>>817774I think there's a fundamental problem in that all of the ship fuel came from Clovis liking Berry but Berry just never liked him in turn through the whole tournament in any reciprocal fashion. Once Clovis realized not only she didn't like him but also was actively trying to stop him from winning the tournament it was beyond over.
Not to say the dynamic wasn't compelling though, Clovis very obviously liked her through 90% of the tournament itself between showing concern for her welfare and going out of his way to help her like with the poison plot. Narratively speaking, if Clovis hadn't warned her she would have walked into Round 2 with even less context and awareness of the trickery Atta was up to.
Berry meanwhile not liking him because of how casually and callously he could kill people like his own teammate and his justifications for it and his cruelty being that he 'has to' be like that was never going to endear her and it's honestly understandable to want nothing to do with him over it. Going a step further, assuming the worst of him and what his wish could be is a natural response especially when he was crashing out.
Now that everything's cleared up, it doesn't really take away that Clovis did still activate the nuke to eke out his win over Berry and he likely won't apologize for going to the lengths he did to get the gold necessary to reach the tie win-state, because if he didn't his team would have lost and with that lost the opportunity for the wish. The nature of the wish he wanted doesn't excuse the lengths by which he went to achieve it, and it can be argued that it all wasn't even necessary. All he had to do, at ANY point, was talk about what his wish was and why it was so important to him to win. But he didn't, not to anybody except maybe Smoke but even there he wasn't very clear about it.