The Challenge 40: Battle of the Eras Recap: Snakes and Ladders

Not to start off this recap being a dick, but I am too young to have participated in the cultish and sadistic ritual of the MySpace Top Eight. Fortunately, I’ve gleaned enough about its lore from history books to know that its dark principles are presently a major piece of strategy in the Challenge house.

Now that the challengers fully understand the updated game mechanics after witnessing the first individual elimination and its aftermath, they’ve determined that each player can feasibly protect four players of the opposite sex. While the big power players like Bananas and Tori have pre-established rosters, free agents like Rachel are trawling around the mansion with a clipboard and a cigar to scout out their new team.

Michele confronts Bananas after he picked her as a target and makes everyone clear the bedroom like she’s the President about to take a call with Russia. He doesn’t want to talk (shocker), which makes Michele feel like he never valued their friendship to begin with. Michele cries, and Bananas executes on his age-old Bananas Arguing with a Girl Playbook:

1). Reject Accountability

2.) Call Her Crazy

3.) Shut Down

At the daily challenge, Michele takes another L: T.J. explains her penance for losing last week’s competition is a 30-second time penalty. The challenge is called “Building Bridges,” which is ironic considering the dumpster fire of division between the two sides of the house right now. To play, each challenger will individually race through an obstacle course that includes rock climbing, jumping across platforms, completing a puzzle, and, finally, Tarzan-swinging on a rope into a pile of boxes that the crew has to diligently reset each time. (I’d be so annoyed.) Whoever finishes with the fastest time wins, and if you fall off the course at any point, you’re disqualified.

I absolutely love this challenge; it feels like a real-life simulation of one of those lo-fi iPhone games from the 2010s, like Flappy Bird (who sounds old now?). Bananas goes first and crushes it, showing 42-year-olds everywhere that they can still run, skip, and jump if they put their minds to it.

This seems like such a Cara Maria event, and she gets all this hype from the other competitors because she’s a big rock climber. Embarrassingly, she can’t get through the very first part of the course, which is rock climbing up a wall and hoisting yourself onto a ladder — she falls and is DQed. I thought she was going to be the only person to tank that early on, but all three Ladies of Leisure — Michele, Olivia, and Nia — fall in similar spots, meaning it’s actually a tight race for last place.

Nia ends up losing for the girls, having traveled the least distance, and Theo loses for the boys, taking about 18 minutes to solve the three-piece triangle puzzle that production probably borrowed from a pre-school in Ho Chi Minh City. Jenny beats Tori by six one-hundreths of a second, and Kyland wins for the guys, meaning he’ll have to choose between his top allies, Michele and Olivia, to face off against his boo. Bro’s probably secretly wishing Bananas won right about now.

At club night, Olivia confronts Bananas for calling her “Devin’s pet snake” at the last elimination. Apparently, this is super triggering for her because in Battle for a New Champion, everyone called her a snake and a bad friend because she was a snake and a bad friend. She needs to relax — this is like, the 450th least offensive thing you can be called on The Challenge. Or better yet, make like Taylor Swift and channel your anger into a pop sensation!!!!

Seizing an opportunity for screen time, Nia and Tori get in on the Bananas attack, and he turns as red as a sixth grader who got a boner at the whiteboard during history class. He knows that there is no coming back from his feud with Tori and Michele, so he decides to pour gasoline all over the game, hoping to weaken his enemies by planting doubt in their allies. Dropping the match, he lights up Jordan and Tori, shouting in front of everyone that they are promising to protect more people than they feasibly can (remember the top four rule!).

Professor Bananas’s master plan works, and Nia comes to see him the next day during his office hours to ask if what he said about Jordan is true. He gleefully divulges that Jordan’s top spots belong to Tori, Laurel, Aviv, and Rachel — who knows, maybe even Cara “Pariah” Maria ranks above Nia! Wiseley (pun intended), she fact checks this testimony with Jordan himself, who doesn’t do much to assuage her anxieties, blabbering something nonsensical about hoping he never has to choose between Nia, Tori, and Laurel. She calls this a “politician bullshit answer,” and decides that despite their friendship, she might have to make him a target if given the chance.

Jenny has spent this entire game feeling unappreciated and undervalued, like an Elf on the Shelf in July, so she comes into the Chamber unnecessarily hot. She sasses that she doesn’t care whether Olivia or Michele faces off against Nia as long as Nia feels like she has her best shot of winning. Jenny, you really didn’t need to say anything — you don’t have a vote, and your presence is purely ornamental. Kyland tells Michele she’ll be the one hitting the sand, and she handles it so graciously she practically courtesies.

When the cast heads to the elimination, they’re greeted by T.J., who is wearing a deplorably unflattering pumpkin-colored button-down. Doesn’t my guy know he’s a Spring, not an Autumn? He announces that the elimination is called “Forty-fication” (I hate this, it sounds way too much like fornication and not in a fun way), and involves solving a bunch of math equations to unchain 40 heavy boxes and then carrying them partway across the arena into your designated square. Ah, a classic “I pick things up and put them down” spectacular.

Neither girl is feeling great about having to do math, and I don’t blame them. It’s frustrating seeing great competitors get sent home because of math. This is THE CHALLENGE, not the Virgin Olympics.

Michele keeps a steady pace and handles the pressure much better than Nia, who looks like she’s solving for the 82nd digit of Pi, while Kyland the Calculator yells “Left to right!” from the stands as if the issue is that she forgot how to read. Nia thinks it’s best to try to solve every equation before unchaining and moving her boxes, while Michele strategically opts to solve an equation and then move its corresponding boxes, which gives her “noodle arms” a break from the action/agony. This ends up being the winning strategy; Nia makes an admirable dent, but Michele takes it by a healthy margin.

As the victor, Michele finally gets to exact revenge on her now sworn enemy, Johnny Bananas, who tries to hide behind five-foot-three Aviv. She also selects Jordan, since she knows he’s not protecting her, and Nehemiah, who has delivered a heaping pile of nothing this season. As for Nia, she shares a good-bye smooch with Kyland and tells him to call her when he gets back to the U.S. Is The Challenge 40 about to have a better relationship success rate than all seven seasons of Love Is Blind? Maybe instead of spending $30,000 on a matchmaker, I should invest in a Crossfit membership and get started on my MTV audition tape.