Deal or No Deal Island Season-Premiere Recap: Eat Them Like Little Gummy Bears

Reality-competition series are a lot like group vacations. Both test everyone’s ability to stay calm and companionable despite a rising tide of logistical challenges and social tensions, and more often than not, someone thinks they’re the ringleader when they’re really just along for the ride. On Deal or No Deal Island season two, the seasoned sharks are already circling around the newbie competitors like they’re delusional chum.

In NBC’s beachside Deal or No Deal spinoff, 14 contestants face challenges to collect briefcases worth a combined total of $200 million. Each week, whoever secures the biggest bag wins immunity and picks another player to enter the Temple, where they face “The Banker” in a game of Deal or No Deal. If that player makes a “Bad Deal” (meaning their briefcase contains an amount lower than the only other briefcase remaining), they go straight home. But if they make a “Good Deal,” they choose who to eliminate next. The final player meets the mysterious Banker in person and hopefully wins the game’s total pot.

Just like last season folded in a few familiar faces, Deal or No Deal season two has upped the ante with reality TV royalty: We’ve got Australian Survivor winner David Genat, a.k.a. “The Golden God” of the game, and reality TV legend Parvati Shallow, who competed on Survivor four times, won season 16, and was runner-up in season 20 before moving her subterfuge to Scotland for a season of Peacock’s The Traitors. Big Brother winner Dr. Will Kirby will join in on the fun soon enough, but right now, David and Parvati are already laughing their way to the bank.

To David and Parvati, everyone else is just so cute. Look at these sweet summer children playing in the water and discussing their favorite Disney princesses. Adorable! Their feeble attempts at strategy? Precious. Sure, there are some potential threats, but for right now, who’s gonna beat Parvati and David — Dickson Wong, a 24-year-old who starts calling them “Mom” and “Dad” in front of everyone? The gorgeous Storm Wilson, whom a couple of competitors nickname “Box of Rocks”?

Parvati labels these youngsters “the Dawson’s Creek crew” and tells David with her blood-chilling Parvati grin that they’re “gonna eat them like little gummy bears,” and I believe her. So far, David’s on the same page. If we want to go back to Disney for a second, he looks at his competitors the way Captain Li Shang judged his spineless, pale, pathetic recruits at the start of Mulan.

But is the skill gap as wide as it seems? David might be convinced he’s got everyone beat (except maybe Parvati), but in our first challenge, his strategy kinda sucked.

In “The Banker’s Pyramid Scheme,” everyone is divided into teams to grab briefcases off one side of a giant floating, water-bound pyramid. Whichever team secures the lowest total is up for elimination, and whoever gets the highest-value briefcase gets to choose the first person to face the banker. Each side of the pyramid is its own category: one, accessible only via a hazardous path of floating platforms, has the highest-value cases; the next, which can be reached through a longer, safer jungle path, holds all the medium-value cases; the last side sits at the end of a zip line and features three red briefcases — one with the lowest value in the game, one with a “Steal” on the inside, and one with a “Swap” on the inside (meaning the player holding it could trade its $200,000 value for a higher one).

David goes for the highest risk and puts himself on Team Red Case, and so do Seychelle Cordero and Luke Olejniczak, a charming but clueless private chef from Wisconsin. So begins the trouble. David wants the three of them to stand at the top of the zip-line platform like vultures and watch which bag everyone takes. That way, whoever grabs the Steal case would know who holds the highest value. This sounds smart until you remember that teammates can always swap cases. Still, David is appalled to see both of his teammates swoosh down the zip line immediately. Why won’t they listen? Do they even know who he is?!

One could forgive Luke and Seychelle’s overeagerness, but what comes next might be one of the most obvious mistakes in reality TV history. When Luke opens his case and realizes he has the “Steal,” he rejects David’s pleas to yank a case from the high-value team (which has not yet revealed their amounts) and instead chooses the highest of the medium-value cases, which has already been opened. As several contestants point out, this makes absolutely no sense. Any high-value case would be higher than the most valuable medium-value case. But what can you say? Luke’s the kind of floppy-eared guy who says things like, “No risk, no reward, baby!” You simply cannot talk logic into this person. His is a flame that can only extinguish itself by burning too bright, too fast. And so, Luke grabs the $450,000 case, dooming his team in the process.

Here’s the thing, though: David screws up, too! He gets the “Swap” briefcase, and rather than trade with Sydnee — who is on the high-value team and promised a case rich enough to keep his own team afloat — David swaps with Alexis Lete. Why? Because he saw her take the most valuable case (worth $1 million) and was convinced she’d hold onto it. Big mistake. Huge! Lete did not have the $1 million case; she’d swapped it with Sydnee and is instead holding a $500,000 case, which isn’t enough to boost Team Red Case out of the bottom.

There’s always a chance that the high-value team planned to screw David over by handing him a lower-value case than they’d promised, but David gravely underestimated his opponents by assuming Lete would keep the $1 million case. In so doing, he also reveals a weakness other players might use against him in the future: If someone thinks you’re stupid, they just might make a few dumb mistakes of their own.

Team Red Case winds up with the lowest total case value, and while Seychelle absolutely does not want to face the banker, Luke and David both want to take fate into their own hands. After some lobbying from both, Sydnee chooses Luke, but not before some very obvious flirting with David, whose facial responses make it clear he’d rather be doing literally anything else. Sydnee might think it’s all in good fun, but she’ll need to watch her back around certain players like La Shell Wooten, who suspects that she’s too boy-crazy to be an effective teammate.

Luke comes into his Deal or No Deal ready to roll with tons of football-based lucky numbers, but this game of chance giveth and it taketh away. Also, one of the case models is a fan of one of Luke’s rival teams, which probably screws with his luck.

For a while, the plays made sense: Luke has high numbers on the board and the banker lowballs him. But in the end, when he has two low-value cases on the board ($1 and $500) and one high ($600,000), Luke keeps playing when he should accept a very generous offer of $218,000. Sadly, he opens the $600,000 case — leaving only $1 and $500 and sparking the lowest offer in DONDI’s short history, $300. Luke loves catchphrases, so he throws in a “Live by the sword, die by the sword” before impaling himself with a humiliating prize of $1.

As David observed while watching Luke play, there really is something deliciously surreal about watching someone who’s terrible at something but thinks they’re the best. For that reason alone, I’m devastated to see Luke go home, even if the other players are relieved. The prize pot will surely benefit from Luke’s departure, but our viewing experiences will all be poorer for it. Still, there’s at least one tantalizing mystery on the horizon: Who is this season’s first female banker? We’ll have to keep watching to find out who’s shattering this incredibly important glass ceiling, but for now, let’s feast on some tropical power rankings based on our supersize premiere.

Island Power Rankings