When they say poop deck they mean it!
Netflix’s Trainwreck documentary project, which began in 2022 as a three-parter about Woodstock ’99, has returned. This second run for the series is not a single movement, but a series of nugget releases. The topics are all “hey, I remember that” stories from our recent, dumb culture, including Balloon Boy, the plan to storm Area 51, and the former mayor of Toronto, Chris Farley Rob Ford.
But at first flush, the episode that initially hits your senses is Poop Cruise, a 55-minute (including credits) investigation, premiering June 24, into that time when 4,500 people paid to bob up and down in an enormous toilet bowl under the blazing Gulf of Mexico sun.
To be sure, the people didn’t know this was going to happen. Initially they just booked passage on a Carnival Cruise. (This should have been their first clue they were doomed, but let’s not get into that.)
Poop Cruise, which is hardly anything resembling intellectual programming but it is certainly absorbing, does a good job of not just summarizing the revolting events that befell the Carnival Triumph in 2013, but giving us a little “you are there” magic with talking head interviews and some recreations. It’s perfect for putting on and also answering texts on your phone without hitting pause.
Poop Cruise’s producers hunted down some of the survivors of the event, a nice array of characters to walk us through the nauseating tale.
There’s a fresh-faced fella who booked the four-day trip from Galveston to Cozumel and back with his fiancée and her father, hoping to make a good impression. There’s a kind daddy-daughter combo (she was just 12 at the time) looking for some bonding. And then there’s the three tequila-sucking party girls on a bachelorette bender. “We left our dignity in Cozumel,” one says about the partying they did on their last night before the excrement hit the fan… and everything else.
In short, there was an engine fire, and the boat got stranded. No electricity, no air conditioning, no refrigeration. Say what you will about cruise food (it’s horrible) but it is at least abundant, yet soon everyone is rationing onion and tomato sandwiches.
Perhaps this is for the best because, importantly, the toilets no longer worked. One can “do a wee” (as the sunny British cruise director says) in the shower, but for defecation, everyone was handed red plastic biohazard bags. (Why they had thousands of these on board was never explained.)
Naturally, many people chose not to use these bags, and instead dumped in non-functional toilets with layers of tissue over each deposit. “Poop lasagnas” one person (actually, one of the Carnival Cruise cooks!) called them. For some dumb reason the ship decided to allow for open bars, because drunkenness and ill-fortune are always a good mix. This led to hoarding of deck chairs, fights, some public displays of intimacy, and no doubt added gastric distress.
For days and days everyone sat doing nothing while the ship grew hotter and smellier. In time they were towed (good!) but when this happened the ship listed (bad!), thus spilling out a tidal wave of urine and feces all over everything. There are pictures, there are videos. You will shout “ewwwwww!” on the couch, which is what this entire project has been building toward.
Poop Cruise never answers if there was running water and if people washed their hands. It also never shares if anyone got sick. There’s a few minutes with a cigar-chomping maritime lawyer with the incredible name of Frank Spagnoletti, but not many details about the actual litigation.
This is not a particularly trenchant documentary. But it is gross and funny and less than an hour. And when I told friends I saw it early every single one of them said “I can’t wait.” What that says about us all I couldn’t say.
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