Below Deck Season Finale Recap: All Hail Krystal

Thank you Below Deck producers for blessing us with dear Krystal, who should probably walk a plank from the My Seanna straight onto the set of Vanderpump Rules or some Housewives or other, because I think I speak for all of America when I say I’m not ready to say good-bye. Tyler can go right on his way out of Bravo forever, but Krystal is a holy spirit who does a disservice to the world by stumbling back into private life. That woman needs a camera on her at all times, and her friends probably all need shields.

We begin with the dramatic conclusion to the “will Josiah spray her with the hose or not?” storyline. Maybe I’m the monster for wishing he had sprayed her with the hose but, hey, she’s the one who threatened to punish Kate and Josiah with projectile vomit. “I’m gonna puke everywhere just for you,” she tells Kate, rising from the banquette and heading to her room. Once the door is closed she starts verbally abusing her roommate. “GetoutofmybednowthanksKim!” she says repeatedly, and for the first time in my life I wished I had hearing aids I could take out.

The next morning, one of the non-Krystal guests is on the elliptical machine, which is notable because one, this is the last group of people one would expect to be able to wake up and sit upright in the morning, much less exercise, and two, she’s one of the few people in Below Deck history to work out, aside from Ashton pumping elastic in his bunk.

Krystal has not yet emerged from her lair when Rhylee walks in with a cup of tea. “You do not enter my room without permission. Get the fuck out,” she growls, sending Rhylee fleeing from the room with an expression that suggests it might actually have been coated in a film of vomit after all.

In the kitchen, Laura squeezes oranges and Adrian asks her if she’s going to South Africa — hint nudge, ASHTON, etc. — and Laura, steeling for further sexual harassment, looks at him with an expression of mild horror. Adrian may be in tune with his own feelings and chakras and whatnot, but he clearly has no idea how other people are feeling because he proceeds to tell us about how much he likes talking to Laura and how much he’ll miss her.

Krystal emerges from her cabin wearing a maxi dress and a smile. She tells her friends she slept like a baby and then they order every egg thing a person can think of along with an egg-white crab omelet, which I’d hate on but is totally the sort of culinary abomination I’d aspire to think of if I were on a super-yacht with an Adrian to cook at my command.

The ladies decide they want to use the slide and Krystal complains that it’s taking forever to set up: “Are they blowing it up with their lungs?” Which does seem like the sort of thing Tyler would do to assert his manliness. Then they go back to their rooms, I think to nap, having eaten maybe one egg white between the million of them. Makes sense. Spend $60,000 on a two-night boat trip so you can let your eggs benedict get cold in front of the view while you sleep in a room.

Next, Adrian decides to leave his kitchen to go forage in the sea for live things to put in a “nice little aquarium” for the night’s table décor. Kate and Josiah are deeply confused by the idea, and Kate seems slightly offended that the chef wants to take on the chief stew’s responsibility of decorating for dinner. Josiah, however, says it’s the ninth charter and he doesn’t understand why Adrian wants to bother himself because at this point, “I don’t really give a shit.”

And now, a moment with Krystal: “I’m like an infant. Feed me, I need a nap. Feed me, I need a nap.”

Tyler takes Adrian out to a coral reef on a Jet Ski. Adrian slaps on a mask and dives down to the ocean floor where he plucks a giant lumpy sea slug off the floor, which he brings back to the boat to the horror of everyone and, wherever he is, Leonardo DiCaprio. He returns to the kitchen where Lee tells Adrian his idea sounds “absolutely disgusting.”

After the deck crew has rigged up a temporary survival vessel for the slug using a basket and pool noodles, Kate orders them to release the beast to the sea (if it’s even still alive). Adrian says that unlike Kate, he “sees beauty in most things.” Oh, even Krystal’s personality? Then he starts complaining about how he doesn’t have time to make dinner, which is on a tight schedule because of a fireworks display. Well, maybe this is why the chefs on these boats don’t normally personally plunge the depths of the world’s most fragile ecosystems to find strange creatures to display for rich people.

Instead of the coral Adrian lifted from the ocean, Kate decides to decorate the table with coral from Rhylee’s room. It’s unclear why Rhylee has coral in her room. Did she borrow it from the décor cupboard to throw at Tyler in the night?

Kate realizes that she forgot to deploy balloons and streamers for the birthday celebration, so she forces the deck crew to blow them up during dinner, because years of experience in yachting have taught her rich people need to be celebrated like they’re children. When the first course of green ravioli comes out, Krystal is already drunk enough to cry during a toast. After they eat some steak, Kate ushers them up to the top deck so they can see the fireworks. This gives the deckhands time to tape balloons to the main dining deck and the rest of the staff time to figure out how to serve the cake on disco lights, per Adrian’s vision.

The cake comes out bearing sparklers, Krystal cries, and a montage later the night ends with red wine spilled everywhere. The guests go to their rooms and Adrian decides to view the table decorations because he didn’t get the chance to see how the sea life he murdered looked next to his food. When he sees that none of the items he foraged are on the table, he gets angry and says Kate is “passive aggressive” which is “very tiring at the end of the fucking day.” Well, I’m glad we’ll end this season knowing what it takes for Adrian to crack and that is Kate rejecting his sea garbage to prevent the dinner table from being disgusting.

The last episode of Below Deck is always a bit of a wash, because a certain amount of time goes toward wrapping up everyone’s storylines, and so Captain Lee tells us the deck team has “come leaps and bounds” thanks to Ross. (Remember Chandler? LOL.) While the guests eat fig French toast and spinach truffle pastry, Captain Lee pulls into port for the last time. The primary says bye in tears and leaves a $20,000 tip. As soon as she walks off the boat the crew rip their shirts off with the desperation of someone on their way to a Fifty Shades of Grey audition.

At night, the crew enjoy a dinner cruise and luau before clubbing in Papeete. Tyler gets drunk and dances with a random lady in front of Rhylee, then gets even more drunk and starts humping the bar with more feeling than he’s ever exhibited toward another human on this show. “I think at this point Tyler could dance with anything,” says Adrian. “Random objects, live beings.” Producers, please bring Adrian back for season seven. He has delivered flawless food and a flawless performance and we know he can’t really want to work for a wealthy couple on land. (Although it might be better for endangered ocean life if he did.)

After Tyler falls asleep in the middle of the club, the crew send him back to the boat by himself. He barely manages to get to his bed, moving as though his limbs are suddenly bottom-heavy like Gumby’s.

The next morning, Kate and Josiah share Cheetos in bed one last time while Laura tells Adrian that before they all leave the boat, she just wants to have a chat. “Is it a bad chat?” he asks, as though “we need to have a chat” has ever been followed by a fun and friendly conversation. Laura then tells him that his comments were “super-inappropriate” and didn’t make her “feel good.” Adrian says he had no idea. Laura tries to seem like she’s been contemplating the situation deeply for weeks but can only espouse that “banter is a very interesting thing. Once you bring something that’s a little more sexualized, it crosses the line a little bit.”

Then it’s time for everyone to leave the boat. Tyler goes first in a tank top I thought was questionable until I saw his distressed cutoffs. Everyone else leaves on their own except for Laura and Ashton because Ashton “did the math” and realized he “might have a night or two to spend with Laura, and it excites me.”

And the only person who gets to leave without a corny confession or conclusion about the season and how it’s grown him as a person is Captain Lee, who has been doing this too long for that shit. Reunion, here we come! I haven’t seen a group of people wearing truly terrible evening wear since the gold party, so we’re long overdue.

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