Trainwreck: Poop Cruise on Netflix Is A Hilarious And Filthy Truth About A Disaster At The Sea

You ever think you’ve had a bad vacation? Like, maybe your flight was delayed, or the hotel room wasn’t quite what you expected? How about you’ve signed up for a Carnival Cruise, thinking you’re in for sun, sea, and all-you-can-eat shrimp cocktails.

It’s supposed to be four days of indulgence, relaxation, and forgetting about your life for a bit. That’s what you paid for. You expect to enjoy a week of stress free time.

What you didn’t pay for—could never have paid for—was a floating, festering disaster. You didn’t pay for the fire, the blackout, or the poop. Oh, and there’s a lot of poop.

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise—Netflix’s 55-minute deep dive documentary into the 2013 Carnival Triumph debacle—it’s a sensory overload. A grotesque, mind-boggling reminder that sometimes things can epically go wrong.

On February 10, 2013, a fire damaged the cables powering the cruise ship Carnival Triumph, leaving 4,000 passengers aboard stranded in the Gulf of Mexico who were on a roundtrip from Galveston, Texas to Cozumel, Mexico, for almost a week with overflowing toilets and sewage dripping down the walls after partying it up on the deck and pigging out at the all-you-can-eat buffets.

Released on June 24, Netflix's latest documentary is for those who're into the kind of watching that feels like a slow-motion trainwreck you can’t look away from. But the retelling doesn't circle around the disaster alone.. It’s about the weird, grim comedy that comes when human beings are pushed to their absolute limits and still manage to find ways to survive—or at least keep posting.

The toilets stop working. No power. No AC. So you’re walking around, looking for a place to piss. The crew starts handing out red biohazard bags for your, well, business. Yeah, you read that right. Poop bags. People are taking their turns in the showers, urinating as if it’s some twisted survival ritual. The air smells like a public restroom at a festival, but without the charm.

The worst part? No one’s in control. The crew’s trying to keep it together, but the passengers are losing it. Chaos is everywhere. There’s footage from passengers like Devin—who, of course, took everything on video—showing the hallways sloshing with excrement. "Squish, squish, squish," he says. God. You’ll never think about walking in a hallway the same way again.

What’s even crazier is that the whole thing could have been avoided. The Carnival Triumph had a history of fire hazards, according to maritime lawyers featured in the doc. A simple safety check and some decent maintenance could have spared everyone the disaster that they did sign up for. But no. Instead, you get a full-on, first-class pass to the most uncomfortable, unsanitary vacation imaginable.

And yet, despite everything, you get a sense that people walk off that ship not just surviving, but with a weird, almost cherished memory. It’s like this sick, twisted rite of passage. Rebekah, (then 12-years-old) one of the passengers, says her dad still talks about how they made it through, and they go on cruises together now. Maybe it’s that thing people always say—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But does it? Or is it just the bizarre human need to always look for the silver lining, no matter how smeared with poop it is?

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise is a reminder that, at the end of the day, humans are capable of enduring a lot.

In the end, this isn’t a story of triumph—it’s a story of shit—but it’s a story you’ll laugh at, cringe at, and absolutely never forget.