Below Deck Mediterranean Recap: Men Down

Below Deck Mediterranean
Out With the Old, In With the Stew
Season 11 Episode 9
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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It’s not for no reason that this season of Mediterranean is a huge hit for Bravo. I’ve caught myself telling Below Deck–curious friends to start with this excellent example of the ouroboros of personal and work drama that makes the franchise engaging: The more people dig in their heels, the more difficult they are to work with; the harder the relationships, the harder the work. But whereas weaker seasons have relied on this feeding loop to the point of exhaustion, overemphasizing one side or the other, this time, new challenges keep emerging, giving personality quirks new angles through which to be reflected. At its most stressful, work pushes our characters out of their boxes: This week, Kat and Coop become exasperated and not even with each other.

Though the interior team has been running laps around the exterior when it comes to efficiency and morale, this week, a near-perfect mirroring of the two teams occurs: They both suffer a temporary loss of leadership, creating the opportunity for more ambitious team members to step up. Joe and Kayley are second-in-command in their respective departments, and they both have more than enough drive to take up the task. The way they go about doing that, though, perfectly illustrates the difference between confidence and arrogance. Wary of overplaying her hand, Kayley leads with openness and honesty, while Joe is all too certain that not only can he lead the deck team, he can do so better than Nathan. Annoyingly, he thinks he and Kayley are the same: “She’s like me: She works too hard to fail.” 

Still, if he keeps going this way, Nathan will never beat the bad-at-leadership allegations. When we pick up this week, he has no good explanation for Sandy as to why he was over an hour late. Sandy tries to get something out of him, but Nathan doesn’t say anything other than it was a tough morning at home. It sounds like code for a really bad fight, and Sandy doesn’t push him further; she just reminds him to send a smoke signal next time. Nathan doesn’t offer his team much by way of explanation, either; he mumble-apologizes before carrying on with the day. The whole thing doesn’t sit well with Joe, who takes it as proof of Nathan’s unprofessionalism. To him, it doesn’t seem like Nathan “wants to be there,” which is a slightly ridiculous way to put it. Of course he doesn’t want to be there! Does anyone?

Still, Joe’s criticism of Nathan’s negative energy is fair, particularly when his defeatist attitude is contrasted with Aesha’s absolute gameness. With her deckhand search still turning up empty and Norma from the staffing company unable to pull an option out of her hat, Sandy comes up with the idea to put Aesha on deck for the charter. Reader, my jaw dropped. Aesha is the chief stew! She has responsibilities! Sandy sends Nathan to “ask” her, but it seems obvious that this is a cap-mandated switch, not a negotiable offer. With Nathan, Aesha is hesitant to leave her team, but by the time Sandy finds her, she has gotten used to the idea. After all, she has an unusually competent team of stews, and she is eager to test and prove Kayley’s chief-stew potential. Which, of course, can only mean one thing: Zen Gen is gone just as quickly as she arrived.

Gen can hardly contain her irritation when Aesha gathers the stews to let them know Kayley will be acting chief stew for the charter. In a confessional, Gen tells us she had such a bad time on her last boat that she took herself to Bali to learn how to read auras, which is hilarious to imagine — I’m picturing Laura Dern in Enlightened. To make matters worse for Gen, Kayley kills it in her first hours of chief-stew-dom. The guests arrive: Newlyweds Danny and Allison bring a group of friends to celebrate their recent nuptials on their first-ever chartered yacht. That bodes well for the crew because while the guests expect full superyacht service, they have not yet developed the sense of entitlement that comes with being a yacht regular. Also, they love Kayley. At one point, right before getting ready to set up the water toys, Aesha goes to check in on her, only to find she needs no help; the girl is a natural.

The same can’t be said about the exterior team, which struggles to put out the water toys. Even Coop, usually so obliging, gets frustrated with the many kinks in the process: They’re not using the crane to move the inflatables; Nathan is out of touch with the level of effort being put into getting things in the water; and they’re blowing up the toys before putting them out, which makes it that much harder to move them. Getting everything out is so chaotic that guests start coming down the slide before they’re even done. When Sandy comes out to check on things, she notices there aren’t enough towels for them on the swim platform and the shower isn’t up. Again, Nathan has no good explanation for this disorganization when Sandy presses him. By the fifth charter, she expects them to be able to put out the toys on autopilot. She also encourages lead deckhand Joe to lead, but Joe knows Nathan has no tolerance for that idea.

In other words, everyone is having a hectic day — except for Joy. She is looking to redeem herself from the difficulty of the previous charter, and though she feels a little lonely in the galley without Luke (who, by the way, is texting her stuff like “my life is joyless without you”), she knocks the safari-themed dinner out of the park. Gen lays a beautiful table, and everyone makes a huge deal out of it, not that it does anything to lighten her mood. Continuing the reversal of roles, Aesha helps out in cabins while Kayley takes charge of dinner service. She only has one minor slipup, when she forgets to tell Joy they are clearing the first course, but it’s nothing that jeopardizes the flow. “I will chew her softly,” Joy says about holding Kayley to her standard. As it turns out, though, she barely has to — Kayley has her own standards to adhere to, and the next morning, it’s the chef who reassures Kayley that her first day as acting chief stew was “excellent.” (Somewhere out there, Daisy and Ben are laughing: If this is Kayley’s idea of a not-great service …)

Gen is not convinced. She spends the morning complaining about “stupid mistakes that should not be happening” and the afternoon bitching about being in the pantry by herself. When Kayley almost sends up a glass that has finger marks on it (but doesn’t), Gen sees proof of Kayley’s unpreparedness for the job; when she finds herself elbow deep in dishes, she sees proof of mismanagement. Her relentless complaining starts to wear on Kat, who bears the brunt of it. There is nothing worse than finding yourself the receptacle for someone’s bad energy, and Kat feels overwhelmed enough to bring it up with Kayley. She worries Gen’s bottled-up resentment is going to explode on the team. To Gen, it seems, any inconvenience is a personal affront: With one member of the team down, everyone is taking on a bigger chunk of work, so Gen’s demand for help in the pantry comes off entitled rather than genuine. How can they have “all hands on deck” when all the hands are occupied elsewhere? Anyway, hoping to appease Gen, Kayley and Kat agree to not leave Gen alone in the pantry so long as they can help it. For her part, Kat thinks Gen should drop the attitude. “My mom always says, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all,” Gen replies when Kat asks her how she’s doing. If only Gen would take that sound advice! 

Meanwhile, the deck team continues to fall apart. Sandy starts the day by helpfully reminding Nathan that “the pressure is on” to redeem the previous day’s chaos. Nathan, already distracted, gets paranoid that Coop and Joe are laughing at him. When he sees them smiling at each other, he barks that if they have something to say, they should say it out loud. He sounds like an elementary-school teacher as he warns that if he catches Joe and Coop making faces at each other again, he’ll go to the captain. This is Nathan’s signature refrain, which speaks volumes about his immature management style. Coop seems almost hurt by Nathan’s turn: “He’s been my deck daddy,” he laments. “Now he’s being a deck dickhead.” 

Just as the tension on deck is escalating, Nathan tweaks his back putting down the water toys. He’d had some back trouble in Australia that never got fully healed, and Sandy encourages him to see it through before it gets worse and he can’t work at all. At first, Nathan is resistant to the idea of going to the hospital, but Sandy puts her foot down and he has no choice but to comply, even as he worries about what being off the boat means for him and his family. The subtext to Nathan’s arc is the pressure to provide for a newborn is weighing on his performance, and I can’t help but feel for him. As we discussed last week, there is obviously something going on in terms of contractual obligation, and it’s in these moments that watching reality television can make a person feel queasy. 

Sandy puts Joe in charge, which finally gives him the opportunity he’s been looking for to prove himself as bosun material to the captain. To his credit, Joe wastes no time organizing the swim platform and coordinating that afternoon’s excursion. Kat and Aesha take the guests swimming in some nearby caves while the rest of the crew holds down the fort. Joe also takes the chance to collaborate with Coop on a new and more effective system for putting away the toys, which is a relief to Coop. He’s been wanting to have this conversation, but Nathan is not exactly known for being open to ideas. In a confessional, Joe says that of course he doesn’t want Nathan to be seriously injured, but this works out perfectly for him. And, as it happens, it will continue to: Nathan calls Sandy on the way back from the hospital to say he has a bruised disc and isn’t sure when he can come back to work. The charter’s balance: two deckhands down and one chief stew temporarily reassigned. What could go wrong?!

The answer comes to us in the form of a mid-season trailer: everything. Everything could go wrong. Sandy continues to pester Norma for a new deckhand, and since desperate times call for desperate measures, she pings the group chat for one of the most chaotic deck teams in recent history — “M/Y Bravado Deckhands” — asking if anyone is available. For a moment, I stressed that Tess or Christian would respond, but by the looks of it, we’re getting Max back, and I’m unduly excited. We can also expect a police visit, more than one injury, several tears, a Luke jump scare, beef between Gen and Kat, the return of Nathan … Here’s hoping the boat doesn’t sink.