I don’t think it helped that, at least at that point in his career, Anthony Montgomery was simply a bad-to-meh actor. I think they maybe saw a wide-eyed optimism that they liked in the audition or something, but his line-readings were often school-play amateurish, to say nothing of communicating any lifelike emotion or pulling off the “I’m young but I’ve seen more shit than most of you” vibe a boomer was supposed to have. The episode on his old ship should have been really powerful, but it just sort of fizzled.

Padma Lakshmi was better. There. I said it.