The Challenge 40: Battle of the Eras Recap: A House Divided
Now that the Vacation Alliance has been officially sliced in half, Tori and Josh are both without their No. 1. Sitting on the couch together, they remind me of the slightly awkward, slightly nervous feeling evoked by two mutual friends forced to maintain the conversation when the primary glue friend goes to the bathroom.
The rest of the house has splintered into different alliances. Bananas, who was formally targeted by his friend Tori at the last elimination, has assembled all of the female free agents — Aviv, Jenny, Laurel, and Rachel — into “Johnny’s Angels.” It’s a smart move, considering that the opposite sex has the most power to protect you in this next phase of the game.
Michele, Olivia, and Nia form “The Ladies of Leisure,” which sounds a little too similar to “The Lavender Ladies,” one of the most annoying alliances in Challenge history. We know Michele and Olivia are besties, but where did Nia come from? I feel like the three of them only aligned because they all have/had Challenge situationships this season and they want to pretend like they’re drinking milkshakes at the Riverdale diner instead of passing out from heat exhaustion in the Vietnam sun.
When the challengers file in for the daily challenge, T.J. tells them he’s going to flip a coin to determine whether it will be a guys’ day or a girls’ day. (We already know it will be a guys’ day because of the intro clip they played from Free Agents where Cara tells Jessica, my least favorite player of all time, to never waste an opportunity to make Banana bread.)
Teej then explains that the first male and female competitor to win the challenge will gain power, deciding which of the three targets — Bananas, Derek, or Ryan — will go up against the male challenge loser. If there’s a stalemate, the winner of the opposite sex gets to decide, which in this case means it’s the girl’s decision and the guy is just arm candy. I don’t love this mechanic because it eliminates any conflict or discourse between the winners, but at least it’s not some crazy nomination process where half the episode is spent on a seven-step vote.
To maintain some stakes for the women this week, the female challenge loser receives a penalty during next week’s daily. Those stakes end up being essential because it is so goddamn hot and this challenge involves a lot of running. It looks so harrowing that probably nothing short of a date with Tom Brady could incentivize me to exert myself in any way.
The task at hand is to collect balls two at a time and place them in the cylinder at your designated station, requiring about 15 trips in the unrelenting heat. Once your cylinder is full, you have to complete a puzzle that depicts the number 40. The challengers are clearly a little out of it, and Ryan and Bananas both end up depositing two of their balls in the wrong tubes. (Haha, innuendo, innuendo. I’m not taking the bait!)
With his bonus balls from Bananas (LOL), Jordan is the first to get to his puzzle and takes the win for the guys. Tori wins for the women, meaning the ex-fiancés are back to being a power couple, at least for today.
It’s between besties Ryan and Derek for the last-place guys’ slot since, unfortunately, their hope for a Kinky Boots challenge did not come to pass. Ryan loses because he spent the entire time trying to construct the puzzle with the pieces flipped upside-down, never realizing that there was a picture on the other side.
Michele, who should be able to do this puzzle with no problem after playing Survivor twice, totally chokes, and as soon as the horn blows, she collapses into the fetal position, suffering from heat stroke. Cooling down in the ambulance, she shares her insecurities with Olivia: She feels like she’ll never be as athletic as the other girls so there’s no point in trying. This moment of comparison is relatable, but Michele is selling herself short. First off, she beat Cara Maria in an elimination last season, which few people can say. Plus, politics is half the game, which means physically dominant players like Tori and Laurel might not even make it to the Final.
In the Chamber, Tori and Jordan (but mainly Tori) have to choose to send either Derek or Bananas against Ryan. Tori claims that this is a best-case scenario for her, because it guarantees that one of the three names she said last week will be walking out the door, but she’s lying to herself. She backed herself into a corner by nominating Bananas in the first place, so now she really needs him gone. And she thinks Ryan could be the mighty steed that takes him down?
Bananas tries to give Tori a way out, positing that she only took a shot at him on Devin’s behalf. However, kowtowing to Bananas in this moment would be absolutely humiliating, even though it might be better strategically given his odds of return. Tori stands her ground, making a moral decision based on how he treated Michele and her friendship with Devin. (And as a bonus, choosing Bananas increases her loyalty points from the rest of the guys in the house).
Bananas puffs his chest and delivers this dramatic villain monologue about how he’s such a “dangerous adversary” in the game who shouldn’t be trifled with. Dude’s already been on The Traitors and House of Villains, so I’m not sure what this audition tape is for.
At club night, Bananas harasses the innocent bartender and asks him to give Tori a glass of his bathwater on the rocks. Imagine having to bartend for a Challenge party. Probably the nadir of this poor man’s career. The cast famously has to pay for their own drinks, and you just know they’re bad tippers.
Meanwhile, Tori and Rachel form a tentative alliance, planning to exert their feminine wiles over their respective male allies to keep each other safe. Rachel, one of Johnny’s Angels, shares that she wants to get closer to Jordan, which Tori agrees to broker.
Back at the house, Jordan and Tori go to find Bananas to deliver the bad news. He jokingly pretends to hide in the wardrobe and takes the hit relatively calmly (probably because he knows he can beat Ryan with his eyes closed … if it were Theo, we’d be getting a much different performance). Bananas tells Tori to “buckle up, young lady” like he’s a cowboy in a direct-to-DVD western and makes sure that Jordan acknowledges he’s not off the hook, either. Jordan says “yes” to him in the moment, but he knows that there’s really nothing Bananas can do to him since the women control his fate in the game. He claims he and Bananas will be back to “strumming the guitar and howling at the moon” in no time. If that is true, MTV can keep that footage for themselves.
Tonight’s elimination challenge, “Killer Quads,” has absolutely no business being this fun. From the title, you’d think maybe they have to hold a super-uncomfortable squat position for hours, but quads is actually a reference to quad bikes. Ryan and Bananas will get to play real-life Mario Kart, chasing each other around a racetrack with the goal of pulling the other person’s ribbon off their bike — best two out of three wins. Bananas definitely thinks he’s Mario owing to his incurable main-character syndrome (he’s actually Diddy Kong), and Ryan has gotta be Toadette.
The Reddit haters are going to say this was rigged by production; the one time in years we get an elimination that is a kids’ party game instead of a grueling slog of physical/mental toughness, and it just happens to go to the franchise mascot. In a confessional, Tori laments throwing in Bananas for something so juvenile. If it had been a puzzle, one of his few weaknesses, maybe Ryan would have had a shot at an upset, but the guy hasn’t even driven a car in 20 years.
The queens start their engines, and Ryan hands Bananas an easy round-one win when he crashes into the hay-bale barricade. In the second round, it looks for a hot minute like Ryan will make a comeback, but when he attempts to grab Bananas’s ribbon, he puts his foot on the ground, stopping the bike and losing his lead. He eventually stalls out, handing Bananas the victory on a bedazzled platter.
T.J. tells “drunk on power” Bananas it’s time for him to pick three female targets, but before he can scream Tori’s name in a fit of ecstasy, T.J. caveats that she has immunity as the week’s winner. Bananas is pissed and acts like this is so unfair, but he should take it easy considering all he had to do to defend his place in the game was run the Coconut Mall track. Also, from a game-mechanics perspective, there’s no incentive for the players of the opposite sex to try to win if they know they’re automatically going to get chosen as a target in the next round.
Since Tori is off the table (which she graciously acknowledges by yelling “Haha, motherfucker, eat my shit”), Bananas selects the rest of Devin’s cohort: Nia, Devin’s “pet snake” Olivia, and his “soon-to-be ex-girlfriend,” Michele. Devin’s not even in the house anymore, and he’s the driving factor of the season’s primary beef. That’s power.