Below Deck Recap: Queen Drunk

Fraser and Barbie, at long last, seem to conclusively make nice. It helps that she good-naturedly cops to being a “spoiled bitch” who needs to grow up. “Who do I think I am?!” she laughs. What can I say? I love Barbie. I also continue to love Anthony, who — four days out from the anniversary of his father’s death — talks movingly about channeling emotion into his food and making his dad proud.

Barbie may have gotten a terminal case of the ick from Jared, but Sunny and Ben are back on — they start making out in the hot tub while their co-workers whoop and cheer around them. Kyle chivalrously offers up his cabin to the happy couple while he eats a burger in the crew mess and talks to his crush, Barbie, about her travels to Israel and her passionate desire to convert to Judaism. She contains multitudes!

The next morning, Jared is still upset about missing his call with his daughter, with the added benefits of now being hung-over and having run out of data (for phones, this is the closest equivalent experience to being hung-over). He calls up their on-land provisioner to source blue-and-white towels and is so annoying on the phone that this woman, who I suspect is not being paid enough for this, calmly but firmly scolds him to be “more professional.” He apologizes; Ben looks on disapprovingly. Kerry (who refers to himself in the third person as “Kez”; why are Australian nicknames the best?) is sympathetic to the emotional baggage from home that Jared’s struggling with but reminds him of his responsibility to stay focused for safety’s sake if nothing else. He promises to keep his head in the game, and they end up sourcing yellow towels. On the bright side, Ben points out, at least they won’t have to wash the stains out.

With bathroom trash liners untucked, sinks grimy, and tissues peeking out of their boxes not properly origami-ed into flowers, Xandi is growing weary of redoing all the housekeeping work that should theoretically have already been completed by Cat. At least Fraser officially names Xandi, without whom this yacht would surely have sunk to the bottom of a reef on day one, his second stew. Barbie is predictably a little annoyed not to be recognized, but whatever. In her own mind, she says, she’s second stew. In her own mind, I believe, the boat is named after her.

Our next primary, a luxury property manager from Iowa named Tina, is “not picky.” She is pescatarian and won’t eat eggs or tofu. She refuses to drink from glass vessels, only plastic. On the bright side, though, she is also very unpleasant and strange. And yet, she is ultimately only a supporting character in the nightmare that is this charter. (Nightmare for the crew, that is — I, for one, am having a great time.) Her business partner’s wife, Eileen, is already drunk enough not to be entirely sure what her name is by the time she sets foot on the boat. The others soon catch up. They go snorkeling, and while I wonder whether it’s medically advisable to obstruct Eileen’s airways in any way at this point, I am neither a doctor nor a deckhand.

When they return to St. David, Cat greets them with a tray of shots, which would be fun in other circumstances, but these people need to be greeted with a non-optional saline drip. One of the guests jokes about peeing in the hot tub. I am using the word “jokes” with approximately 30 percent confidence here. Later, Queen Drunk Eileen’s husband (the prince consort) somehow locks himself inside their bathroom and knocks out all the glass from the door. Kyle is unfazed, having broken “hundreds” of doors himself under the influence, to say nothing of roofs, guitars, and one leg.

Despite the guests’ half-assed flapper costumes, dinner feels less in line with their theoretical 1920s Monte Carlo theme and more so like a 1990s Vegas-inspired bar mitzvah. Nothing is giving anachronism more than Fraser’s kitschy dice vest, as it’s made of a synthetic fabric that I don’t think DuPont would have quite gotten around to inventing yet. The food looks great, though!

The Drunk Prince Consort asks Barbie if she could set his plate down “more quietly” (“Can you feed your wife more water?” she asks in a confessional), then promptly manages to smash a glass. I’m detecting a pattern. Tina “hates” her profiteroles because they taste like eggs. Both ice cream and choux pastry are sort of definitively made with eggs, so I don’t know what to tell you, lady. The other guests complain that she didn’t wait for them to start eating dessert. “I’m done,” Tina snaps, angrily getting up from the table and fleeing downstairs in tears. Only one man — whom I initially assumed to be her husband, but I’m not doing a great job telling these dudes apart — follows her to check-in. In fact, her husband is still back upstairs, shrugging off her dramatic exit: “I told her to fucking settle down.” It takes a special guy to make me feel bad for Tina, who, not for nothing, has a large tattoo of some kind of bird of prey spanning the width of her back, accompanied by the word “live.” Meanwhile, the other guests, nominally Tina’s friends, are eager to complain about her in her absence.

Eileen, in particular, proves to be a mean drunk. (On second thought, I don’t want to diminish her to a single label — I’m sure she finds time to be every kind of drunk that there is or ever could be.) “Barbara, let’s go,” she snaps at Barbie for not having anticipated her 38th drink order. When Jared somehow gets roped into helping serve dinner, she tells him, “You’re lucky you’re good-looking. That’s all you got going on.” This throwaway insult was apparently a bull’s-eye, triggering his childhood trauma about not feeling good enough. Jared’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day just got even worse.

Karma works fast. Eileen slips and falls getting out of the hot tub. She hits her head alarmingly hard — hard enough that maybe we should double-check if all the blood vessels inside her brain are, like, good — prompting Barbie to essentially carry her to bed. Barbie threatens to start watering down their drinks tomorrow. At this point, I think they’d be well within their rights to wrap Eileen head-to-toe in protective bubble wrap. Just tell her it’s a spa treatment.