Below Deck Recap: La-La Land

Below Deck
Knot So Innocent
Season 13 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Having to hear the otherwise lovable Kaylee repeatedly declare that Matt is “saur nice” nearly drove me insane, but I think this week’s episode is the most engaging of the season so far. Below Deck’s flagship franchise has struggled with unlikeable crewmembers and guests in recent years, but in its fifth episode, the current season begins to show signs of finding its stride: There are personal and work problems galore with a wide-enough scope to keep us interested.

This week, both Matt and Moe have trouble finding their place in the crew. Except Moe is nice, caring, and talented, while Matt is arrogant, unpleasant, and, at the beginning of the episode, belligerently drunk. I’m not surprised Moe doesn’t actually fight the random Englishmen bothering the girls on the way to dinner — production eventually steps in while the other guys in the crew look on uselessly — but I am surprised that no one blows up at Matt. His night of terror begins when he gets irritated with Kaylee for being, truthfully, too eager.

The single most annoying thing about Matt is that, so far, he hasn’t been entirely wrong. His delivery is wrong, and his pride is most definitely misguided, but he is correct when he tells Kaylee that a week isn’t long enough to fall in love with a stranger. Just as all the guys in the crew except Moe fail to step up and intervene when the drunks mess with the girls, so too do the girls fail to step up and intervene in Kaylee’s delusional, maybe even hallucinatory, view of Matt. After getting brought down several notches by Matt in the car, Kaylee proceeds to tell Rainbeau that Matt is too nice, which makes her suspicious. Rainbeau knows Kaylee is off the mark but decides not to say anything. As Sen and Rosa mention later, when Rainbeau flirts with James at the club, Rainbeau hasn’t always shown herself to be a “girls’ girl”; the conversation with Kaylee is one instance when, surely, she could have found a caring way to open Kaylee’s eyes.

Back at the dinner table, Matt takes out his irritation with Kaylee on the servers, his co-workers, and several rounds of drinks. Not even Matt can believe it when Kaylee says he’s “too good to be true.” “I’m not always nice,” he says. “I’ve cheated on three girls in one and a half years; it should freak you out.” Alarmingly, it doesn’t quite. In the club, Matt dances with other girls and, with Fraser’s encouragement, Kaylee kisses a random guy in front of Matt. It’s not enough to make him jealous, Matt says, because he’s “the sexiest over there and, like, 300 women want [him].” Kaylee, a monument of imperturbability, doesn’t bat an eye. Not even Matt’s declaration that his IQ places him “in the top 7 percent of the world” can faze her. If Kaylee could bring half as much determination to her job as a stew as she does to tolerating Matt’s bullshit, she would be captain of the vessel in two weeks’ time. 

But Matt and Kaylee are not the only doomed couple onboard. In the van going back to the boat, Sen dares James to finally make out with Rosa, so it’s the two of them kissing in the front while Alex and Sen kiss in the back. Rosa and James have a nice moment on the sun deck before going to bed, but the next morning, James tells Sen he can’t commit to what Rosa wants — something more than just “a night or two of fun” — so he’ll have to “keep it at that flirty stage.” You might want to run that plan by her, bud. Sen and Alex continue to be the only two people acting normal about exchanging saliva on the Azul V.

Really, they are the only ones acting normal about anything at all. Still on his belligerent tirade, Matt makes an inappropriate sexual joke toward Sen, and Alex tells him to pipe down. “I want to piss you off,” Matt replies, before complaining that Alex delegates “stupid jobs” to the deck team so he can do “fuck all.” The disrespect alarms Fraser, who tells Kerry the next morning that “some people get funny on some drinks.” Though it’s not anything the captain needs to know for now, it’s a relief that Fraser is keeping an eye on Matt’s demeanor. If he’s this destructive on little authority, imagine how diabolical he could get if he became bosun? 

Unfortunately, the longer the power struggle between Alex and Matt goes on, the closer Matt gets to achieving his stated aim, which is to steal Alex’s job. Alex only makes one mistake this week — he lets the hot tub overflow — but according to Kerry, “he’s on thin ice.” Alex sits down with Matt to address their bickering from the night before, and though Matt claims not to remember it, he apologizes and promises to “be better.” We know he doesn’t mean it because he pulls the same trick with Kaylee. After Moe insists that he was rude to her, Matt decides to apologize, but only because it’s easier to tell her what she wants to hear. And he is right; it is easier: Kaylee forgives him immediately, tells him she hasn’t liked someone this much in a long time, and says in a confessional that she sees a future with him. It’s enough to make you want to live in Kayleeland, where houses are made of marshmallows, Trump never got into office, and Matt is a wonderful husband. Kaylee’s crush on Matt stresses me out because I really like her. She is so charismatic; she even buddies up with Kerry to do a salmon-sperm face mask gifted to the crew by one of the guests.

Also, even though she is not the most skilled stew, Kaylee makes for a needed buffer between Rosa and Rainbeau’s clash-prone personalities. The tension between them is apparently news to Rainbeau, who addresses it with Rosa the morning after their night out. Rosa admits that it “frightens” her that Rainbeau flirts with James, even if she knows Rosa likes him (Rosa’s distrust of Rainbeau has moved out of the professional realm and into the personal). For her part, Rainbeau doesn’t think she has to “walk around with a trash bag over [her] head just because [Rosa] is insecure.” Rosa is taking this thing with James way too seriously, given his own cavalier attitude about their “flirty stage.” That said, I appreciated learning more about Rosa this week — she tells the girls about her challenges with mental health in the past few years and how yachting helped her find her way back to herself.

Heading into the next charter, both the deck team and Moe need to redeem themselves from lackluster performances in the last charter. Luckily, primary Janessa and her guests, including the delightfully bratty teens Madison and Paris, are a walk in the park compared to Carolyn & Co.: Their requests are reasonable, they are quiet, and they mostly just seem happy to be there. Before they arrive, Alex promises his team he’ll be a more organized leader and even opens the floor to suggestions (Matt declines the opportunity to say anything). Kerry stops by the galley to encourage Moe to work through the pressure, rather than bottling it up and letting it explode. He brings up last season’s Lawrence. Remember that guy?

But something more than purely professional pressure is affecting Moe. It’s tough to be away from his family, especially when his mother has just sold the house he grew up in. He also expresses that it’s challenging to be the only person of color in the crew and in an industry dominated by white people. He takes as much time as possible for himself in the first couple of days of the charter. The guests enjoy their first dinner, but the food betrays Moe’s exhaustion: Rather than make croutons for their Caesar salad, Moe serves it on top of a grilled croissant; for the dessert course, Moe makes “deconstructed” lava cakes with the sauce on the side, a technically easier bake than achieving the lava cake’s essential gooey center. The next day, noticing Moe’s low energy, Fraser checks in with him. Moe admits that being on the Azul V is harder than he expected, and he worries it’ll be too much for him. Fraser encourages him to see the season through, not just because he is a cherished member of the team but because Fraser’s life will be so much more difficult if they have to switch chefs. Anthony is probably refreshing his inbox this very minute.

The new charter weighs on the other departments, too. Rainbeau struggles to harness Kaylee’s “golden-retriever puppy” energy while the rest of the interior team takes the guests to a private tour of James Bond Island, where The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) was filmed. It’s a special moment for Janessa, whose late husband, Steve, loved Bond movies. Janessa is taking the trip in honor of Steve, so it’s nice to see the guests remember him. When Fraser returns, Rainbeau tells him that she had trouble putting Kaylee to work. Fraser instructs her to be more assertive, though earlier in the season, he told her to be less assertive. She’ll have a chance to practice her non-assertive-assertiveness the next day at the beach picnic, which she will helm with Kaylee’s help.

Deckside, Matt continues to wreak havoc. When he sees Sen and James refolding towels — earlier, during his walk-through, Kerry asked Alex to redo the towels — he calls their effort “fucking stupid,” demonstrates a smaller fold, then leaves to do push-ups. Again, though he is right that the towels are badly folded, his arrogance negates any authority he might have. The next morning in the crew mess, Alex tells Matt that he will rely on him to “take lead” while he reorganizes the team and asks him to “try and be nice” about it. Matt retorts that he is nice, “most of the time.” In a confessional, he says that Alex is being too easy on Sen — who Alex calls “sensitive” — and “letting her talk back a lot” because he has a crush on her. This, from the guy who berated his own bosun only two nights ago. Later, Sen basically asks Matt who hurt him. He tells us a bit about his difficult upbringing, dealing with his parents’ divorce and having to move schools as many as seven times. “Do you feel like you never got full attention, so you seek attention [from] other people?” Sen asks. Matt replies that he has never thought about it that deeply. Maybe it’s about time he looks within.