Below Deck Mediterranean Recap: A Sticky Situation

Below Deck Mediterranean
Bad Seamanship
Season 11 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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So far in the season, Gen has mostly landed on the wrong side of the audience’s favor. Her rivalry with Kayley was unnecessary, and the sheets disaster unbecoming, to say the least — but if her behavior suggested Gen was too immature to navigate the complex social dynamics of a yacht, this week, she proves that impression wrong. Gen may have acted bratty, but she shows commendable firmness, standing up to a man over ten years her senior who is trying to gaslight her. “I may be young,” she tells Luke, “but I know men’s behavior.” I was proud of her, but it also made me angry that she should feel that way at such a young age. It’s enough to make you want to get together with a bunch of other women in a room and scream. 

In a confessional at the start of this week’s episode, Luke tries to redress his failure to communicate with Gen as an intentional attempt to guard Gen’s feelings in the middle of the charter. But if there’s anyone whose emotions are getting in the way of a job well done, it’s Luke himself. In the morning, Nathan and Joe notice that Luke didn’t complete all the tasks in his night shift’s to-do list. He’s also not quick enough on his feet during docking, which prompts Joe to remark that Luke is “on one today.” Joe knows a thing or two about picking up a love triangle on the job, but Luke’s behavior makes Joe seem like the second coming of John Stuart Mill. 

At this point, with the guests just about to disembark, Nathan’s soiled sheets still haven’t been changed, and Gen is still under the impression that the previous night’s conversation with Luke was “really good.” After the guests leave, Aesha reminds everyone to do their sheets ASAP. Luke offers to change Nathan’s, but the bosun waves away the offer. After all, why should he take Luke up on it, not knowing that he has been sleeping on Luke’s DNA for three straight nights? Besides, Nathan is sick and being overly cautious about not infecting anyone — he even decides to stay on the boat rather than go back to his rental that night to avoid getting Kayden sick, despite Gael needing his help. Aesha remarks on how hard it must be for her to be alone with the baby all day, and in a foreign country at that; later that night, when Nathan calls her to check in, Gael cries because she feels so overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, Luke’s attitude about the dirty sheets is “could’ve, would’ve, should’ve.” That also more or less describes Joy’s attitude toward Luke. If he wants to win her attention back, he will have to prove that he has the cardio endurance as well as the muscular strength to climb a steep mountain on the way to redemption. Luke steels himself for some “difficult conversations” that night. It helps that they’re all $2,076 richer from a solid $27,000 tip. During the tip meeting, Sandy singles out Kayley and Cooper, praising them for knocking the Game of Thrones–themed dinner out of the park.

The hours between finishing work for the day and going out to dinner are the calm before the storm. The crew is on a 24-hour turnaround, which means no one is expecting to drink that much. Aesha FaceTimes her fiancé, Scott, to make sure he’s getting through the wedding-planning checklist she left for him, and tells him about mentoring her group of young, competent, and reliable stews, speculating that Kayley will make a great chief stew one day. Kayley is laser-focused on her job, but she has also found herself in a comforting situation with Joe. Resting with him in his cabin, she tells him about her brother, Ewan, who had cerebral palsy and passed away when he was only 5 years old. Later that night, Kayley and Joe follow in Kat and Cooper’s wholesome footsteps and decide to sleep on the deck, under the stars. Joe even sets a reminder on his phone for Ewan’s upcoming anniversary date. I’m starting to suspect that Joe went through some kind of reverse Manchurian Candidate thing. Joe Bradley, if you’re in there, blink twice.

On the way to dinner, Luke rides in a taxi with Nathan, Aesha, and Joe. They tell him that they noticed how distracted he was during the charter, and Luke admits that he likes Joy “on a very different level” than Gen. He needs to straighten things out, but he needs everyone’s help. This is the first sign of the kind of tomfoolery Luke has in store for the night. Why should anyone help him fix the mess caused by his own behavior? In a confessional, Luke articulates his line of thinking matter-of-factly, and, I thought, audaciously: In order to win back Joy’s favor, he needs the crew on his side, so he purposefully omits the fact that he had sex with Gen from his narrative of the love triangle. Instead — and this part is implied — he relies on Gen’s image as a competitive brat to paint her as “obsessed,” thereby washing his hands of any wrongdoing.

Victims of this manipulation scheme, Nathan and Aesha conspire to impose on the dinner’s seating arrangements in such a way that Luke is sitting next to Joy, and Gen is isolated at the end of the table. Kat encourages Gen to forget a guy who seems like “a fucking player,” but Gen fumes as Luke pleads his case to Joy. He asks for a chance. He tells her he went out of his way to organize her already-organized cupboard during his night shift (instead of doing his own job). Joy starts to feel like maybe she was too hard on Luke, and that maybe a little part of her still likes him, but the feeling hardly has any time to develop before shit hits the fan. 

Gen notices Aesha and Nathan cheers-ing to the success of their seating plot. Not unreasonably feeling ganged up on, she explains to her chief stew that she and Luke were “fully inside each other.” Aesha apologizes; if she knew, she wouldn’t have tried to help Luke. The revelation only confirms Aesha’s instinct that it’s always better not to get involved. At this point, even after Aesha tells her that Luke said, in the car, that he wanted desperately to sit with Joy, Gen is still maintaining that Luke assured her that “There is no love triangle.” When he gets up to go to the bathroom, Gen follows him, and they finally sit down for their talk. Luke is more direct this time, saying that their fling “doesn’t sit right” with him, and that he doesn’t want to pursue it. He also says he likes Joy in a more serious, future-oriented way. 

Obviously, Gen feels used. It’s unfair for him to have sex with her and let her go so quickly, as if she were a shirt he tried on and didn’t like. When she says she’ll talk to Joy, Luke gets hostile and defensive. “It sounds like you’re threatening me because you’re facing rejection”, he says, crazily. He says Gen is trying to “smear” him. Perhaps Luke doesn’t know that a “smear campaign” is usually unsubstantiated, or perhaps he doesn’t remember that he’s being recorded. We saw him getting into bed and initiating sex with Gen twice in a span of 12 hours. “I’m not going to play a part in this,” he announces, as if Gen were acting by herself. In a confessional, he says that Gen is trying to “ruin” his chances of making it work with Joy, but he was the one who ruined his own chances. Amazingly, he tells Gen that he’s not “reckless with people’s emotions” while he is plainly walking all over hers. Not once does Luke say, “I’m sorry.” Gen tells him he’s being an asshole, and saves most of her crying for when it’s just her and Kat. As an older sister of a girl about Gen’s age, a visceral part of me got activated seeing Gen be treated like this, but I was proud of how she handled it.

Gen asks Luke to grab Kat, and on the way back to the table, he decides he should come clean to Joy before Gen gets a chance to. It’s unclear what Luke expected Joy’s reaction to be — did he think she’d be grateful? Joy sees the situation clear as day: “So, you give her a green flag, get intimate with her, and then you just, like … go back to me?” She makes a blergh sound, sticking her tongue out. Echoing the sentiment, Kat tells Gen that Luke “rhymes with puke” and that he’s “cringe,” then encourages her to channel the girls’ girl she knows lives within and speak with Joy. Before she can do so, the chef has already disabused Luke of any hope, telling him that he seems “very weak” and that she doesn’t “want a man like this in [her] life.” When Gen takes her aside to talk, Joy doesn’t say much, only that Gen “can keep him.” But Gen doesn’t want him, either.

For the rest of the night, Luke acts like a wittle baby. He groans when he sees Joy and Gen talking and bickers with Gen when she says she doesn’t want to ride in the same van as him. Gen goes with Coop and Kat instead, and, in an act of revenge, tells Coop about the sheets, knowing the information will travel among the deck team. In the morning, Coop can barely look Luke in the eye. Too hesitant to go straight to the bosun but too disturbed to not say anything, he decides to tell Joe instead. Joe resolves to tell Nathan right away — or at least, right after the preference sheet meeting. Coming on board in a few hours, with her dog Sugar Baby, is the “glamorous entrepreneur” Suzanne, who is using the boat as a matchmaking site, once again with the help of Amy the matchmaker, who had zero success finding her client Joe a wife last time she was aboard Captain Sandy’s vessel. I’m hoping for Suzanne that Amy got better at her job in the few months’ interim. Last season’s matchmaking episodes were hilarious, so my expectations for absurdist fun are high going into next week.

Lord knows we need it if we’re ever going to get through Sheetsgate. After the preference sheet meeting, Joe tells Nathan he’s been “sleeping in a dirty bed.” Nathan thinks Joe is teasing him about his cleanliness, and jokes back that Joe hasn’t changed his sheets, either. Joe then explains that “there’s another man’s deposit on your bed.” It’s so absurd, you can tell both of them are trying not to laugh. For some time, as they’re getting ready to welcome the guests — Suzanne will arrive with Amy first, and the bachelors one hour later, just as it happened last season — Nathan is jokey about the incident. He calls Luke “bunker spunker” and then lets him figure out what the nickname means for himself. Then he tells Aesha, and soon the whole boat knows about the sheets. Nathan needles Luke in front of the other deckies, and increasingly, it bothers him that at no point does Luke offer an apology or acknowledge the gravity of his (mis)behavior. The more Nathan thinks about it, the more annoyed he gets. He’s about ready to blow a gasket when he detects the vestige of a smile on Luke’s face as he talks to Joe. Luke — closer to 40 than to 30 — doesn’t understand why Joe had to go and say anything, but by the end of the conversation, he knows his job is on the line. Nathan threatens that if he slips up even once, he’ll be walking down the dock with his bags in no time. 

For all of Luke’s harmful behavior in this episode, both Joy and Gen should feel satisfied that he comes across as a total fool. Not just a tool but the whole toolshed, as Kat put it last week. Speaking of Kat, I’ll leave you with a brief summary of Kat and Cooper’s lovely “romcom vibes,” as Kat describes them: They snuggle in his cabin after their night out, and Coop promises that he won’t hurt her because that’s not what he’s about. Early in this episode, Kat gets emotional, telling us that Coop is the first guy she has opened up to since a bad breakup some time ago. I don’t think I have ever rooted for a Below Deck couple this much, ever. I only wish all the girls on board were treated so nicely.