Just like hooooooney Haaaaanaaaah, it goes down just as sweet. Poor Hannah Ferrier is drowning in her desire for Conrad Empson, and while she has her head in the clouds, everything else on Below Deck Mediterranean is sinking. Especially Captain Sandy Yawn‘s opinion of her!
So here we are in the high seas with one charter’s breakfast service going to crispy toast in a bread basket. If only Kasey Cohen could find her way out of the laundry room to help Brooke Laughton and if only Hannah could find her way out of Conrad’s dreams, Captain Sandy may have gotten either her omelet or her toast in a timely (re: still hot) fashion! Instead, Sandy has to track Hannah down, like a dog sniffing out a dropped piece of meat, and finds her sitting at her computer ordering supplies for the next charter.
I don’t think I need to explain the logic to y’all that the PRESENT charter guests need the attention now. We all know the Below Deck chief stews can have rare tequila (or anything at all), heliport-ed into the middle of the ocean, ergo supplies order can wait, but until they acquire a toast-delivering drone Hannah needs to be monitoring her underlings and managing service! Girl – rookie mistake. At Sandy’s confrontation, Hannah turns whiny and dramatic as a character in a bad local theater production and shrilly blames her disorganization on being up ALL NIGHT fixing Sandy’s mistake to let guests wear shoes on-board scrubbing stains out of the carpet until she developed blisters. However, Cinderella makes no mention of doing all this cleaning alongside Conrad, the prince with the glass slipper that slides in just right!
Then Hannah dissolves into tears and storms below deck where a stunned Jamie Jason plasters herself against the wall to avoid getting run over by the camera crew chasing a feral Hannah. After taking a few moments to sob into her pillow, Hannah resets her bitchface, caters to the guests and vows to make Kasey pay for not assisting Brooke by putting ipecac in her cocktails later. Good thing Kasey constantly has that hot iron with her – she might need it for self-defense!
Thankfully the guests are Sandy’s friends and the forgiving types, so instead of tipping with a box of super vibrators, they hand over $1000 euro each. Regardless, Sandy remains salty over the failures of the charter – she’s looking at YOU Hannah, Conrad, aaaaaannnnd Adam Glick!
Adam, turning into Colin Macy-O’Toole‘s rapping sidekick, is like hoooold up, waitaminute , but I hit them guests up with 300 desserts and you can just call me Eazzzzy-Bake Oven because not a thing was badly cook’d! So, yo Sandy, let the dry toast cut your mouth. To put it politely Adam refuses to be blamed for bad service because Sandy didn’t get breakfast fast enough. To illustrate: A) he’s not a short-order cook in a low-rent diner; B) he didn’t even know Sandy was dining with the guests; C) the orders weren’t coming in at the right time or being taken out upon completion. Of course, Adam tells Sandy all this on the bridge while Hannah conveniently happens to be tidying up. Uh-huh… Hannah vows that if he’s planning to throw interior under the bus he better make sure she’s not driving – and practicing how to work the reverse gear. Later, however, she decides it’s better to just keep on Adam’s good-side.
Hannah also thinks Sandy is projecting because she’s pissed over not getting to show off for her friends how she drives big boats. Perhaps…
As they prepare for the incoming charter the crew learns things are about to get worse. Way worse. The new primary is a woman named Honey who eats kosher, only drinks special tequila, and wants to play on the floating playground. However, one of her guests is a vegan, and the remainder are not kosher at all and want all the shellfish. Yes, we will be having shrimp-o-matic problems again. This is a theme. Adam is chained to the oven, barefoot and lobster clawed, taunted by Hannah waving ridiculous orders from egotistical guests and demanding he devein shellfish people may or may not eat. Then they send it back and it’s a deja-food nightmare!
The other drama is that Honey is celebrating her birthday and wants a Great Gatsby themed dinner. Hannah predicts this group will be high-maintenance, so instead of working overtime, she seems to inwardly collapse. She puts Brooke on party duty because Brooke wants to be swept into a romance with a sociopath from a neighboring dock. At least he’d be rich and she’ll never have to chamois a toilet again! It’s her own Cinderella dream.
And poor Brooke – after noticing that Joao Franco is flirting with Kasey (by showing off his collection of scars ’cause he’s Indiana Jones of the yachting world), Brooke suddenly desires Adam. Essentially Brooke is desperate. The sad thing is we all know, although she doesn’t, that she’s destined for Colin. They have chemistry, plus he is nice and funny and seems like a genuinely fun and delightful, no-drama person. PleaseDontLetRealityTVCorruptHim.
While Conrad is off procuring the giant inflatable slides of death, Joao takes the opportunity to project his misplaced authority by berating Jamie. Jamie overslept on her break and was 15 minutes late to duty. Joao had her on a timer and the very second she was due back on shift, started radio-ing her like a mofo. This is significant because Sandy can hear the radio calls. Therefore she may get the picture that Conrad isn’t leading his crew and that Jamie is being lazy. When Jamie emerges Joao starts ripping into her for her so-called attitude problem. The irony of this douche calling others out for a bad attitude…
Plus it has the opposite of intended effects, because instead of getting to work, a hysterical Jamie calls her mom and bursts into tears, consoled by Hannah who tattles to Conrad the second he returns. Like a parent mediating between two 6-year-olds, Conrad pulls both Joao and Jamie aside and informs Joao that he’s not the boss of anyone or anything but his chamois, and even then…
But you guys – Joao is the LEAD deckhand and deserves his authority being respected. Especially from someone like Conrad who claims to be so obsessed with pecking order. Can someone throw Joao overboard already?!
That night, out for drinks, Hannah does another storm off after Adam makes snarky comments about the interior crew’s lack of service and there is Conrad, once again, to the rescue; carrying Hannah’s wine and listening to her problems. Back on board he finally kisses her but warns that Hannah needs to take her time with him. Hannah is his Mrs. Robinson and he’s but a poor Boy Band member whose mommy just relaxed his curfew! I think Conrad is adorable. I also think Hannah’s smoking is disgusting, and my American is showing when I say I cannot imagine kissing someone who tastes like an ashtray.
Joao spent the evening alternately skeeving on Kasey and Brooke. Brooke, in a rare moment where her horny connects to her brain, decides Kasey can have him. And it’s good karma too, cause Kasey WON’T have him!
The next morning Hannah is glowing. Which means her head is in the clouds for the oncoming guests. The oncoming guests who are full of more demands and preparation than a Thanksgiving dinner. You just know, from the jump, that these types won’t tip well from the jump, and everyone is forced to endure all their highfalutin delusions about their own grandeur as they take this one opportunity to live it up. Like their insistence on rare tequila – oh, please! What’s wrong with Skinnygirl?!
Predictably there are problems from moment one. Not just with the tequila, but with Kasey’s inability to move quickly enough. With Hannah and Brooke again picking up her slack, the guests are left complaining that they didn’t get a tour of the boat while they wait for fo CHILLED tequila shots, especially since it’s not the RIGHT 1940’s tequila! To quote our least-favorite borderline Bravolebrity ever “Good talk!”
Of course, seconds after the boat leaves the dock Kasey’s seasickness is back, so she’s hunched over the railing mainlining bread and willing herself not to puke. Hannah’s face might as well go and freeze in a permanent eye-roll.
At least Hannah furiously tracked down a rare bottle of 1942 Don Julio and has it delivered in time for dinner. The significance of this request is never explained. The other drama is over lunch, a Chinese Chicken Salad, however, these guests complain, “But we aren’t Chinese” as a way of explaining they don’t want a salad. They are soooo hungry they actually need pasta. Like now. Which means Adam is forced to make 3 types of pasta. One for the vegan, some with shrimp for the non-Kosher/non-vegans, and one truffle spaghetti for the primary, who being kosher can’t eat dairy mixed with meat or any shellfish. Honey then takes two bites and decides she’s full. I guess a GIANT chicken salad was enough food after all…
Meanwhile, Conrad has the slide on board and is struggling to blow it up. Or at least Joao wants us to believe Conrad is too stupid to inflate it without Joao’s seasoned expertise as LEAD deckhand. *spoiler alert: Conrad can handle it – the slide goes up without issue!*
What is an issue, however, and continues to be, is THE FOOD. Adam is really getting his due from last season! After lunch was a let-down of lowly salads, two of the guests request a sit-down to clarify the dinner menu and explain, in intricate detail, all their wants. This morphs into their demanding he make a veritable buffet of every fattening food they can imagine. Mac and cheese, more pasta, steak, lobster, not lobster, cake… Did it not occur to these guests that they will be wearing a bathing suit on national TV and perhaps food baby bloat might not be the best look? Am I the only one who thinks salads are the compassionate choice for swimwear meets television cameras with confidence?
While Adam is laboring in the kitchen cooking for hours, meeting the demands of each and every guest, Hannah is hanging balloons and hanging out. Just waiting as the guests are delay dinner again, and again, and again while they perfect their outfits and their makeup and their hair. At 11 pm Adam is still heating and re-heating food while the guests remain in their cabins hand-gluing each individual rhinestone to their Party City costume. Adam blames Hannah for not controlling the flow of dinner by being more proactive. Maybe it’s because Hannah is dreaming of all the things she could do to Conrad in the tender with that feather headdress.
Next week as Adam and Hannah’s issues explode, Brooke lights a firecracker on board, and Sandy freaks out!
TELL US – IS HANNAH SLIPPING OR ARE ADAM AND SANDY UNFAIRLY BLAMING HER?
[Photo Credits: Bravo]
