Photo: Fred Jagueneau/Bravo
Ahoy, mates, and welcome back to Below Deck Mediterranean. It’s only been a few months since our last season, which was an unqualifiable mess of flailing departments and corroding personal resentments. Captain Sandy finds her newish team in Dubrovnik, Croatia, aboard the Akira One, a bigger and older boat than last season’s Bravado. She is welcoming back Below Deck all-star Aesha Scott as her chief stew and new dad Nathan Gallagher as her bosun. In what I think is a Below Deck first, Nathan has brought his partner, Gael, and their little son, Kayden, to Dubrovnik. They’re staying in a rental near the marina for the season so that Nathan can be with them between charters. It’s an … interesting choice to add a domestic element to a show about the workplace, but it makes sense in the context of Nathan’s three-season journey toward maturity.
He’s getting there with baby steps. Nathan’s biggest challenge this season will be figuring out how to be a less frazzled bosun — he has a way of putting his head in his hands whenever something happens, and while I relate to that kind of knee-jerk anxiety, it’s not an ideal quality in a boss. It still feels like he is playing catch-up to his position rather than taking the lead with confidence. Perhaps given how long it took the crew to find their groove last season, Sandy has the prudent idea to get them all onboard early so that they can get used to the boat. She scopes out Dubrovnik with Aesha a couple of days in advance and gets the deck team to practice undocking, anchoring, and docking so that they don’t have to learn on the job. As it turns out, it’s a good thing they have a practice round: They hit the dock before the charter has even started. Aesha quips, “We’ve set the bar so low that we can only go up from here.”
Aesha is her usual uplifting, hard-working, funny self. She’s getting married after the charter season, so she needs some generous tips. She nearly cries in excitement when Sandy tells her she’ll have three stews working the interior: Kayley, whose demeanor is best described as Hoodwinked!’s overly caffeinated squirrel; Kat, a green stew with a positive attitude; and Genevieve, an experienced stew who has worked on celebrity yachts and been a chief stew before. Despite their varying levels of experience, they have all been sole stews before, which means they’re familiar with every aspect of the job. In an introductory team meeting, Aesha says that she will hold off on picking a second stew until the dynamics of the team settle. Genevieve responds with a surprised, wounded Oh! It’s obvious that she came on expecting to be second, and she acts accordingly during the first charter.
Before we get there, though, let’s go over the deck team. We have two new additions, both of them over six-foot-two, which means they are cramped in the Akira One’s teeny cabins. There is Cooper, who is from South Carolina and sounds like it. He’s on his very first month of yachting, having decided to try out a new career path after getting repetitively concussed playing college football. I maintain the right to retract any statements I make in the first episode of the season, but I kind of love “Coop” already; he just seems happy to be there. Then there is Luke, who is 34 years old and therefore ancient compared to his co-workers. Luke is less green than Cooper but still relatively new to yachting. He has an imposing physique that earns him comparisons to Tarzan and Superman. I was relieved to see an “older” man onboard, thinking it might inspire the rest of the crew to be mature, but if the season preview at the end of the episode is any indication, Luke’s advanced age won’t necessarily equal advanced wisdom.
Also, Joe Bradley is back. Sandy is apparently oblivious to one of last season’s biggest stories, because she’s all happy to tell Nathan that Joe is joining the team. The only person more stressed out than me about Joe’s return is Nathan. They haven’t talked since last season; as Nathan tells Aesha, Joe texted him, but Nathan wasn’t interested in replying. The episode’s cold open suggests their bromance break-up will provide us with plenty of soap-opera moments, although it’s frustrating to start a new season already rehashing stale drama. It might seem like “good television” to put two best friends turned enemies to work together, but I’d rather see drama develop as the season rolls along rather than get hit with it one minute into the first episode.
Besides, it doesn’t seem like Joe has done much reflecting on his mistreatment of women. He tells Nathan, simply, that he “likes to have fun” and probably won’t stop. Their friendship fell apart because of Joe’s mishandling of a disastrous love triangle, which made clear to Nathan that they were on two different paths: Nathan’s toward adulthood and Joe’s toward terrorizing women’s lives. At least, in between seasons, he’s been working. Sandy is glad to hear that he’s been a bosun and a captain of smaller vessels, but Nathan is not as impressed. The other boys are either slow to pick up on social cues or really focused on work: It’s not until the first night of the charter that Cooper learns from Joe that there is tension between him and Nathan, despite the fact that the first deck meeting is as awkward as if Joe and Nathan were exes.
To round out the Akira One’s crew, we have the French chef Joy, who has spent some years cooking for celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Rihanna, and Paul McCartney. She self-describes as intense and puts a little fear into everyone except Luke, who flirts with her by showing off his French, which he is learning because he wants to marry a “feisty” French woman one day. But, at least for now, Joy is focused on her job. She is demanding when it comes to service and tells Aesha she wants the girls in the galley before the food is ready to go out, to ensure timeliness. She reminds me of another gastronomic icon, Ratatouille’s Colette.
In a brief intro meeting, Sandy asks the crew to respect each other, then they’re off on their dry run. The undocking and anchoring go fine; it’s only when they have to dock, at night, next to two very loud party boats that problems emerge. Sandy can hardly hear a thing coming from the radio. She misses Nathan’s distance calls from the stern and bumps the rear of the boat on the dock. It’s a huge mistake, but not easily attributable: Everyone was doing what they were supposed to, only they couldn’t hear each other. Still, Nathan immediately freaks out: “I’m going to get fired.” After the boat has been secured, Sandy checks to make sure the damage is repairable and that the Akira One is seaworthy. She is a little rattled but pulls herself together. Nathan can’t quite do the same. Sandy tells him that, as a bosun, he needs to learn how to dust himself off and move on. Joe, meanwhile, says in a confessional that if he were on the stern, they would never have hit the dock. Okay, Joe.
The next morning, Sandy tells Nathan to put two people on the stern and two people on the bow when anchoring, docking, or undocking the boat. That means that they need an extra pair of hands, and the captain’s suggestion is to put Aesha, a former deckhand, on the bow. Aesha is happy to do it, and undocking and anchoring after guest pick-up go smoothly. The first charter’s co-primaries are Angela and Matt, a married couple who are celebrating the 23rd anniversary of their burlesque show in Vegas. They are bringing their performers onboard, and their requests include white-glove service and a Vegas-themed dinner. Thankfully, we are spared those glimpses into guests’ lives that the franchise tried out in Down Under, going for a brief front-facing intro video instead.
As the guests enjoy their canape lunch, Nathan’s simple request that Joe get the water toys out as fast as possible causes friction. “Just no more accidents,” Joe provokes. Then, as Nathan rushes him through the task, Joe huffs about the delay: “Respectfully, this is an organizational issue.” Nothing foretells disrespect more clearly than a sentence that starts with “respectfully.” Meanwhile, Genevieve gets annoyed at Kayley for taking charge of the dinner tablescape. Each woman thinks they have a right to lead decorating: Kayley was a wedding coordinator before yachting, and Genevieve has experience from years in the field. Gen only gets more annoyed when Aesha praises Kayley over the radio (after asking Kat who set it), and she starts arbitrarily attributing bad motives to Kayley, like she’s trying to undermine her experience and become second stew. It’s not a great first impression for Gen: Her overreaction makes her seem presumptuous, as if she’s already thinking of herself as a “senior stew” despite the fact that Aesha explicitly told them they each have one stripe for now. Genevieve tells us she’s an only child from a rich New York family, and her ultimate goal is to be a purser, which is the senior-most position in the interior department. That’s a great goal, but it’ll help to learn teamwork to get there. It’s also not very senior-stew behavior to hide in the bathroom in the middle of dinner service to call your mom and whine about your co-worker. The edit makes it seem like Kayley could hear her from the laundry room, but if she did, she was impressively cool about it. All she does is say to Kat that she can tell that Gen hates her.
After an afternoon in the water and an excruciating exchange between Nathan and Matt — learning that Nathan is not interested in any of the girls because he has a partner and a child, the primary assures Nathan that a woman’s “tits” get “bigger and firmer” after babies — the guests are ready for dinner. For the occasion, the performers all wear dresses with a heart-shaped cut-out on their asses. Joy is very pleased with dinner service, and the food looks amazing, especially the heart-shaped raspberry and coconut parfaits for dessert. That she didn’t have to yell at anyone during service is a relief to Joy, who is reassured that Aesha has the same high standards as her.
By the end of the season’s first episode, the interior team threatens to be roiled by vicious competition and the deck team is already fractured — and only looking to get worse. Nathan makes a half-hearted attempt to address the tension with Joe by telling him that he doesn’t “appreciate the energy or whatever of the past couple of days,” but he ends the conversation before they can engage in any productive dialogue. On the phone, Nathan tells Gael that, despite the fact that Joe is the most experienced deckhand onboard by a nautical mile, he plans to make Luke his lead. He is convinced that Joe is angling to take over his job, but this move doesn’t seem wise. Joe is already poised to be against Nathan, and by undermining his professional experience (which is separate from his personal conduct), he’s making the problem worse. Realigning their relationship along professional lines might have relieved their tension. Besides, putting an inexperienced deckhand in a lead position will only make more work for Nathan, who is overwhelmed by temperament. Judging by the season preview, though, common sense will not be the driving force of this crew. Buckle in!
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