erik and his entourage arrive — one of them already shirtless. Lara gives them the usual boat tour and shows them the retractable balcony in one of the bedrooms. She radios Wihan to close it, but his radio is on his bed while he uses the restroom, so he doesn’t hear her, which becomes a problem as they undock. Captain is pissed that there’s a balcony open and even angrier that Lara and Wihan are not communicating efficiently. Meanwhile, Bri is trying and failing to figure out how to close the balcony, and Adair has to run downstairs to do it. Wihan seems annoyed at Lara even though it’s his mistake. He doesn’t think she should be putting the balcony down in the first place, but it’s the room’s coolest feature … Imagine paying thousands of dollars to charter a boat and never learning you could jump into the water from your room!

In preparation for dinner, Tzarina puts Anthony in charge of the octopus and takes on crew food so he can get a good head start on the canapés. While her passive-aggressive comment about his lying down is the focus of his entire afternoon, her gestures of goodwill go unnoticed and unappreciated. His canapés are a success with the guests; his ego is inflated, and he doesn’t miss the opportunity to disparage Tzarina’s cooking, which he thinks is basic. His own idea of sophistication, mind you, is arancini and tartare: delectable but hardly original. While Erik teaches the beach crew how to awaken their inner leaders, disaster strikes on the Katina. 

It wasn’t a red herring: Harry jams his thumb while docking the Jet Skis and his nail comes clean off. The medic tells him to be careful about not getting it infected in the water and to get it checked for fractures if the pain doesn’t subside. It looks pretty gnarly, and Harry is upset not only because he’s in so much pain but also because any simple task has now become three times harder, which will make it tricky for him to do his job. Jason starts planning for the possibility of having to find a new deckie almost immediately, and Johnny wonders if this will be his chance to snag the lead deckhand post. Still, everyone worries about Harry: The sight of him crying would be enough to grow the Grinch’s heart three sizes.

However, this is luxury yachting, and the show simply must go on. I’m not proud of it, but I stood up from my chair, pointed at the screen, and laughed out loud when I saw that Anthony’s sous-vide bag burst and his octopus boiled in the water, ruining it beyond repair. Who is the Jacques Pépin of the Seven Seas now?! Tzarina, who must be a better person than me, is not worried. After all, she has, I swear to you, made two more kinds of soup this evening. Erik starts dinner with an eloquent prayer worth transcribing in full: “I’m so blessed to be gifted with great looks and leaving a valuable mark in this world. Life is really short; stay on your purpose for the rest of the time. Amen, you guys.”

As the night winds down, Johnny does weights in his room, and Wihan asks Marina, who is a certified diver, to go on the diving excursion with Jason and the guests tomorrow. She can’t contain her excitement at being asked or at the fact that it was Wihan who asked her, and she agrees right away. Understandably, Lara finds it annoying that Wihan stole one of her two stews for the entire afternoon without discussing it with her first; but she bites her tongue because she is an adult, unlike some other people on this boat. “Little baby” guy is my least favorite type of guy, and by the end of this episode, Jason has had it with Anthony, too.

Earlier that night, Wihan had unsuspectingly rekindled that morning’s fight when he asked whether Tzarina and Anthony were ever going to get to rest. Tzarina mentions she’d offered Anthony a lie-down break, prompting him to say he’s “not being treated like a human” and that he doesn’t respect Tzarina as a chef; which, of course, is the real problem. Some readers have wondered if Anthony would have the same attitude working under a male chef. I hesitated to ask the same question because I didn’t want to make an unfair assumption, but at this point it’s clear that there is at least a little bit of that going on here. Ever since stepping onboard, Anthony hasn’t shown an ounce of deference toward his boss, who, condescending as she may be, hasn’t asked him to do anything he isn’t getting paid to do. Jason suggests she fire him, but she wants to give their team a chance. That is annoying, too. Tzarina is being spineless. She tells us a bit about her own hard-earned rise through the ranks, and it makes you wonder why she’s not stricter. Have it out with him, tell him what’s what — do something!

Having taken too long to take decisive action, Tzarina gives Anthony way too much control. The chef he’d contacted earlier confirms a new job for him on a different boat, and he tells Tzarina he’ll work two more charters on the Katina before leaving. The notion that he could be consistently uncooperative and disrespectful to his head of department and choose to leave on his own terms is too much for Jason, who stomps down to the galley to tell Anthony if he wants to leave, it won’t be in two charters, it’ll be right now. Pack your bags and go. No one is going to miss you! The episode promises that this is “to be continued,” but I wish this shit-fest would just end. There’s a chance we will be two crew members down next week, too, since poor Harry had to be sent to the hospital after a sleepless night in pain.