Below Deck Down Under Recap: Fizzling Out

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It’s starting to feel like Groundhog Day on the Katina. At least since episode five, the same “conflicts” have recurred without escalating in any significant way. Wihan doesn’t want to work. The deck crew brings up dinner for the guests half-naked. Tzarina delusionally chases Wihan’s attention. Adair seems so lost it’s like she wandered onto the boat by accident. I thought Alesia’s arrival might stir things up, but as it turns out, so far, she’s been nothing but a lovely team player and a stable presence to Tzarina’s chaotic methods. Also, she is the sole reason why this episode is getting four stars from me.

Gossip and confrontation are the pillars of good reality television writ large, but what makes a great season of Below Deck is more specific and somewhat counter-intuitive. It helps the show when the crew is tight — we saw this last season after the Devil (Luke) and his fork (Laura) left. One of the joys of watching the crew work together is to commiserate with them about the general loathsomeness of entitled rich guests. By the time they get a couple of days off, we almost feel as if we, too, have earned the break. Watching a good Below Deck cast is like having a really cold beer after a really long day; or like sending your best friend a three-minute voice memo about all the shit that happened at work that day. It’s soothing because it’s a way to exorcize the demons that have been lodged into your soul by a job. At its strongest, Below Deck speaks directly to that instinct. When that appeal starts fizzling out like Bri and Harry’s lukewarm relationship, our engagement also begins to drag.

Maybe Alesia will save this season from total boredom. In the morning after their first night out, Johnny says more to her than Harry has over the entire course of his semi-relationship with Bri. With a humble dignity that is rarely demonstrated by any male member of a deck team, he apologizes if his move made Alesia uncomfortable. In a confessional, we learn that Alesia is not officially trained as a chef but is hoping to learn on the job, which is enough to ensure she won’t try to dominate the kitchen like Anthony. For her part, Tzarina is already better at being a head of department: she doesn’t ask Alesia to list her weaknesses, and she clearly communicates her expectations that the sous will take on crew food and help clean up.

In the light of morning, the boatmance landscape looks unchanged: Lara facepalms when Wihan tells her that he kissed Tzarina even after telling her that he is interested in Adair. Bri tells Marina that she is reaching her last rope with Harry: if he doesn’t demonstrate more urgency and interest, things could quickly go south. She later tells Lara the same thing, which ends up being great for Harry — Lara warns him that he should step up if he wants things to progress between them, resulting in a nice text exchange that raises the heart rate from 50 to 60 bpm. Tzarina concludes that she and Wihan are nothing more than “flirty friends” who “shouldn’t drink around each other,” knowing full well they will continue to drink around each other for the next several weeks. The only real development occurs on the deck when Wihan tentatively tells Adair he likes her. The confession takes Adair by surprise, though it doesn’t exactly sweep her off her feet. She tells us Wihan is not really her type. She likes a man who drives a lifted truck when Wihan has a Mini Cooper.

It would be nothing but beneficial for Wihan’s ego to be swiftly shot down. Though it seems like she has better chemistry with Johnny, with whom she’s always laughing and goofing around, Adair doesn’t reject Wihan definitively: she tells him there’s time yet. Taking her tentativeness as encouragement, Wihan leaves his deck team working while he stalks to the nearby hotel to write Adair a love letter, which nearly made me choke on my chicken salad sandwich. He comes back to the boat just in time to help with provisions, which he does only kind of, leaving most of the lifting and running up and down the dock for Lara.

As they get ready for the incoming guests to arrive, Lara puts Marina on housekeeping for the third consecutive charter, even though Marina has more experience as a stew than Bri. This might emerge as a point of conflict between the two of them later, but as of now, Marina is a good sport and doesn’t say anything. The crew goes to change into their whites, and as Wihan tells Harry about the letter he wrote for Adair, Lara mentions to Tzarina that she never sees Wihan working — another heroic effort by the editing team to defame Wihan’s reputation.

The guests finally arrive: Caroline Buck, a trial attorney and philanthropist, is on girls vacation with the rest of Kappa Delta Gamma. They look like fun gals with enormous potential to be obnoxious. Perhaps unaware that requesting “local cuisine night” is just a more involved way of ordering Tzarina’s World Famous curry, they ask for the first night’s dinner theme to be “Seychelles Islands.” The stews all wear nice floral dresses, and Lara cooks up a scheme for the deck crew in which with every course they will shed another piece of clothing, so that by the end of dinner, they’ll be serving dessert in nothing but a pair of silver hot pants with a palm leaf hot-glued to it. When Lara pushes Wihan on why no one is available to help her set up the sundeck, or why it seems like the deck team relaxes more than they work, he tells her that he’s in a tough spot with Adair, because if she helps interiors too much, the rest of the crew will “start taking the piss out of that.” But isn’t Adair supposed to help both departments? Don’t the boys know that?

Amazingly, Wihan then pulls Johnny and Adair aside to tell them that if Lara starts encroaching too much, his advice is for them to “not stand around” and look like they’re doing nothing — in other words, to pretend to be busy. What he doesn’t seem to take into consideration is that other members of his team are harder workers than he is; Johnny tells him simply that he doesn’t mind helping in the interior or anywhere. Johnny tells us that Johnny doesn’t care who is right between Lara and Wihan. “Let’s keep the fun going, let’s keep the money flowing,” he proselytizes, in a line more beautiful than anything Wihan came up with.

To Tzarina’s credit, tonight’s first course is non-liquid, a salt-baked red snapper with mango salad that actually looks delectable. While the guests enjoy their dinner, Adair helps Marina with the cabins, having learned from last week’s blunder. They chat about Adair’s type. At first Marina is amused by the fact that Adair describes it as “redneck,” but then she’s just concerned. Whatever her type is, it’s definitely not Wihan in hot pants, through which Adair says she can see “inner thigh hair.” Her questionable taste in men notwithstanding, Adair is pretty funny, and it’s kind of bizarre that for someone so central to the season’s dominating plot, we barely know her at all. I wish there was a way to fact-check this, but for my money she has gotten the least amount of screen time out of everyone aboard, Jason’s fish included.

The guests are all happy with the food, but Wihan appears less happy with each layer of clothing the deck crew sheds. His unhappiness is a little confusing, since he was the one rallying Johnny and Harry to degrade themselves in order to increase their tip prospects. I’m of two minds on this because while it’s obvious, as Harry points out, that Wihan’s grumpiness has nothing to do with taking his clothes off — it’s clear to everyone that he loves attention and wearing a speedo in front of guests ranks among the tamest things he’s done to entertain them — I have to agree with him that having the deck crew serve dinner half-naked every charter is getting old and gross. Bottom line, though, Wihan’s annoyance has to do with the fact that he feels bossed around by Lara, who is supposed to be his equal, not his superior.

Talking about this with Harry, Wihan gets pretty worked up — or so I thought until I realized what he was really fretting over was how he was going to get his love letter to Adair. When he slid it under Adair’s cabin door, my whole body cringed so hard it basically folded onto itself in ways I had previously thought unimaginable. “Stop it,” Marina laughs as soon as she sees the note. Somehow Adair manages to read the whole thing with a straight face, and when Marina comes into the cabin demanding gossip later, Adair doesn’t give away much: she basically only says that the note was sweet. I have a feeling that Adair is probably just a nice person who doesn’t want to embarrass anyone on national television, but if that’s true, Bravo is just not the place for her. In the morning, when she sees Wihan, she thanks him with a tight hug and promises to talk more later, which makes him very happy.

Meanwhile, Lara and Tzarina realize that Wihan spent all his time trying to be Rimbaud and no time organizing the guests’ morning excursion. They are scheduled to go on a bike ride to a tortoise sanctuary, ending the trip with a paradisiacal beach picnic. Earlier in the bridge, Jason had shown Wihan the itinerary, putting him in charge of the day’s activities. But when Lara and Tzarina ask him difficult questions such as “what time are we leaving” and “what time do you expect they will be ready to have lunch,” Wihan wings the answers. He estimates the guests will be at the beach by noon, but at 11:45, they’ve only just made it to the tortoise sanctuary. It seems like a really nice time — the tortoises are old and cute, and we meet one fine, 114-year-old specimen named David — but the lack of communication between the bike riders and the beach crew creates a problem. As Adair had expected, the radios don’t work from that far away, so Lara is unable to communicate to Tzarina that they will be late for lunch, and Bri is unable to get ahold of Lara to ask where the hell they are. It’s a mystery why they don’t use their cellphones, but either way, it sends a chill down my spine to see all that food cooking in the sun, getting slimy and sweaty and swarmed with flies. In next week’s preview, we see that Lara and Tzarina have taken it upon themselves to talk with Wihan, which probably means the picnic was a disaster.

But the reason for my fourth star and this episode’s best moment happens on the boat while the guests are out. Having decided that the thing to do is present Adair with a cheese board, then a hug, then a whisper in her ear (creepy), Wihan descends to the kitchen to ask the sous chef to make said cheese board for him. Instead of immediately agreeing to a service that has nothing to do with the guests, or with her job at all, Alesia lays out a line of questioning. Has Wihan asked Adair out already? “Was she not slightly put off by the fact that you’ve gone through half the crew?” For me, this moment was like if your team scored a winning home run in the ninth inning of the World Series. Not satisfied, Alesia tells Wihan he can make a cheese board himself if he’d like — she’s busy, not that Wihan can fathom the concept. Sometimes all it takes to put a man in his place is a 25-year-old with an attitude. I hope she never changes.

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2025-03-18 04:59