I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting from the new Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as big of a nightmare as it is. For a few weeks, since I first heard about the documentary, which came out this week as part of the 2025 television schedule, I’ve been joking with co-workers about it.
There’s simply no way around it, “poop” is a funny word and combining it with cruise makes it even funnier. Bodily functions, in a lot of contexts, are also simply funny. Hearing about someone pooping in a bag? Yeah, hilarious (unless it’s me, I guess). It just sounded like this documentary would be funny. It’s not. It’s horrible. Not the doc, that is very well done, just as all of Netflix’s Trainwreck documentaries have been so far. The situation on the boat was horrible. Or worse.
I Didn’t Know The Whole Story
late-night television jokes and memes about it. Like I said, it sounds like a funny topic. At that point in my life, I’d never actually been on a cruise, and I was kind of snobby about them. I’ve since been on a cruise (a Disney cruise a few years ago), and while I’m not snobby about them anymore, it wasn’t my favorite trip ever, either. I do have a much better understanding what living on one of these “cities at sea” is really like.
the fantastic Trainwreck series from the streamer, really gets into the details of why this cruise was so much worse than I understood it to be at time. For starters, I had no memory of the reason it all happened, which was because the ship lost all power after a fire destroyed the electrical system. A fire on a ship is scary enough, but losing all power, including the ship’s ability to, you know, move, is something that only the worst nightmares are made of.
Pooping In A Bag Might Seem Just Like A Camping Trip, But No, It’s Not
The idea of pooping in a bag or a bucket could be compared to camping. Which is fair enough, but when you’re camping, you’re not doing it with 4200 other people trapped on a boat miles from shore. Think about just how much human waste that is. And they were trapped there for days!
You also don’t rely on electricity to take the waste away when you are camping. Try as the staff did to convince everyone to go to the bathroom in the showers or in the little red biohazard bags, people still found their way into whatever bathrooms they could find. Public bathrooms were described as having layers of human waste, like “lasagna.” I’ve been to a lot of music festivals in my life, and pooped in a lot sketchy porta potties, but this sounded orders of magnitude worse. There was literally no way to clean anything.
Life On A Powerless Cruise Ship Is Chaotic
The graphic descriptions of the bathroom situation are enough to make anyone squirm and feel sick to their stomach. What was even worse for me as I watched was seeing the absolute chaos the situation caused. Almost immediately, it was like Lord of the Flies. People with inside cabins not only had no lights, but they also had no air conditioning. The stifling air of the southern Gulf of Mexico must have felt like literally Hell on a boat.
People were forced to move mattresses to the decks and into larger public spaces alongside hundreds of other passengers. One person interviewed talked about a newlywed couple having sex next to her, in full view of anyone and everyone. When another Carnival cruise ship passed nearby, hundreds of passengers desperate to get phone calls and texts to loved ones at home swarmed around the deck, waving their phones in an attempt to find a Wi-Fi signal. It was pandemonium.
Then they decided opening the bar was a good idea. It wasn’t. Predictably, serving a bunch of hot, scared, angry people free booze ended in even more chaos, with fights breaking out. What seemed like it could have been a little reprieve for some made the whole thing worse for many others. It wasn’t the best decision by the officers and staff of the ship, but I understand they were just as desperate as the passengers.
What Do You Do When There Is No Solution To A Problem Like This?
Living on a cruise for a few days is fun, but there is no question that being in such close quarters with so many people can definitely cause some problems. For me, on my cruise, it meant everyone in my family returned home with Covid. We were all okay, but I would’ve rather just come home with a sunburn and some sand in my clothes. For the people on the Carnival Triumph, it was much worse, and I can only imagine they come home with some kind of cruise PTSD.
The staff did all they could to help, but there was only so much that they could do. There wasn’t a good solution. It would’ve been almost impossible to evacuate the ship without causing more chaos, and the company had trouble getting tugboats out to the ship to drag it back to port, due to the weather conditions. The Triumph was dead in the water miles from land, and with no way to fix anything. I can’t imagine how wonderful it must have been for those passengers to finally reach dry land after five days of hell.
Before watching Poop Cruise with my Netflix Subscription, my biggest fear of a cruise was being stuck on a boat with a bunch of drunk, sunburned vacationers screaming the words to a Jason Aldean song. Now I know things could be so, so much worse.