“Balls and everything. That’s not cool.” – Ben
Below Deck becomes my default favorite trash-tastic reality show when my absolute faves such as Vanderpump Rules and Love Is Blind are on hiatus.
There, I said it. Below Deck is a marvelous and wicked combination of a catty, loopy, gossipy, soap-fest with a rather interesting lens on life and work aboard the kind of superyacht most of us will never in our lives get within breathing distance of.
So in “Bitchy Resting Face,” we enter the fray after something of a cliffhanger closed the previous episode: Kate, who holds a managerial position on staff, blew a bit of a casket in response to how the guests were treating and reacting to her. That’s to say they openly admired her work and work ethic while equally openly complaining about her attitude, her sour puss in particular.
The casket blowing resulted in a most peculiar and potentially self-destructive act. Instead of blowing up at the guests or bitching below deck (for lack of a better term), a favorite go to move for most of her co-workers over two seasons, Kate decided to artfully craft a blanket into the shape of a penis on a guest’s bed.
This is a good time to aside about one of my favorite topics with regard to Below Deck. The guests on the superyacht pay somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred grand (and don’t forget the tip that the crew clamors and strives for during each and every service) for the privilege of taking a private luxury cruise.
That obscene sum of cash, one would think, would allow if not require the full of the crew to prance about slavishly and happily if the guests demanded that everyone on board speak, act, dress, and even think as their favorite character from David Copperfield throughout the trip. With this backdrop, watching the deckhands and crew complain and complain and complain is quite a lot of gorgeous good fun (note to Andrew: hey, we miss you already, buddy!).
Now, back to the penis-shaped blanket. Of course it was reported straight back to Captain Lee, whereupon Kate lied about doing it, then awkwardly covered by claiming that it was a rocket-shaped blanket, whereupon Captain Lee called shenanigans. Cut to Kate being forced to apologize to the guests for acting like a bratty four-year old.
After pouting about for the rest of the day, Kate did manage to offer up an awfully lame apology to a guest in the form of, “Whatever you saw on your bed, it was not meant to be offensive.” What if a wombat had hopped (scampered?) into the bed later that day? That would make for a startling revelation, I’d think.
Later, Kate crystallizes her worldview: “I don’t like being treated like The Help by those who are less refined than me.” And/but the kicker on the whole story is that the guest wound up thinking the entire affair was hilarious.
Meanwhile, Kelley finally makes a power move on roommate Jennice – landing a kiss, and walking off with a, “Take what you want from that” – and a big storm proverbially rocks the boat, which was in the midst of a white party. Oh yeah, and then there was the drunken guest who gets down with his bad self in his sparkly bikini-like underwear.
Some stats and info about Below Deck, “Bitchy Resting Face”
TV SHOW – Below Deck
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 2, Episode 5
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Bravo
GENRE – Reality TV, Docuseries, Office Culture, Trashtastic TV
CREATED BY – Mark Cronin
STARRING – Lee Rosbach, Ben Robinson, Jennice Ontiveros, Eddie Lucas, Kelley Johnson, Amy Johnson, Kat Held, Kate Chastain
This review was originally published on TV Geek Army.