Not sure that this is where I thought this would go, but episode 6 of Crew Girl grabbed me by the throat and said, buckle in, we’re gonna show you the worst of people. The episode opens with somebody slipping into the boathouse, doing something to one of the oars, and covering it back up. And I want it on the record that I spent this entire hour convinced it was Ryder, and I have never been so wrong about a show in my life.
Two teenagers in heat
Teagan and Josh show up early to the regatta specifically to make out, and they are absolutely two teenagers in heat about it. Both of them are rebounding. For a man with a heart condition he sure throws her around. Talk about cardio.
They don’t want anybody to know, so they break it up the second the team is due.
And I want to note how much this contradicts everything Josh said last week. He told her he didn’t want to just be friends, then he kissed her at his lowest possible moment, and now the arrangement is a secret one — which is exactly the thing Teagan said she wouldn’t accept. She’s in it anyway, because she likes him and because she has never in her life been given the option of an easy want.
God bless a rebound.
Cam won’t say it to her
Hayden arrives with his daughter and puts her to work, and Cam shows up. She asks how things went with him and Teagan and he’s basically like, it’s not happening for him, and she just looks at him. She knows that he’s sabotaging himself, but I think she’s okay with that because she likes him.
He doesn’t want to say anything. And we all know something’s going on.
Then he tells her what is happening — sort of. The shop is in trouble. His dad had to lay off all the mechanics. He’s got to help, he just has to get through this.
Except he doesn’t say it to Teagan first, and that’s the part I cannot get past. If he had just told Teagan, she would have been there for him, completely. How do you tell one person and not the girl you like? It doesn’t make sense to me that he made it seem like it was her fault and it wasn’t.
CAM IS A GOOD PERSON
Cam is a good person. He needs to stop treating himself like a charity case, because that is not what he is. He is a person and a genuinely important part of this team.
And these kids are all a mess and they talk about everything — the money, the baggage, who’s worried about what things cost, all of them convinced they’re going to be kings and queens of the world someday — and they still care about each other. It’s a brotherhood.
But look at the structure of Cam’s disclosure, because it’s the same pattern as Josh’s. He tells the person it costs him the least to tell. Josh can survive a teammate knowing his dad laid off the mechanics. He cannot survive Teagan knowing, because Teagan is the person whose opinion could actually change his estimate of himself. So the closer someone gets, the less he’ll say — which means intimacy actively reduces his ability to be honest. That’s a horrible way to be built and he doesn’t know he’s built that way.
The pressure lands on Josh
Everybody’s arriving, drinking their nasty green smoothies, and Josh walks into the kitchen and finds his dad.
Richard of course has a problem, and expects his son to get him out of this. He needs a win to impress his father. That pressure transfers over to Josh.
And the pressure that hits Josh instantly is more than anyone should have to carry at any age. You can see the pain in his eyes.
Which is Richard doing the single most Richard thing available: converting his own professional failure into his sixteen-year-old’s assignment. Grandpa promoted somebody else, so now the fix is a boat race. There’s no version of this where Josh can actually deliver what his father is asking for, because what his father wants is to be respected by his own father, and no rowing result on earth produces that.
Note also that Richard bought this seat. He purchased it with a favor for the principal’s niece, and now he’s showing up to collect a return on the investment. It was never a gift for his son. It was a loan.
Cam won’t communicate
Cam goes to talk to Teagan and it’s all one-word answers, which is frustrating to watch. She asks if there’s anything else he wants to talk about and he says nope.
A girl that is willing to fight for you and see the best in you, well – that’s a fumble on your part Cam.
He will not communicate with her. And fine, if he wants to keep things to himself, that’s his to keep — but all she’s trying to do is like him. She’s trying to be there. She’s trying to care.
I get the impulse to push people away. But when you need somebody, that is the exact moment you shouldn’t be doing it. He can’t fight the impulse. Teagan is the first distraction that Cam has had and he isn’t sure how to balance with that.
The rest of the guys want to know what’s going on so they send Perry over to ask, and Teagan gives him nothing. No comment is the most she will say. She has nothing to give him.
Of course she wouldn’t. Girls don’t.
The Hanford Cup
Coach Hayden huddles them up before the race for the pep talk, and tells them that if they place, they’ve got a shot at the Hanford Cup — first time in ten years they’d even have the chance.
That gets them all going. He tells Josh to take it out easy, and Josh just smiles.
That smile is the whole episode in one beat and I did not catch it the first time. Hayden tells him to go easy and Josh smiles, because Josh already knows this boat isn’t going to finish. He’s not agreeing. He’s the only person in that huddle who knows how the story ends.
Ryder isn’t pleased that he’s out of the stroke seat, but at this point, does anyone really care. I don’t.
Noah wants to remind everyone about the after party. He says it’s going to be the bee’s knees and the cat’s meow, which is genuinely funny. He’s an old soul, I guess. We have to survive the regatta first.
The sunglasses
Josh is in the locker room getting focused, which he should be, especially after Ryder told him he ought to be worried because when Ryder was in stroke, they won. Stop putting pressure on the boy. These two have issues.
Cam comes in and grabs his glasses and Josh tells him he can’t wear those, everyone has to wear the same thing, it’s regulation. And Cam basically says he doesn’t have any others, and Josh goes — you don’t have a backup?
The audacity. Josh, not everybody has your money. It actually makes me feel for Cam, because he’s trying and everything keeps getting worse.
The two of them bicker, and I suspect it’s partly about both of them and mostly about Teagan. Cam did put himself in that situation, so I don’t feel as sorry for him as I probably should.
Then Josh says it’s fine, he’ll tell everybody they’re not wearing sunglasses.
And that’s the thing about Josh — the fix always arrives after the humiliation, never instead of it. He solves the problem in about four seconds. He just has to make Cam say the words out loud first.
Which honestly makes me feel worse about the stroke seat fight, because I get that stroke matters and everybody wants it. The way these boys claw at each other over it is exhausting. They should be working together instead of against each other.
Cam gets his shot in on the way out — you’ve got a lot of things you probably shouldn’t have. Okay. Don’t hold back, sir. Tell us all how you feel.
And he can feel however he wants. At some point he has to let people in. Teagan wasn’t wrong about that. It’s just not going to be easy.
The oar snaps
They get the boat out, they’re motivated, they’re rowing well — and Josh’s oar just snaps.
Disqualified. Nobody understands why. It literally came off.
They’re devastated. Coach Hayden tells them not to give up, that they just have to wait for other scores to come in and it could still be fine.
And note what that does to eight kids who just found out they had a shot at the Hanford Cup: it converts them from competitors into spectators. They can’t row for it anymore. They can only sit there and hope other people are slow.
The murder mystery
Noah is thrilled. He planned the after party — and the party he planned is a murder mystery in the boathouse, which not one of these people wants to do. It’s also a dry party. No alcohol. They’re going to be stone sober solving a fake murder inside a boat shed.
Talk about a rager.
Teagan is the only one trying to convince everybody it’ll be fun. I’m not convinced. I think it will be atrocious.
And structurally, this is a genuinely clever piece of writing, because the episode hands its characters a fake mystery and a real one at the same time, and then makes the fake mystery the mechanism for solving the real one. Noah’s ridiculous alibi charts are what actually crack the case. The show lets the dorkiest kid on the team be the reason.
Josh calls his dad
Josh calls his dad to apologize for letting him down. The boy doesn’t care about a lot, but he does care about letting his father down.
His dad doesn’t answer, because his dad is a douchebag who does not spend one second considering that he is a douchebag. Richard genuinely does not think about how his actions land on his son.
And Josh is apologizing for something he did on purpose, to a man who won’t pick up. That’s the loneliest thing that happens all episode, and I didn’t understand it until the last two minutes.
Comfort and a savior complex
Everyone changes and reconvenes. Noah is so into this. He pairs people up to make it fun, and Quaid is having the time of his life handing out alcohol.
Josh’s dad situation is grinding him down, and Teagan tells him it’ll be okay, they’ll get them next time. And what’s lovely about it is that while they’re talking she’s rubbing his shoulders and his back, making sure he has human contact and feels like he matters. You see his arms move and know he’s holding her, by the hips I think, though I could be wrong. They find comfort in each other, and that’s fine.
I do want to name something I’m noticing, though: Teagan has a savior complex. That’s maybe a whole separate conversation, but it’s there and it’s consistent. She fixed the boat’s seat order. She negotiated Quaid out of an expulsion and stayed at Easton instead of taking Gravenhurst. Now she’s physically soothing a boy who won’t tell her anything.
And it makes sense where it comes from, which is the part that gets me. Her father vanished mid-race and she could not fix that. So she has become someone who fixes. Every act of rescue she performs is an argument with a man who isn’t there.
Josh and Teagan find it
Josh and Teagan get paired up and go hunting for their clue in the boathouse, messing around and having a good time. He thinks he’s solved it.
And then Teagan sees the oar that broke.
She looks at it. She notices. It was sawed through. Somebody did this on purpose.
Before that she asks him if his dad has called and he says no, and I don’t think he will anytime soon. We all know Richard is an idiot who takes his son entirely for granted.
She tells him they’ll get it next time and he believes her. You can see it in his eyes — he actually believes her.
Which, knowing what we know now, means she comforted him about a loss he engineered, and he let her, and the belief on his face was real. He wasn’t being manipulative in that moment. He needed to be told it would be okay by the one person at Easton who wasn’t asking him for a result.
The team investigates itself
She gets the whole team and Noah goes feral, because now it’s a real mystery.
I was certain it was Ryder. It felt like the perfect opportunity — get the stroke seat back and pin it on Westvale, whether or not Westvale had anything to do with it.
They gather in the meeting room and start checking alibis. Everybody has somewhere they were supposed to be, and Noah points out that the motive might not be what everyone assumes. They go through the pre-race rituals — karaoke, Crab Catcher eating pasta, Josh always doing his thing — and since the oar was cut through the pink tape, the question becomes who had a problem specifically with Josh.
Everybody assumes Ryder.
REASONING
Ryder says it could have been Baloo, because Baloo was angry that Josh dumped Britney. And he broke up with her on her big night — who are you, dude, what the actual hell. But I don’t think it was Baloo. He has to defend himself now, and it wasn’t him.
And that scene is doing something the show has been building toward for six episodes: a team with no functioning trust attempting a group investigation. They can’t rule anybody out because nobody actually knows what anyone else is dealing with. Cam’s family shop, Josh’s diagnosis, Baloo’s boyfriend, Ryder’s Dartmouth thing — every single alibi in that room has a secret sitting behind it. The mystery is unsolvable precisely because the boat is full of people who won’t say where they were.
That’s a beautiful piece of construction, honestly. The murder mystery is a stress test of exactly the thing this season has been diagnosing.
Perry’s hair, and Cam’s grievance
My favorite might genuinely be Perry’s motive. Perry is furious with Josh because Josh stole his hair color. A 10A ash blonde base, and apparently Josh has the same one, and Josh is like, what, my mom picked this out for me.
Too funny.
Then they get to Cam, and Cam has an issue with Josh being in stroke. So does everybody, sir. Get in line.
Stroke seat and the wrong sentence
Teagan sends the boys off to look for the saw and finds Josh on the floor of the kitchen with an oyster shucker. She asks who he thinks they’ll find on the security camera, and he says he doesn’t know, so they run the list — could be Baloo, could be Cam.
And she admits she thinks Cam should be stroke.
Which is hard for Josh to hear, and he tries to tell her she can be honest with him. She explains it: Cam should be stroke because he puts the team first, he goes for the boat.
He takes it very personally, understandably, and says — okay, so I’m good enough to make out with but not good enough for stroke.
She didn’t mean it that way. But she said it. And even if she doesn’t realize she said it, she did. She puts her hand on his chest and he backs away.
CRUELEST MOMENT
I have to believe he’s upset, and he should be, because in one night he is learning everybody’s worst opinion of him at once, and that’s hard for anybody to handle.
But sit with the timing, because this is the cruelest coincidence the show has arranged. Josh has just been told by a doctor that he cannot do physical activity. He needs open-heart surgery. He is, medically, no longer capable of being a stroke seat. And the girl he’s been secretly seeing tells him, kindly, that somebody else deserves the seat — the seat he has already lost and cannot admit he’s lost.
She was right. That’s what makes it unbearable. She was right, and she had no way of knowing how right, and he can’t tell her.
Cam, accused
Noah and Teagan work the clues and find the hole: Cam said he was stretching, but he isn’t in any of the photos Perry took in that room during the window he claims to have been in it.
Teagan goes to Cam and he’s offended — she thinks he’d do this? That’s not him. He wouldn’t. I can understand his pain with her not believing him.
She says, well, what am I supposed to think, you’re acting different and you weren’t where you said you were. Turns out he was selling his dad’s truck. She asks why he didn’t tell her. He says it’s nobody’s business, which is fair and honest. And then: if you think I did this, you don’t know me.
Which is also fair. He thought she knew him.
And I think it’s fair for her to wonder, because he isn’t telling her what he’s feeling or what’s happening, and when he won’t do that, she has nothing to work with. I think we give her grace and we give Cam grace, and Cam is also getting in his own way, so I’m genuinely not sure who to believe in here.
But that fight is the exact price of his privacy, and I wish somebody would say it to him. He withheld information to protect his dignity, and the withheld information became the evidence against him. Secrecy didn’t shield him. It made him a suspect. He got accused of sabotage because he sold a truck and thought it was nobody’s business that his family is broke.
He was selling his father’s truck while eight rich kids raced. That’s the whole show in one sentence.
I do hope Cam and Teagan find their way, because I really do see them together. They’re my ship. I adore them.
The security footage, and Baloo’s heart
Perry finally gets the footage, and in it they see two things. They see that Baloo is dating a guy from Westvale — and they see Baloo leave him alone in the boat storage.
Which makes it look like Logan did it. And it breaks Baloo’s heart. Hell, out hearts are breaking for him – Baloo opened up and this is what he gets back? Not okay.
Baloo wanted nothing more than to be in love. He opened up to this guy and it got broken. He messages him — I can’t believe you did this to me, lose my number — and Logan writes back asking what he did.
Did you do something? Yes, you did something, you dumbass. You broke this man’s heart. What do you think.
TEAM
And then the thing that got me: the team hugs him. They’re not angry. They’re worried about him and how he’s feeling. They grab him and hold him and he says he needs a minute, which is completely understandable, because he just had his heart broken in front of everyone.
That’s the payoff I asked for last week and the show gave it in the worst possible circumstances, which is somehow better. Baloo didn’t get to tell them about his man on his own terms. He got outed dating the enem by security footage in the middle of an accusation, in front of the entire boat, with his relationship collapsing simultaneously. Every fear he had came true at once.
And it turned out not to matter to a single one of them that he was a rower for the enemy. They skipped straight past the boy being from Westvale and went directly to are you okay. This team, which cannot manage a single honest conversation about a rowing seat, got that completely right on instinct.
It also means the thing Britney was holding over him is now worthless. The photograph has no power because the secret is out and the room didn’t care. She spent an episode building leverage and it evaporated without her in the room.
WHAT A SNAKE
Josh goes to comfort him and says he wishes he could make it better but he can’t. Which is true. He can’t. And Baloo says, you dumped my sister, I still think you’re a piece of shit. And Josh says, at least we agree on something.
That’s the only genuinely warm exchange Josh has all episode, and it’s with the one person willing to insult him to his face.
The boat storage
The guys are thrilled they solved a murder mystery, and now they just want to help Noah, so they ask what could possibly be better than solving a mystery, and he pulls out the next clue.
Then Teagan gets a text — meet me in boat storage — and goes in, and says something like, guess we’re not picking up where we left off this morning.
Nope.
Josh tells her she’s not supposed to be with him, they’re not good for each other, she doesn’t even like him. She says she doesn’t think that anymore, she doesn’t think he’s an asshole, and asks him to just be real with her.
And he says: you want honesty? We’re both on the rebound. Let’s cut our losses.
Whoa.
She says, good to know how you really feel, and walks off.
Whatever Josh is going through, he is alienating himself from every single person available. He broke it off in the language most likely to make her leave and least likely to make her ask a follow-up question, which is either the cruelest or the most protective thing he could have done, and right now I can’t tell which and I don’t think he can either.
And then
He’s alone. He pulls down the ladder.
And we see it.
He climbed through the window. He sawed through his own oar. He’s the one who did it. We see him grabs the bag and goes out to the water to sink the saw.
He let Baloo get destroyed and he wrecked his thing with Teagan. He let the whole team turn on each other and accuse Ryder and accuse Cam and drag a boy’s private relationship into the open, and he did all of it, and he stood in the room while it happened.
And he did it for a very specific reason. After the fight with his father, he got the call from the doctor. No physical activity. Because he needs surgery.
Open-heart surgery. He’s at risk of a heart attack.
So let me lay out what this reframes, because it’s every single thing.
THE WHY
He couldn’t row. He physically could not get in that boat, and he could not say so, because his father had just told him the family’s standing depends on him winning in that seat. So he manufactured an equipment failure, which is the only outcome that removes him from the race without touching his eligibility, his reputation, or his grandfather’s opinion of him. Nobody can be blamed for an oar. He didn’t sabotage the team to win anything. He sabotaged them because it was the only exit that let him stay a Regis.
That smile when Hayden told him to take it out easy. He knew.
The apology voicemail to his father was real. He was apologizing for something he chose, to a man who wouldn’t answer, because the guilt was real even though the act was deliberate.
THE TEAM IMPLICATIONS
Telling Teagan they were both on the rebound and should cut their losses — that’s a boy scheduled for open-heart surgery removing the one person who might have shown up for it. Because she’s the only one who’d notice, and being noticed is the thing he cannot survive.
And Cam, who got accused of sabotage for the crime of quietly selling his father’s truck. Josh let that happen. Josh watched the team suspect the poorest kid in the boat.
This is the same show that spent two episodes making me believe Josh’s panic attacks were arrogance. Now it’s shown me that a kid facing heart surgery destroyed his own team’s shot at the Hanford Cup rather than admit his body is failing, and I understand exactly why he did it, and I am furious about it, and both of those are correct.
He is going to have to tell them. That’s the season now. Not the cup, not the race, not the triangle. Eight boys who just spent a night interrogating each other over a sawed oar, and the answer is sitting in the stroke seat in need of a surgery date and no idea how to say the sentence.
Crew Girl is streaming now on Netflix.
