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In Love and Deep Water: Was the Netflix Movie Shot on a Ship?

With Yûsuke Taki at the helm, Netflix’s ‘In Love and Deep Water’ is a Japanese murder mystery film that follows the intertwined lives of a loyal butler, Suguru, on a luxurious cruise ship, and a mysterious passenger named Chizuru, on board. After claiming that both their partners are on the brink of cheating, the latter tries her best to make him stop the cruise and return to Japan to save their respective relationships.

However, the focus shifts to something more grave when Suguru and Chizuru, along with other passengers on board, come across a dead body in the pool. Almost everyone except Suguru pretends to have not seen anything, which leads to him and Chizuru taking matters into their own hands as they try to find the murderer. Meanwhile, sparks start to fly between them. The rom-com movie is set on board the luxurious MSC Bellissima in the middle of the Aegean Sea, leaving the viewers curious about the actual shooting locations of ‘In Love and Deep Water.’

Where Was In Love and Deep Water Filmed?

‘In Love and Deep Water’ was filmed in Japan and Greece, with some portions shot out in the Aegean Sea. Reports suggest that the principal photography for the mystery film took place around the summer of 2022, over the course of a month or so. So, let’s find out about all the specific sites that make an appearance during the sea excursion in the Netflix movie!

A significant portion of ‘In Love and Deep Water,’ mainly interior scenes, was lensed in Japan, where the actual MSC Bellissima was based at the time of the shooting. However, most of the filming was reportedly carried out on a set, where the production team recreated a replica of MSC Bellissima. By constructing seemingly accurate interior parts of the stunning vessel, the cast and crew members were able to tape the pivotal sequences based inside it.

Moreover, a few exterior scenes were recorded in Japan, mainly near the area where MSC Bellissima was ported. Apart from ‘In Love and Deep Water,’ Japan has hosted the production of multiple movies and TV shows over the years. Some of the notable ones include ‘The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill,’ ‘Top Knot Detective,’ and ‘Yôgisha: Muroi Shinji.’

Aegean Sea, Greece

The director and his team also taped several aerial shots involving the MSC Bellissima out in the Aegean Sea near Greece. Operated by MSC Cruises, the luxurious ship, which has the capacity to accommodate around 4,500 passengers, was constructed at the Chantiers de l’Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire, France. While most of the interior scenes were shot on a purpose-built set, as mentioned above, the exteriors of the vessel were utilized to record most of the establishing shots.

Read More:  Best Japanese Movies on Netflix

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The 18 Best Sailing Movies to Watch on Netflix & Amazon

Watching one of these best sailing movies, you can sail into the ocean from the comfort of your couch.

Watching movies is a great way to take a trip without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. So, if you’re longing to take a voyage on the sea, a sailing movie is a great option!

Our favorite sailing movies include a great story and amazing views! All of the films on our list are available on Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Netflix at this time. So you can watch a great film about setting sail without ever leaving your house!

Most of these options also lend them selves to be a great outdoor movie night or pool party movie choice !

The 18 Best Sailing Movies

From action-packed thrillers set on a boat to inspiring documentaries about real-life sailors, you’re going to love each of the sailing movies in this comprehensive list.

Rated PG-13

A young couple sets sail on an adventure of a lifetime across the open sea together. But as they’re sailing across the ocean, one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in history capsizes their boat, leaving them to fight for their lives in the ocean, in this sailing thriller based on a true story.

2. Life of Pi

After surviving a shipwreck, the young son of a zookeeper is trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in this Oscar winning sailing movie directed by Ang Lee.

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3. deep water (2006).

This sailing documentary tells the true story of the first solo, non-stop boat race around the world. As the film progresses, the filmmakers work to uncover the toll the grueling sea trip took on the race’s participants. The documetary features Simon and Clare Crowhurst.

4. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

In this historical drama, Russell Crowe plays a 19th century British ship captain who struggles as he prepares rag-tag team of crew members to attack a French ship.

5. Captain Ron

After a man finds out he’s inherited a yacht, he takes his family on a trip to the Caribbean to bring the ship home in this sailing comedy. When they arrive, the family hires a shady captain to help repair the ship and sail them back to Miami, leading to plenty of trouble on the trip home.

Kurt Russell and Martin Short star in this sailing film.

A group of sailors come together to reclaim the America’s Cup for the American team after a defeat the year before in this action-packed sailing movie starring Matthew Modine and Jennifer Grey.

7. White Squall

An educational sailing trip turns into a larger life lesson for a group of prep school students when their boat gets caught in a white squall storm in this Ridley Scott sailing movie classic featuring Jeff Bridges and John Savage.

8. Dead Calm

When a seasoned sailor and his wife, played by Nicole Kidman, take their yacht out on a long vacation trip across the ocean, they come upon a sinking boat in the middle of a calm sea. After rescuing the distressed sailor, the couple uncovers a horrifying sight and works to uncover the mystery behind the capsized vessel.

9. Kon Tiki

This Academy Award winning classic sailing documentary tells the story of a group of sailors who took a 4,300 nautical mile trip across the Pacific ocean on a raft. 

10. Maidentrip

Follow 14-year-old Laura Dekker as she achieves her dream of becoming the youngest person to set sail around the world alone in this riveting sailing documentary.

11. The Old Man and the Sea

Based on the classic novel by Ernest Hemingway, this sailing movie follows Santiago on a fishing trip that ends with the biggest catch of his life. But when sharks attack his catch, he must fight to keep his fish and save himself.

12. Morning Light

Watch as 15 young sailors compete to join the crew of the Morning Light, a sleek racing boat bound for the Transpac LA to Hawaii open ocean race in this Disney sailing documentary.

13. The Perfect Storm

To help tide his crew over for the winter, a fishing boat captain insists the group go out for one more fishing trip before the cold weather arrives. But as the crew sets sail, a storm begins to brew directly in their boat’s path in this sailing movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.

14. Red Dot on the Ocean

Hoping to become the first person to sail around North and South America alone, Matt Rutherford goes on a death-defying ocean journey in this popular sailing documentary.

15. The Mercy

Leaving behind a loving wife (Rachel Weisz), an amateur sailor named Donald Crowhurst (played by Colin Firth) competes in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race around the world. This movie has some of the prettiest sailing scenes and is based on a true story.

An overworked doctor takes her dream trip sailing alone across the Atlantic. But when she comes across a boat filled with refugees, she jumps in to organize the group and get them to safety.

17. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Famous Steve Zissou sets sail with this crew to find a (possibly nonexistent) Jaguar Shark. This quirky comedy stars Bill Murrary, Owen Wilson, and Cate Blanchett.

18. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Johnny Depp plays Captain Jack Sparrow in this popular Disney franchise about the days of pirates and treasure hunts.

You can also save this picture to have the list of best sailing movies easily on your phone!

Whether you’re an experienced sailor or you get sea sick at the sight of water, you can enjoy a vicarious trip across the ocean with the help of a good movie. And these amazing sailing movies won’t disappoint!

If you loved this list of best sailing movies, you may also like:

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• 17 Best Movies About Greece to Watch Tonight

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Miss cruising? Stream these 13 movies and shows to get your cruise ship fix

Are you a hardcore cruising fan? We wouldn't blame you for being a bit down. The complete shutdown of cruising since March due to the coronavirus pandemic is keeping you away from your favorite floating hideaways, and it doesn't look like you'll be back at sea anytime soon.

That said, you're not completely cut off from your favorite ships — you still can see them in movies and in television shows.

Since streaming movies and television programming is pretty much all we're doing these days (and we're guessing that's the case for you, too), we've put together this list of some our favorite onscreen entertainment that includes at least a glimpse of a cherished cruise vessel.

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In some cases, these movies and shows are available on streaming services such as Hulu (if you're not a subscriber, get a free trial ), Amazon Prime , fuboTV , Sling TV and FandangoNow . Others can be found on YouTube, iTunes, or at Redbox kiosks.

"Mighty Cruise Ships"

Available on: Hulu , YouTube , Amazon Prime , Smithsonian Channel

You'll get much more than a glimpse of your favorite cruise ship with this series. Each of the 18 episodes, which originally aired in 2014, 2017 and 2019 on Canada's Discovery Channel, focus on a single cruise vessel in fabulously minute detail, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how they run. Among the vessels featured in the series are Celebrity Solstice, Carnival Vista, Royal Caribbean 's Symphony of the Seas and MSC Divina. The series also includes ships operated by Viking, Star Clippers, Azamara and Ponant.

"Mighty Ships"

Available on: FandangoNow , Hulu , YouTube , Amazon Prime , iTunes, fuboTV , Smithsonian Channel

"Mighty Cruise Ships" was a spinoff of this series, which began airing in 2008 on Canada's Discovery Channel and has completed 10 seasons. While it generally focuses on commercial and military vessels, from the container ship Emma Maersk to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, it also offers several wonderful episodes on cruise ships. Among the vessels profiled: Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas , Norwegian Breakaway, Wind Surf and MSC Meraviglia.

"Ocean Treks with Jeff Corwin"

Available on: ABC, Hulu , Ocean.com

Every episode of this 4-year-old travel series starring television personality Jeff Corwin will get you at least a peek at one the vessels under the Carnival Corp. umbrella of brands. The giant cruise company, which owns Carnival Cruise Line , Princess Cruises , Holland America and six other major lines, sponsors the series, which has been airing on Saturday mornings on ABC. It follows Corwin as he heads off ships in various port towns for a perfect day of adventure.

"The Voyager with Josh Garcia"

Available on: Hulu , Sling TV , fuboTV , Ocean.com

Like "Ocean Treks," this is a series sponsored by Carnival Corp. that's generously filled with cameos of the line's vessels and is all about things to do during port calls, but with less of a focus on adventure. The host, video journalist Josh Garcia, sets off from vessels for a day of off-the-beaten-path exploring. His goal: Meeting locals who can share their history, life stories and exotic foods. It originally aired on NBC from 2016 to 2019.

"Building the World's Most Luxurious Cruise Ship"

Available on: YouTube

This is can't-miss television for Regent Seven Seas Cruises fans. The two-part documentary chronicles the creation of the luxury line's Seven Seas Explorer, which was the most expensive luxury ship ever built at the time it debuted in 2016. Even today, only one ship -- Seven Seas Explorer's just-unveiled sister, Seven Seas Splendor -- rivals it in opulence. What we love about this documentary is the amazing behind-the-scenes access that Regent gave the filmmakers during the ship's construction. You see every little twist and turn in the making of a new icon of the seas.

"Jack and Jill"

Available on: FandangoNow , YouTube , Amazon Prime , Hulu , Google Play, iTunes, Vudu

Yes, we know: This is widely considered one of the all-time worst movies ever made. It only scored 3% on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer! But, if you're a Royal Caribbean fan jonesing for a glimpse of one of the line's giant Oasis Class-vessels, there's simply no better movie. We won't even bother going into the inane plot of this 2011 comedy, which stars Adam Sandler (playing both a male and female role). Just fast-forward to the shipboard scenes, which were shot on board Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas.

"Speed 2: Cruise Control"

Available on: FandangoNow , YouTube , Amazon Prime , Google Play, iTunes, Vudu

This 1997 action flick starring Sandra Bullock got almost as bad reviews as Jack and Jill (which is a pity, as the original "Speed" is a classic). Still, we mention it because it was filmed on one of the great luxury ships of the past 30 years: The vessel now known as Star Legend. Star Legend sails for Windstar Cruises these days, but it originally debuted as the last new ship for legendary (and long-defunct) luxury operator Royal Viking Line. Back then, it was called Royal Viking Queen. By the time the film was made, it had moved to the Seabourn fleet, sailing as Seabourn Legend.

"Like Father"

Available on: Netflix

Another giant Royal Caribbean ship, Harmony of the Seas, is the star of this somewhat predictable "dramedy" from 2018, which stars Kelsey Grammer, Kristen Bell and Seth Rogen. The plot twist here is that Bell's character, left at the altar, ends up on her honeymoon cruise with her estranged father (Grammer), with resulting drama and hijinks. Royal Caribbean lovers can make it a game of spotting all the cool Harmony of the Seas features, from the ship's nine-deck-high zip line to the Rising Tide Bar. Scenes also were shot at Royal Caribbean's private beach retreat in Haiti.

"Cruising With Jane McDonald"

Former cruise ship entertainer Jane McDonald highlights a different river or ocean cruise every episode on this British television series, which ran from 2017 to this year (a new host will soon be taking over the show). Recent episodes have featured a wide range of vessels, including Oceania Cruises' Marina, Silversea's Silver Shadow and Princess' Sun Princess.

Related: Feeling wanderlust? Stream these 12 films set in spectacular destinations

"Monster Ships"

Available on: FandangoNow , Hulu , YouTube, Amazon Prime , iTunes

Just in case "Mighty Ships" doesn't provide you with enough of a giant ship fix, the television world also offers the similarly named "Monster Ships" and, as its name suggests, the eight-part series from 2019 brings an up-close look at massive vessels of all kinds -- one per 42-minute episode. In addition to a gargantuan car carrier and a crazy-looking heavy lift vessel, the series (which aired on the Science Channel) includes two ships designed for cruising: Crown Princess and Royal Clipper.

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked"

Available on: FandangoNow , YouTube , Amazon Prime , iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, HBO Now

If you're even the least bit an "Alvin and the Chipmunks" fan, this is your cruise movie. The third installment of the live-action chipmunks series, which dates to 2011, is set on cruise giant Carnival's 3,646-passenger Carnival Dream. Or, at least, it is — until the chipmunks get blown away while flying a kite and end up on a deserted island. External shots and some interiors were filmed on the vessel. Some ship scenes, alas, were shot in a soundstage.

"Out to Sea"

Available on: FandangoNow , YouTube , Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime , HBO Now, Hulu

You can't go wrong with this Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau matchup, which involves the legendary comedic duo delivering their schtick as dance hosts on a cruise ship. Dating to 1997, it takes place on what's now the Marella Dream, a 1,132-passenger vessel in the fleet of British line Marella Cruises. Holland America fans will know this ship better as the old Westerdam (which was its name from 1988 to 2002). Just don't confuse it with the new Westerdam (Holland America likes to recycle names). It also sailed eight years for Costa Cruises.

"The Love Boat: Next Wave"

To make our list, a movie or television show had to feature a vessel still in service.

But we really can't do a story on cruise-related entertainment without at least mentioning "The Love Boat," which featured a Princess Cruises ship that's no longer in operation. While it doesn't offer a glimpse into a vessel you can book, this is, quite simply, the most iconic cruise ship show of all time. Indeed, many in the cruise industry credit the series, which ran from 1977 to 1987, for kicking off the great growth in cruising we've seen over the past four decades.

"The Love Boat" was set on the original Pacific Princess, which sailed for Princess from 1977 to 2002. But it was filmed not just on that ship, but also several others. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, you can find the show on MeTV stations on Sundays and on YouTube -- or buy the DVD box set of the first four seasons at Amazon.

Also, in 1988, the series was revived with a short-lived remake, "The Love Boat: Next Wave" — and it was filmed on the Sun Princess, which still sails. Unfortunately, it's not available on any major streaming platform. But, if you can find it, please sound off in the comments below and let us know where we can watch it, too.

Looking for more of a cruise fix? Try these stories:

• How to plan a cruise with points and miles
• The most exciting new ocean ships of 2020
• The most exciting new river ships of 2020
• 6 new cruise itineraries you should book right now
• The best cruise lines for solo travelers
• The best Caribbean cruises for every type of traveler
• 5 cruise lines to try if you just can't stand being around kids on vacation

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Observational documentary series following the lives of the crew and passengers heading out on the holiday of a lifetime on board the ships Scarlet Lady and Valiant in the Virgin Voyages fle... Read all Observational documentary series following the lives of the crew and passengers heading out on the holiday of a lifetime on board the ships Scarlet Lady and Valiant in the Virgin Voyages fleet. Observational documentary series following the lives of the crew and passengers heading out on the holiday of a lifetime on board the ships Scarlet Lady and Valiant in the Virgin Voyages fleet.

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What Is the Prometheus in ‘1899’?

Where to stream:, 8 shows to watch if you loved 'silo', 'yellowstone' season 5 will be the end of the show,  creator taylor sheridan's "ego" to blame: report, canceled tv shows 2023: which of your fave shows got the axe, stream it or skip it: 'wreck' on hulu, a horror comedy that involves a cruise ship, a missing woman and a killer in a duck costume.

Netflix has officially taken to the sea with its latest series, 1899. Half ocean-based adventure, half twisting mystery, this new series from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar makes Westworld seem reasonable.

It’s because of these unending questions that we need to talk about one of the biggest elephants onboard: What exactly is the Prometheus ? And what does it mean for this twisting thriller? Spoilers ahead. 

What Is the Prometheus in 1899 ?

Though this drama starts aboard the Kerberos , there’s another vessel that’s equally important. At the beginning of 1899 , the Kerberos is supposed to travel from London to New York City. That voyage is interrupted once Captain Eyk Larsen (Andreas Pietschmann) learns that their path will take them by the Prometheus , a ship that disappeared four months ago. After arguing with his crew and passengers, Eyk decides to do the noble thing and explore this lost ship. It’s this decision that sparks the beginning of an unending nightmare.

What Is the Meaning Behind the Prometheus ? Was Prometheus a god?

We’re going back to a nation that isn’t represented in this show: Greece. Prometheus was a Titan god of fire in Greek mythology. He’s best known for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity. Thanks to this gift, humans were able to form civilization. As punishment for his crimes, Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle, which was the symbol for Zeus, ate his liver every day. Each night his liver would regrow, subjecting him to a never-ending cycle of torture.

The Prometheus isn’t the only ship that takes its name from Greek mythology. Kerberos, also written as Cerberus, was a multi-headed dog that guarded the gates of the Underworld. Often called the hound of Hades, he was captured by Heracles as the last of Heracles’ 12 trials.

Why Is the Ship Called the Prometheus ?

It’s never explicitly stated why the Prometheus was given the name that it has. But thanks to some context clues, we have a pretty solid theory. Major spoilers ahead.

The final episode of 1899 reveals that the Prometheus and Kerberos never actually existed. Instead, they were simulations created by a grieving Maura (Emily Beecham) so that she could spend more time with her dying son. As Maura’s father Henry (Anton Lesser) explained, Maura spent her entire life questioning the nature of reality and striving to learn more. It makes sense that the boat she’s seeking would be named after the god who cursed himself in the pursuit of giving mankind more knowledge. It also makes sense that asme boat would be named after a god who had to endlessly endure the same horrific punishment, a detail that these constantly resetting simulations mirror.

The finale also hints at an unsettling explanation for the Kerberos . If the Prometheus represents Maura’s doomed quest for knowledge, then the Kerberos implies that they were always in hell.

What Happens to the Prometheus in 1899 ?

It went to the great whirlpool in the sky. Let us explain. Toward the end of the season, Henry decided to reset the simulation. For whatever computer-based reason, that reset involved the Kerberos steering itself into a whirlpool and emerging on the other side of the world. 1899 gave us several chilling shots of an ocean littered with abandoned ships — presumably, abandoned simulations — before the reset took place. Once that happened, both ships were engulfed in flames.

Shockingly, this isn’t the end of the Prometheus ‘ journey. In the final moments of “The Key”, Maura wakes up not in a cabin but on a spaceship. That’s where she learns about something called Project Prometheus. We still have no idea what this interstellar project is, what it’s trying to accomplish, or where it’s going. But we do know that 1,423 passengers and 550 crew members are along for the ride.

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Death and Other Details Review: Hulu's Whodunit Mystery Takes Itself Too Seriously

Mandy Patinkin investigates a murder on a cruise ship in the dry new series

Violett Beane and Mandy Patinkin,  Death and Other Details

On paper, Hulu's  Death and Other Details  has all the makings of a great whodunit: entitled rich people living their best lives, an outsider who has infiltrated the inner circle, the working class that hates them all, and a disgraced detective trying to make a splashy comeback. So it's disappointing that, in reality, the series never quite pops. 

With the resurgence of whodunits thanks to projects like  Knives Out, Only Murders in the Building,  and Kenneth Branagh's modernized Poirot movies, any new one has big (gum)shoes to fill. The detective at the center of the case is key to keeping the audience engaged in solving the murder. In  Death and Other Details , Mandy Patinkin steps into that role as Rufus Cotesworth, the world's greatest detective. 

Or at least he was, until he was unable to solve the case of a murdered woman with ties to a powerful family. Through flashbacks, we learn Cotesworth fled midway through the investigation, leaving the family and the dead woman's daughter, Imogene (played as a child by Sophia Reid-Gantzert and in the present by Violett Beane ), behind. 

In the present day, Cotesworth shows up on a luxury cruise ship commandeered by that same family to celebrate the retirement of its patriarch, Lawrence ( David Marshall Grant ). There is a colorful cast of characters aboard, including Lawrence's entitled kids, Tripp ( Jack Cutmore-Scott ) and Anna ( Lauren Patten ); the commandeering head of staff, Teddy ( Angela Zhou ); and Imogene, whose complicated relationship with the family leaves her straddling both worlds. 

When one of the guests is suddenly murdered, Imogene and Cotesworth are thrown together to solve the case, bringing the past and present together through flashbacks, re-enactments, and interrogations set against colorful backdrops and featuring beautiful costumes.

Death and Other Details

• Lots of larger-than-life suspects
• A fun setting
• Great costumes and scenery
• Takes itself too seriously
• Too much exposition
• Too many complicated twists

It's got almost everything Agatha Christie could ever want from a murder mystery, but Death and Other Details  lacks fun. When dealing with suspects, a show like this needs to toe the line between believable and outlandish. It needs lighter moments to balance the morbid situation at hand. Rather than lean into those moments and play up its quirks, Death goes the other way.

It's not just the characters who take themselves too seriously. Class division and wealth are the topic of way too many conversations, hitting viewers over the head rather than letting people draw their own conclusions. The ship's setup is very  Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey , and the theme seems obvious enough without the constant exposition. 

There are moments when the show borders on fun. A karaoke scene between siblings, a night of unbridled passion, and an ongoing storyline involving one guest broadcasting the case for his social media following are some of the standout lighter moments. The series could use more of them. 

As for Cotesworth, he, too, is too serious. Patinkin easily commands a scene, but he doesn't exude the charm you want from your lead guy. His strongest scenes are those in which he's most animated, such as a talk show flashback in a later episode or his interactions with his partner at the office. On the ship, however, he's tightly wound and private, offering gruff advice to Imogene as he lets her lead the investigation.

Unfortunately, Imogene is an unsympathetic character. Finding her mother's killer is what drives her, but it often undermines the importance of solving the murder at hand (even if it may be the same killer). She's got access to money, beauty, and brains, and plenty of people on the ship seem to fall for her quickly. Given everything she has so readily accepted in life, it's hard to root for her and her hypocrisy. 

As for the case itself, it's hard to tell whether a satisfying ending is in store. Hulu released eight of the ten installments to the press, and although a new suspect comes to light in each episode, it's hard to tell where the story is going. Many of the reveals come via flashbacks off the ship, retold while a present-day Imogene or Cotesworth steps back into a scene to discuss information as it unfolds.

Despite the ship's isolated nature, some passengers come and go, and it doesn't take long for the case at hand to grow into a larger conspiracy that's no longer contained. That's fine for a thriller or psychological drama. But part of the fun of whodunits is discerning the killer and making educated guesses based on the clues others may have missed, without stretching too far outward.

In other words, it's all about the  Details . And while there are still two episodes for this story to come full circle, it will take a lot of pulling back and simplifying to get to that satisfactory ending.  

Premieres: Tuesday, Jan. 16 with two episodes on Hulu, followed by a new episode each Tuesday Who's in it: Violett Beane, Mandy Patinkin, Lauren Patten, Rahul Kohli, Angela Zhou Who's behind it: Mike Weiss, Heidi Cole McAdams For fans of: Whodunits, murder mysteries and shows that tackle class division How many episodes we watched: 8 of 10

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Separating Seafaring Fact From Fiction In Netflix’s “Leave The World Behind”    

December 21, 2023

By Taylor Bounds

In the first twenty minutes of Netflix's new movie, "Leave The World Behind," an oil tanker runs aground on the coast of Long Island in an area full of beachgoers. Explained by the movie as "something to do with their nav system," this scene is one of the first indicators of a greater problem: a nationwide power failure. According to the movie, this is not an isolated incident, but one of several groundings along the east coast.

Capt. Wade Howell '02, master of the TS Kennedy , sat down with bldg. 311 to discuss the likelihood of an event like this.

If there was a total blackout like in the movie, what systems are in place to keep something like this from happening?

Every ship can have a blackout, just like on land, but there are safeguards in place that will limit this blackout time to a few minutes in most cases. The ship has a backup uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, that can provide power and automation on the emergency diesel generator that will start when a ship experiences a loss of power. When the generator starts, it will provide basic lights, communications and navigation, but will not always have propulsion to move the ship forward.

What kind of navigation system would you typically find on a commercial ship? Do ships ever experience navigation system failures?

Modern ships maintain a full interconnected bridge system that shares information between radars, GPS and electronic chart displays. As with any computer system, it can develop bugs, and a signal loss can shift the system. Over the development of these systems, manufacturers have developed alarms and visual messages to display when a loss of the input sensors occurs.

However, even with all the technology available, the mariner is the true failsafe, using the systems to make sure everything makes sense. This is typically accomplished by comparing the old systems of celestial and terrestrial navigation techniques with the modern equipment.

How did people navigate oceans and coastlines before electronic navigation?

Throughout history, people have used the movements of the sun and stars. When you know your rough latitude and longitude, you can use the position of the heavens and mathematical tables to figure out your location. Closer to land, you can navigate the coastline by land features compared to the chart you are sailing on.

The university offers courses in terrestrial, celestial and electronic navigation. These classes cover all the forms of navigation that are in use in today's industry.

Running a ship aground on a busy beach seems like a worst-case scenario. Are there any situations where this would be the correct response?

Depending on the situation, the area around you, cargo onboard and other dangers, it might be appropriate. Generally speaking, it's preferred not to run aground, but it might cause less environmental damage if you can keep the cargo from spilling into the water. Think of a tanker carrying heavy crude oil: depending on the conditions, it's safer than letting it sink with less impact.

If a beach is full of people, you should avoid that. However, if you have a loss of steering systems (separate from navigation system), there are backup systems that should prevent a total loss, but you might not have a choice if you are close to land and that's where the ship is heading before you can regain control.

So losing electronic navigation capabilities isn't a typical reason to ground a ship?

NO, not for loss of navigation. Although we don't know exactly what happened with the ships in the movie, we can likely chalk it up as movie magic.

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Netflix Announces Ability to Download Programs… And It’s Great for Cruisers

If you wanted to watch Netflix on a cruise, you used to only have a few options. Most cruise lines have notoriously slow Internet speeds (although they are getting better).

Slow connection speeds meant that trying to stream video from your account while on the ship was shaky at best, and impossible at worst. In fact, due to the amount of data consumed, some cruise lines banned streaming services, even if their Internet speeds could support streaming.

If you’re a Netflix-lover and want to watch your favorite shows while on a cruise, then there is some excellent news. Netflix now allows users to download programs and play them back later without using an Internet connection. That means as long as you plan ahead to download your show, you can watch without having to connect to the online service.

Best of all, the service works on your smartphone or tablet — as long as you have iOS (Apple) or Android operating system.

This really is a game-changer when it comes to watching Netflix on a cruise. Without the need for a data connection, you can now watch wherever you are on the ship — even in the middle of the ocean. It’s the perfect way to enjoy your shows without the hiccups, buffering, and expense that would come with trying to watch through the ship’s Internet.

For more details on how to download and watch programs via Netflix, check out the video below. Note that not every show is available for download.

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Netflix’s new series from Dark creators sets a deadly riddle on a ghost ship

1899 arrives on Netflix in November

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Netflix is bringing mystery to the high seas with the latest series from the creators of Dark , 1899 . The streamer released a new trailer for the series on Monday, which gave us our best description yet of its plot — or at least its mystery.

The series’ new trailer sets up a boat full of international travelers whose captain takes them off course in hopes of saving a lost ship called the Prometheus. But once they all arrive, they find that the boat had sunk and has mysteriously resurfaced, without a single person on board. As the investigation continues, a massive puzzle begins to reveal itself pointing to the larger mysteries of the boat, its disappearance, and why and how it turned back up.

1899 comes from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, the creators of Netflix’s exceedingly complex German-language time-travel drama Dark . That series ran for three seasons, but it’s not clear yet if 1899 is intended to be a limited series or continue its story for multiple years. 1899 brings together an international cast that includes actors like Emily Beecham ( Hail, Caesar! ) and Aneurin Bernard ( Dunkirk ), as well as a few cast members like Andreas Pietschmann who played important roles on Dark .

1899 is set to premiere on Netflix on Nov. 17.

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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'The Last Cruise': HBO documentary reveals when the Diamond Princess cruise vacation turned into a COVID-19 nightmare

"One team, one dream" is the saying between crew members on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, but now we get a glimpse into the moment that dream turned into a COVID-19 nightmare in a new HBO documentary The Last Cruise (debuting on Crave on Tuesday, March 30 at 9:00 p.m. ET) .

When the Diamond Princess cruise set sail from Yokohama, Japan on Jan. 20, 2020, with 2,666 passengers and 1,045 crew members, there were still a lot of unknowns about COVID-19. In 40 minutes, The Last Cruise showcases videos taken by both passengers and the crew for a first-hand account of what it was like to be on the ship as concerns around COVID-19 became more serious.

After the first COVID-19 case was identified in the U.S., while the ship had been travelling around Asia, American passengers Cheryl and Paul Molesky were told by Paul's daughter to not get off the ship in Hong Kong because there was a virus going around. But there weren't a lot of concerns about the virus for anyone on the cruise at that point.

Eventually, cruise employees were taking everyone's temperatures, with several passenger calling it simply an "inconvenience" to their vacation. When the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed on the ship at the beginning of February, the priority was still to just monitor for anyone else who had cold or flu-like symptoms.

Initial screening by the Japanese Ministry of Health found that 10 people had tested positive for COVID-19. The ship was put into quarantine in Yokohama and a second set of samples found that 10 more people were positive. Masks were then delivered to everyone's staterooms.

'The rich would be taken care of'

While the passengers stayed in their rooms, the crew still had to work. Phones had to be answered, cleaning had to be done, food had to be made and delivered.

In the documentary Maruja Daya, a pastry chef, says she felt like "the rich would be taken care of," expressing concerns that the crew was still working when they were also at risk of being infected.

Dede, a dishwasher who was particularly excited about being able to work on a cruise ship, highlights that there was no separation between crew members that were infected and those who weren't. The crew was also scared to report that they were sick or even to complain about the conditions.

Sonali Thakkar, who worked security on the ship, reveals that as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on the ship continued to rise, there was a rumour that there was a plan to sink the ship with people on board, which was frightening for her.

Knowing what we know now about COVID-19 and the spread of the virus on this cruise ship in particular, it makes you cringe seeing some of the passengers complain about the food they are receiving and the impact of the quarantine on the hospitality of the staff.

It's revealed that at least a third of the crew members who tested positive for COVID-19 by around the Feb. 9 mark didn't have any symptoms. That's when it was discovered that asymptomatic spread was possible.

The crew decks have no windows so it was incredibly isolating for cruise employees in particular. While everyone was stuck on the ship, the crew was below deck, not even knowing what time of day it was unless they were looking at a clock. They just wanted some fresh air.

Near the end of the documentary, we see the American passengers getting on a plane to the U.S. near the end of February, after some expressed concerns about possibly catching COVID-19 on the aircraft if they disembark the ship. In the middle of the plane, with passengers from the Diamond Princess on board, you see a plastic curtain enclosure. One of the couples featured in the documentary reveals that's where people who were COVID-19 positive were sitting throughout the journey.

A total of 712 people contracted COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship and 14 died.

While COVID-19 still rages on, The Last Cruise makes you think about all the progress made throughout the pandemic, but all the things that are still unknown about the virus, including asymptomatic spread. It also highlights the importance of support for essential workers.

Although it happened more than a year ago, even if you're aware of the events, it's still incredibly eerie to see how quickly the virus spread and it makes you uncomfortable to see delays to measures like wearing masks.

When the U.S. government studied what transpired on the ship, it was determined that COVID-19 was airborne and spread through asymptomatic carriers. Ultimately, The Last Cruise stresses that the CDC in the U.S. took more than a month to recommend masking to prevent COVID-19 spread. Canada's chief public health officer officially called for the use of non-medical face masks when a two-metre distance cannot be maintained on May 20.

While many might think going on a cruise would be the last thing anyone on the Diamond Princess would want to do again, one woman, who was actually sent to a hospital because she tested positive for COVID-19 on the ship, said she and her husband would definitely go on a cruise again, with another one already booked.

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How accurate is a new movie about the real-life spies who inspired Bond? We checked

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Warning: The following contains spoilers from “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”

Although the events of World War II have been extensively studied, details are still emerging. In fact, documents concerning an essential mission, dubbed Operation Postmaster and undertaken by the British War Office, were only recently declassified. The mission, carried out by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), is the unlikely subject of Guy Ritchie’s latest film, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”

Now in theaters the film, written by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Arash Amel and Ritchie, is based on Damien Lewis’s 2014 book “Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII.” However, it takes some dramatic license in its depiction of the events.

“The story itself and the elements are true,” Amel says, noting that some characters are amalgamations to serve a two-hour narrative. “Not only was it untold history, with men on a mission against all odds who became the forerunners of James Bond, but it was a coming together of this multicultural coalition of the misfits. It wasn’t just your classical story of the British fighting the Germans.”

Operation Postmaster involved a group of special operatives, led by Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill), who were tasked with destroying ships used to supply the German U-boats then terrorizing British waters. The members of the team — Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson), Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding) — are based on real people. Other characters, like Nazi leader Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger), are fictional.

But while Ritchie infused the story with his own flair (and predilection for improvisation), the outlines of the mission itself are depicted more or less accurately.

“It was extraordinary to learn about a mission like this, which on paper was a suicide mission,” Cavill says. “It changed the course of the whole war because we essentially shut down the nasty U-boat fleet in the Atlantic. Without that happening, there could have been considerably less supplies reaching the Allies in Europe and the Americans may never have joined.”

“You can be taught this story from history and think, ‘Wow, this is fascinating,’” adds Eiza González, who plays an agent named Marjorie Stewart. “Because it is a fascinating story. But you also have to care about these people and you have to give them a personality.”

Here’s what’s true and what’s dramatized in “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”

Review: Long before Bond, ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ kicked off British covert ops

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The mission objective

In 1942, Winston Churchill enlisted a team of operatives to infiltrate the West African port city of Fernando Po (now Bioko) to steal three Italian and German ships, including the Duchessa d’Aosta, which supplied the German U-boats. In the film, the characters intend to destroy and sink the ships, but the plan is foiled when they realize the Duchessa’s hull has been reinforced. In reality, the mission was to steal the vessels and pretend to discover them in international waters — exactly what the team did.

“Churchill backed the mission against a lot of his senior advisors, who said the risks were too great,” Lewis says. “But he believed the upside of what would be achieved by stealing three ships was too great to miss.”

Operation Postmaster was the first mission for the group, known as No. 62 Commando. Ritchson notes that, although many factors “ helped the dominoes fall for the Allied forces … this group was one of the really important pieces of the puzzle.”

In real life, the operatives sailed two ships from Britain to Fernando Po. One was a trawling vessel, the Maid of Honour, commanded by March-Phillipps, the other a transport ship commanded by Appleyard. In the film, the action is contained to the Maid of Honour and the mission team is reduced to five agents, including Appleyard.

Onscreen, March-Phillipps leads a bloody raid on an enemy camp to free Appleyard on the way to Fernando Po. “There were certainly many attacks like that,” Lewis says. “But Appleyard was not held prisoner at that time.” Amel confirms that the raid in the film is based on the second real-life mission the group undertook, Operation Dryad, although the violence is “a nod to the mayhem and murder of subsequent missions” as no shots were actually fired.

In Fernando Po, two agents, Marjorie Stewart (González) and Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun), create a diversion on the ground by hosting two parties for the Nazi officers and soldiers, as well as the Spanish harbor crew. Those scenes in the film are based on fact, although Mr. Heron is an amalgam of real-life agents.

“All of that is pretty much as it happened,” Lewis says. “The big crazy party at the end — that’s exactly what the guy did on the ground. They even had a trial party to check out that it would work. And blowing the electricity station — all of that took place.”

The James Bond factor

As seen in the movie, Ian Fleming did work for the British government and was involved with the SOE during World War II. Several years later, he was inspired to write the James Bond novels, which began with 1953’s “Casino Royale.” Lewis explains that Bond is a “photo fit” of several actual agents.

“March-Phillipps is one of the key characters and there are two or three others — all individuals that Fleming worked with,” he says. “Fleming was hands-on with Operation Postmaster. That’s absolutely true. But he also worked closely with an amazing character named Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale. He was a high-born bon vivant, just like James Bond, and he was the secret intelligence spymaster in France prior to the war.”

March-Phillipps, who died during the next mission he undertook, wrote a spy novel himself, which Cavill discovered “in a very small article somewhere in the dark corners of the internet.”

“Had he not died during the war he might have beaten Ian Fleming to the punch,” Cavill says.

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The Danish hammer

One of the film’s most compelling characters is Lassen, a real-life spy who went on numerous missions throughout the war and was a deadly fighter known as “the Danish hammer.” Ritchson describes him as “the most badass character in the movie and in real life” despite the fact that Lassen looked nothing like the muscled “Reacher” star.

“What so impressive about Anders is that he was this very slight man,” Ritchson says. “He didn’t look like a superhero. He was a genius tactician [and] a genius strategist. He was so inventive and creative in his pursuit of dominating the enemy or fooling the enemy or in his outright savagery.”

In the film, Lassen is a brutal killer, using a bow and arrow to take down Nazi after Nazi. He was, in fact, a skilled archer, and even campaigned to get the bow and arrow recognized as an official weapon of war in Britain. Ritchson trained with an Olympic archery coach to get the character’s physicality right.

Like March-Phillipps, Lassen died during a later mission, only two months before the war ended. His death is documented in Lewis’ book, which describes numerous missions after Operation Postmaster.

“People who read the book say they are in tears because you really get to know this guy and he is this incredible, legendary, free-spirited maverick,” Lewis says. “Alan has got his essence, as I think have all the actors.”

The body count

March-Phillipps and his team killed dozens — maybe hundreds — of enemies in the film. The action sequences do reflect real fighting techniques used by the British forces, but the number of dead Nazis during Operation Postmaster has been drastically exaggerated.

“There is quite a bit more gunfire than in the real mission,” Cavill says. “I think during the real thing not a single shot was fired, apart from when [the team] blew the anchor chain in the harbor and the Germans thought it was a bombing raid so they started firing antiaircraft guns into the sky. But they did not think there was a bunch of sneaky gentlemen stealing their boats.”

Ritchson and his stunt double Ryan Tarran helped to conceive several of the brutal fight scenes, including when Anders storms one of the ships and takes down multiple crew members with an ax. Ritchson recalls asking for 18 extras to kill in the scene even though Ritchie said he could only have 10.

“The crazier it is, the better,” Ritchson says. “I wanted everything to have life-and-death stakes, but I didn’t want it to take itself so seriously that the audience couldn’t enjoy it. The cake is the reality of this saga and the men behind it, but the icing is how much fun we can make it.”

Cavill adds that while the body count is exaggerated, it encapsulates the work these operatives did throughout the war. “What made these guys and girls so special is that they made a lot of this stuff look easy,” he says.

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The real Marjorie Stewart

Marjorie Stewart was a spy and did work for the SOE, but she was not part of the Fernando Po team. And although Lewis confirms that there was a female agent on the ground, he notes that she was not, like the movie’s Marjorie, tasked with seducing Nazis. That said, seduction was certainly a tactic employed during the real-life operation.

“When they organized the party, they organized ladies to be there for the same reason,” Lewis says. “That was part of the draw — drink, food and women.”

Amel says that Stewart, who was also an actress, was an “incredible person in real life.” He wanted to include her not only because she married March-Phillipps, but because she could stand in for all of the female spies who never got their due.

“If we didn’t put Marjorie in there, we’d be forgetting all of the women that were there and the work that she did specifically on all the different missions,” Amel says. “That’s where it’s acceptable, for me, to stray from the bounds of an absolute commitment to history because contributions get forgotten.”

In the film, Marjorie distracts Heinrich with a Marilyn Monroe-like performance. The song was added on the set when Ritchie discovered that González could sing and is not based on the historical record. González did learn about Stewart’s life and work, as well as other women in the SOE, including Virginia Hall, Nancy Wake and Mata Hari.

“I was just impressed by the capabilities that they had,” González says. “Women were pivotal in these missions, and they were necessary because there were a lot of things that men couldn’t infiltrate. I genuinely encourage anyone who is fascinated by this story to read more about it. We hear about a lot of the men who made a difference, but not a lot about the women who made a difference and there’s quite outstanding stories out there.”

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Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Peacock

By Vrinda Mundara

Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 is an American true-crime drama series. Directed by John Barnard, Ian Bawa, and Cameron Patterson, the second season’s storyline delves into more ferocious cases of people who went on a cruise ship for their respective work but vanished because of mysterious circumstances.

Here’s how you can watch and stream Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 via streaming services such as Peacock.

Is Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 available to watch via streaming?

Yes, Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 is available to watch via streaming on Peacock.

While Sally works as an entertainer on a high-end cruise, her stunning beauty causes jealousy among the people present. However, after a fun night, Sally does not turn up for rehearsal. Is it only a normal-life incident, or is it something more deadly than that? 

The series features John Bernard as the narrator, Damian Turner, and J.H. Moncrieff, among others.

Watch Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 streaming via Peacock

Cruise Ship Killers Season 2 is available to watch on Peacock.

Peacock’s vast range of top-notch flicks and shows provide non-stop entertainment to avid OTT enthusiasts in any corner of the world.

You can watch via Peacock by following these steps:

• Go to PeacockTV.com
• Click ‘Get Started’
• $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year (premium)
• $11.99 per month or $119.99 per year (premium plus
• Create your account
• Enter your payment details

Peacock’s Premium account provides access to over 80,000+ hours of TV, movies, and sports, including current NBC and Bravo Shows, along with 50 always-on channels. Premium Plus is the same plan but with no ads (save for limited exclusions), along with allowing users to download select titles and watch them offline and providing access to your local NBC channel live 24/7.

The official synopsis of the show is as follows:

“Cruise Ship Killers is a true crime series that tells the stories of people who never returned home after taking a holiday on a cruise ship, featuring interviews with family, friends, investigators, and experts.”

NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.

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A Hollywood movie and series buff who loves binging all things right from Marvel to Netflix followed by Kardashians ! A writer at heart always !

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