Forget the fictional miseries of prestige TV’s one percent; in the documentary, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, Netflix delivers a stomach-churning tale of a luxury escape gone wrong that’s all the more hellish because it’s actually true. The latest installment in the streaming platform’s real-life disaster reenactment series takes us back to 2013, when an engine room fire aboard a Carnival cruise ship turned a floating paradise into a poop-soaked prison. As the ship’s four thousand passengers and crew members fought to survive the filthy conditions while adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, the world watched on in awe-struck horror. Hashtags trended, Saturday Night Live sketches immortalized the tragedy in satirical form, but it took over a decade for the debacle to get the “true crime” binge treatment it deserved.
The result? An hour-long docu-style episode filled with firsthand accounts, bizarre re-enactments, raw footage, and enough scatological humor to put you off your popcorn. But while there are plenty of tongue-in-cheek references to some of the more surreal sanitation issues onboard, BAFTA-nominated director James Ross is constantly reminding audiences of the horror these poor people went through. “When you hear ‘Poop Cruise’, you think ‘… OK’”, he told The Guardian ahead of the show’s premiere. “But actually there’s a lot more layers and twists and turns to the story.”
Everything You Need to Know About the Real ‘Poop Cruise’
In February 2013, over three thousand passengers boarded the Carnival Triumph in Galveston, Texas. Their destination: Cozumel, Mexico, a round trip by sea that was intended to last just four days. But, as Netflix’s Trainwreck: Poop Cruise recounts, that quick jaunt to the tropics turned into a week-long nightmare, a urine-drenched odyssey that exposed some pretty nasty truths about a multi-billion-dollar company – and human nature in general. What the documentary only skims the surface of is Carnival’s complicity in the catastrophe. The fuel fire that struck the ship’s engine room wasn’t the first to render one of their ships dead in the water, and the Triumph’s decision to initially operate with only four of six generators working meant the damage was basically irreparable. According to CNN, the Carnival Triumph disaster was over a year in the making, an uncomfortable truth for the thousands of passengers who spent days adrift with sloshing sewage and soggy sandwiches for company.
What Trainwreck does spend a majority of its runtime investigating are the unimaginable conditions vacationers faced once the ship left port in Mexico to make the return journey home. Awakened in the middle of the night by blaring sirens and flashing lights, guests were initially shuttled to “muster stations” where they were told the problem was under control. Despite flames leaping from the ship’s iconic red fin, the crew advised them to wait in their rooms while the vessel’s auxiliary power still worked. But once the lights permanently went out – the engine room fire completely destroyed the power lines that provided electricity throughout the ship – things became dire. The air conditioning cut out, forcing passengers to remain topside, some even hauling their mattresses on deck to escape the stifling heat indoors. The refrigerators stopped working, causing hundreds of pounds of food to spoil, and the crew began rationing meals for guests. And, of course, the toilets wouldn’t flush, a particularly disgusting dilemma that left passengers to pee in showers and defecate in biohazard bags for the remainder of their stay.
All this before the ship’s only hope of rescue – Mexican tugboats that had to travel too far from home after the cruise liner drifted hundreds of miles off course overnight – arrived to turn everything sideways, literally. With rough seas and unexpected weather making their efforts even more difficult, the tugboats’ positioning meant the ship was dragged all the way to Alabama (the closest port), almost on its side, causing watery human waste to overflow: seeping down the walls, cascading into elevators, and covering hallway carpets indiscriminately.
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Netflix brings these real stories to the small screen.
‘Poop Cruise’: Key Moments and Revelations From the Documentary
Aptly named for the very disasters our shared morbid curiosity finds oddly entertaining, Netflix’s Trainwreck series understands a simple truth: gawking at others’ misfortune is a streaming sure bet. It’s why Poop Cruise is just one of a handful of man-made disasters to earn the docu treatment – Travis Scott’s Astroworld tragedy and a coked-up former Canadian mayor have also recently been featured in series “episodes.” The team in charge of re-telling Carnival’s cruise line disaster strikes a fairly deft balance between the absurd and appalling, enlisting a cross-section of survivors from the Triumph to relive their misery via straight-to-camera confessionals. There’s the trio of bachelorette partiers, the man anxiously traveling with his fiancée’s father for the first time, and a divorced dad with his young daughter. The doc also spends time with the below-deck crew, the cooks, cleaners, and Scottish-lilted emcees in charge of guiding these boozed-up animals through their overpriced bacchanal.
Each subject offers a glimpse of their own revolting trauma. The bridal party recalls pilfering life vest beacons to use as makeshift flashlights while squatting in showers, a story that rightfully earns an on-screen recreation so that fans can truly experience what it’s like to urinate in a discothèque. As they wander above deck, popping Imodium like Tic-Tacs, the nervous fiancé desperately clenches his cheeks to avoid dumping in the staff-provided hazmat bags, worried the visual might cause his future father-in-law to object to the wedding. Both the paying passengers and put-upon crew recount how quickly the situation took on a Lord of the Flies-feel, especially once the decision was made to open the bar and offer disgruntled guests free liquor.
Shanty-towns were erected using ripped sheets and deck chairs, as the stench of back-up commodes meant no one could safely sleep in their rooms. People began fighting over open-air real estate, violence erupting as chaises went flying. Spoiled food reserves meant guests quickly resorted to hoarding resources like “lettuce sandwiches” and water, and eventually, drunken passengers grew tired of disposing of their own waste, tossing poop bags over railings only for them to land on bystanders a level or two down. But, as ridiculous and hilarious as the ticketed travelers experiences were, it’s the “downstairs” survival story that earns the most sympathy as workers like Abhi, a chef, gives us a chilling description of a passenger-produced creation, “poop lasagna,” while Russian worker Hannah likens the onboard societal collapse to her living conditions in the Soviet Union.
How ‘Poop Cruise’ Flips the Vacation-Gone-Wrong Genre on Its Head
That stripped-back veneer is what sets the documentary’s take on luxury-escapism-gone-wrong apart from the vacation trend dominating so many prestige TV offerings these days. Shows like HBO’s The White Lotus and Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers contain their chaos to the metaphorical. Their disasters are born from the psychological – a man seeking revenge for his childhood trauma, a woman grieving her daughter, a dysfunctional family escaping their comfortable routine. Everyone is beautiful and no one is suffering, not really. They’re wrestling with their morality, they’re chasing enlightenment, they’re trying to break free of the monotony afforded by their bank accounts, but their struggle is immaterial and symbolic. By contrast, the poor people on Carnival’s Poop Cruise are wading through rising sewage, fending off heatstroke, rationing cold cuts, and living in tent cities, untethered from any semblance of governance.
These two things are not the same, and that’s what makes this latest Trainwreck so compelling. The gloss has been wiped off, the sheen of an unlimited production budget dulled. Grainy first-hand footage, shaky-cam POVs, poor-quality iPhone photos set the mood here. The characters aren’t wealthy hedge fund bros or West Coast actresses, they’re everyday people splurging on a getaway for reasons relatable and mundane. And the trauma doesn’t come from reckoning with their materialist nature but from witnessing a mock societal collapse and realizing just how close we are to a more savage existence. Ultimately, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise isn’t just a story about a ship adrift — it’s a warning about how quickly paradise can turn to panic when the illusion of control goes out with the power.