The Second Overboard Climax (Overboard) Overboard (1987)

Protagonist	Joanna Stayton
Mission	Be the practiced self — the woman who does the things, regardless of station.
Runtime	112m
Climax	beat 43 · 107m · 96% into film
Wind-down	beats 44–45 · 108m–109m · 5m long
Resolution type	validation

The climax

Grant has retaken the wheel of the Immaculata after Joanna turned the yacht back toward Oregon at b39.^b39 He calls her a "hillbilly harlot," tells her no one leaves a Stayton, and reveals — in the same breath — that he left her in the psychiatric hospital.^b41 The Coast Guard cutter pulls alongside with Dean and the four boys aboard.^b40 Joanna runs to the rail; Andrew tries to stop her with a lifejacket; she takes it and dives off the Immaculata in her evening dress.^{b42 b43} Dean dives off the cutter to meet her.^b43 The mission is tested at maximum stakes — her actual yacht, her actual marriage, her actual mother, her actual money — and resolves in a single bounded gesture.

The title image is inverted: the woman who fell off the yacht against her will at the inciting incident now jumps off the same kind of yacht on purpose. The two falls bracket the post-midpoint approach as a single test instrument. The first fall was the disruption that broke the inherited self; the second fall is the practiced self choosing the water.

The wind-down differs because

Beat 44 (Dean's confession that the boat, the money, and everything else are now his)^b44 and beat 45 ("a little girl")^b45 are the new equilibrium incorporating the verdict. Diagnostic: the dive tested whether Joanna would choose the practiced self at maximum cost; the Christmas-list reveal enacts the screwball reattachment of the inherited self's resources on the new self's terms. The wind-down's comedy is that the material base of the old life returns through Dean rather than through Stayton — the practiced self gets the boys, Dean, and (laughably) the Porsches. None of this tests the mission; it furnishes the room the test cleared.

Why this is a validation climax

Joanna's post-midpoint approach (practice over inheritance) builds visibly across the falling action: refusing the cigarette her mother insists she has always smoked,^b36 getting her own beer instead of accepting champagne,^b37 Andrew naming the choice for her,^b38 taking the wheel and turning the yacht.^b39 Each of these is the practiced self exercising itself inside the inherited frame. By the time the climax arrives the approach is fully formed and articulate; the dive is the test of an already-built understanding under maximum pressure (Grant in physical control of the boat, the restoration apparatus on board, the practiced family approaching across the water). The climax holds. Validation: realization at the midpoint, build across falling action and Escalation 2, confirming test at b43.