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When I left the Akira One crew a couple of weeks ago, the team was hamstrung but managing. I guess it only took one charter for their precarious balance to fall apart. Nathan is still out, but on the mend, and despite the fact that Max’s arrival brings the deck team back to four pairs of hands, more things go wrong this week than they’ve had all season. Primary guest Bunny’s charter is like extreme sports for yachties: Demands are being made, preference sheets are blurring into each other, the anchor is dragging, the tender is smoking, people are crying. In other words, music to Andy Cohen’s ears.
When we pick up this week, Max has just arrived, somersaulting and tumbling with excitement. Last season, Max got into a real funk when Joe’s arrival nixed his chances to be lead deckhand, a “betrayal” that ruined his relationship with his “enemy” Nathan. Max is a difficult person with a huge ego, but I can’t help but love his mercurial sensibility. Joe was always better at handling his volatility than Nathan, so he feels confident he can enlist Max to his ranks as he continues to mount a coup for the bosun position. Max’s arrival is particularly propitious because Max is still sore from Nathan’s betrayal, so if Max can get on Joe’s good side by respecting his authority, Joe can reward him with the lead position.
Sandy, apparently blind to the interpersonal nuances ailing the deck team, keeps Aesha on deck, Kayley as acting chief stew, and makes Joe acting bosun for the charter. She continues to check in with Norma about a permanent fourth deckhand so that Aesha can resume her job, and Norma finally comes through with a deckhand who will be there midway through the next charter. For now, Sandy keeps Nathan posted with updates about how well Joe is doing. Knowing what we do about Nathan, these texts are probably worse for his morale than if he never heard from the captain at all. Joe, for his part, ignores Nathan’s call before the guests arrive. When Sandy asks him if he’s kept in touch with Nathan, Joe shrugs and says that he’ll call him after the charter. For now, he’s busy making extremely simple anchor-watch roster tables on a Word doc. It doesn’t take much!
Probably the worst thing to happen while I was away was the disaster between Kat and Cooper. Their secret relationship plan is very 1940s screwball comedy, which I appreciate, but it’s such unnecessary stress. Coop doesn’t know that Kat revealed their secret to production, so in his confessionals, he only laughs and flushes red when he’s asked about Kat. Meanwhile, their “break-up” puts ideas into Gen’s head. Looking for a distraction from the embarrassment of being taken down several pegs by Aesha on the “Kayley-acting-chief-stew bullshit,” she decides to set her sights on Cooper and displays zero shame telling Kat as much in their cabin. When Kat asks her how she likes Max, Gen says she’ll be celibate for the rest of the season — then she says she actually might pursue Coop, whom she should’ve gone for since the beginning. Kat is speechless in the moment, but texts Coop a heads-up.
Interior-side, Joy and Kayley, still unaware of what’s coming, worry about the guests’ convoluted preference sheets. But Joy feels rested enough from a couple of days off and constant communication with Luke to take them on and asks Kayley to set aside a little time after the guests arrive so she can chat with primary Bunny about dinner expectations. The guests kick off the boat tour already complaining — their cold towels get put away too fast, the crackers are too hard — and when they sit down with the chef, as usual, the non-primary people are full of ideas.
In the meantime, Joe “I Can Do This Better Than Nathan” Bradley tyrannizes the water-toys setup in a way that does, for better or worse, make the process smoother. As they’re hanging out by the water, the guests order burgers and shrimp, overwhelming Joy’s prep plan for that evening. Bunny asked Kayley to set dinner time for 9:30; if everyone is so hungry now, why didn’t they ask to eat sooner? These guests seem like the kind of people who forget there is only one (1) person working the galley, and perhaps in an effort to remind them, Joy comes up to kindly but firmly say that she can’t drop everything to suddenly grill four cheeseburgers. She offers them some cookies instead, but they really want shrimp, so she spares some of the tempura she had set aside for dinner.
While the guests enjoy their shrimp, the wind picks up significantly and starts to drag the anchor. This is the beginning of the end for this charter: From here on out, no task is easily accomplished. As the anchor drags, the boat gets closer and closer to shallow waters and to another boat, so Sandy sets a time limit for the crew to haul in the water toys — a job they have never been able to complete in under 45 minutes — in a half hour max. It’s put-up or shut-up time for Joe, and, with the help of Coop and Max, he shows up. His creative solution is to tie the inflatables to the tender and Jet Ski and have Max and Coop tow them to the new anchorage. They make departure just under the wire, 15 seconds before their time limit expires. The deck team comes out of this chaos proud of their efforts — Coop is pleased to have come so far, Max is pumped on adrenaline, Joe is convinced of his superiority over Nathan, and Sandy is relieved to have a bosun who can think quickly under pressure.
Despite the stressful afternoon, Sandy asks Aesha to stay up for dinner service with Kayley in case she needs support. Though I think this constant piling up of Aesha’s responsibilities is suspicious at best — will those extra hours go on her timesheet? — it turns out that Kayley will need her support after all, because Bunny and her friends are hungry and ready to ruin Joy’s life.
The dinner theme is “pride in space.” Kayley starts service with a positive attitude, hoping to give the guests no reason to complain. But things fall apart over the first course, when Bunny and Judah, who get crispy rice with watermelon and avocado instead of a gorgeous sea bass ceviche because they don’t like fish that is not fried, think that their crispy rice is too crispy. They ask Joy to remake their plates, except Judah wants just watermelon and no avocado. While they have Kayley, Sequoya asks for more shrimp, but the guests ate all the shrimp in the afternoon, so Kayley has to tell them Joy can’t accommodate their request. Flustered, Kayley accidentally tells Joy that Judah and Bunny want all avocado and no watermelon on their limp crispy rice, so Judah sends her plate back again. Joy playfully hits Kayley with a paper-towel roll, and they move on to vegan tacos, which please absolutely no one.
Aesha is tempted to step into this disastrous service, but decides that it will be a teachable moment for Kayley. She tells her that a little delay will hopefully condition the guests to not be so demanding, but man, do they have stamina. Even Gen offers Kayley some words of support, reminding her of something she knows from experience: “Some people just like to be difficult for no reason.” Complaining about the avocado on the vegan tacos again, Judah reminds Kayley that she put no avocado on her preference sheet, which means Joy and Kayley are one-for-one on mistakes. Still, it’s incredibly annoying that when Bunny and Judah went over the menu with Joy earlier that day, they explicitly asked for guacamole tacos. On Bunny’s request, Joy fries up some fish and meat for the non-vegans and adjusts the tacos for the vegans. When service is done and cleaned up, both Joy and Kayley cry tears of embarrassment and frustration. Joy texts Luke for emotional support.
The morning brings a new chance to reset and do better, though Joy and Kayley still feel beat up when they reunite in the galley. Joe, meanwhile, rearranged and reorganized the water toys during the night, lining up the inflatables to create a square. When Sandy sees it, she tells Joe that she’s been asking for them to be put out this way since the beginning of the season, not that Joe needs another reason to think highly of himself. Max praises Joe’s leadership and tells him he’d be happy to be his lead. He jokes that the newly reorganized aft will send Nathan “a good message” when he’s back.
Hoping to redeem herself at dinner, Joy goes over the menu with the guests as they’re having breakfast, the one meal they have nothing to complain about. For dinner, they each order a different kind of pasta, except for Bunny, who wants lentil soup (?). I wondered if Joy shouldn’t have been more assertive, maybe tried to find some middle ground by offering two options, but then I remembered that when she tried to assert herself the day before, the guests literally told her no, they wanted shrimp now! So while they’re out on their excursion, she gets to work on every single burner on the stove at the same time to meet all their demands.
The charter is such a shit show that, going over the excursion plan for later that afternoon, Kayley has no time or energy to think about where she and Joe stand, situationship-wise. Joe sends Max ashore and Cooper to drive the tender, and Kayley joins as the tour guide. On their way to shore, the tender begins to sputter and smoke. Could this have been a consequence of the weight of the water toys the day before? If you know anything about boats or engines, sound off in the comments. The tender is able to make it, and while Kayley and Max take the guests on a tour of the medieval town of Ston, a tour they requested but are too miserable and hot to enjoy, Coop sets about doing his dad proud and fixing the engine. He is able to get it back to good shape after going over the issue with Joe on the phone.
Back onboard, Aesha updates Sandy on the previous night’s disastrous dinner service. From the looks of next week’s preview, Aesha will finally get some time to rest at her bachelorette party, organized by Sandy after Aesha mentioned that she always wanted one. Hopefully, too, she’ll be able to get back to her rightful post — it sounds like Nathan is nearly ready to return. No fool, he can tell by Sandy’s updates that Joe is getting comfortable leading the deck. So Nathan texts Max with a bribe: If Max agrees to have his back, he’ll make him lead deckhand. Max knows that this is an absolutely immoral, not to say unprofessional, offer, but he’s tempted: It’s all he’s ever wanted to hear from Nathan, and an opportunity to climb the first step of his career plan (lead deckhand → bosun → charter guest). Whatever decision Max makes will affect the rest of the season.
