The Challenge 40: Battle of the Eras Finale Recap: Nice Guys Finish First

We meet back up with our challengers right where we left them, counting coins in the dank depths of the Sinister as their psyches splinter and their muscles spasm. Jenny, in the midst of a Hulk Smash meltdown, gives up on the task around 1 a.m., throwing the rest of the coins into her collection box with gay abandon. She gets to sleep on the cold, metal floor, lulled to sleep by the rest of the cast moan-chanting the “Show me the way to go home” shanty.

A few hours later, as everyone else is wrapping up the game in earnest, Tori still has a good half of her bag left. To get some sleep and preserve her sanity, she probably should have just made an educated guess, but she’s feeling the pressure after her sub-optimal performance in the first day’s checkpoints and commits to the bit like an ASSSSCAT performer when they hear a WME agent’s son is in the audience. Singing alone at 4 a.m., she goes so far as to add some classy vibrato trills — how about some Karma Points for that, since we’re deciding who wins this Final based on meaningless data?

In the morning, T.J. wakes the cast in a striking black button-down that was definitely one of his go-to first-date shirts back in the day. He’s here with the results of their suffering. It turns out that Tori stayed up all night just to come in dead last, overcounting her coins by almost a thousand. Bananas joins her in fourth place, and with Derek’s first-place win, he has zero room for error if he wants to take back the second-place position.

Checkpoint IV Results: 1st Place, Derek and Rachel; 2nd Place, Jordan and Michele; 3rd Place, Kyland and Jenny; 4th Place, Bananas and Tori.

The first checkpoint of day two is called “Submerging Terror,” a.k.a. the tagline for a new Blumhouse film about a zombie virus that breaks out on a military submarine. Wait, I would watch the hell out of that. Am I a genius?

The players must swim out to a second location, grab a paddle, and swim to a large raft. Deep underneath the raft are crates that hold the keys they need to unlock the boats, which will take them back to the Sinister. Apparently, yesterday’s grind had minimal impact on Jordan’s body because he effortlessly tears through the swim once again like the lovechild of a man and Lola, the sultry Angelina Jolie fish from Shark Tale.

He tries to catch his breath once he makes it to the raft, which gives his competitors a chance to catch up. Even though he’s still the first to unlock his boat, he’s nervous that Bananas or Derek could use this moment to their advantage since it’s much more difficult to row effectively with one hand. But they don’t, and Jordan’s “Operation: Avoid The Karma Vote” barrels ahead.

Michele blows an early lead trying to retrieve her key, and she’s so depleted from the swim that she’s unable to hoist herself from the water onto the raft. She might have been there forever if it wasn’t for Kyland, who lets her climb his body to get up. Kyland is a humble, good sport about his irrelevance in this stage of the game and posits that “there’s no training that compensates for experience.” Sure, but some swim lessons couldn’t have hurt.

Checkpoint V Results: 1st Place, Jordan and Jenny; 2nd Place, Derek and Tori; 3rd Place, Bananas and Rachel; 4th Place, Kyland and Michele.

Next, the players move on to “Mathematical Leisure,” where they solve a grade school math equation on a sandbar while drinking coconut water. Based on the order in which they arrive at the sandbar, two players sit head-to-head and shout the answer to something like 10 - 8 + 2. Whoever delivers the correct answer first gets to swim back to the Sinister, while the loser must continue with matchups until they get a win. The last person left on the sandbar has to wait to start their return until the person who beat them makes contact with Sinister, which is essentially a guaranteed last-place finish unless someone got MedEvaced.

These equations are so easy, I’m getting them right and I stopped taking math after Algebra II. They’re so easy, they don’t even need to use their little chalkboards. They’re so easy, Jenny beats Michele.

Michele takes L after L, like a Jeopardy! contestant who knows the answer but can’t figure out the buzzer. Every woman passes her. She tries to use her feminine wiles to seduce Derek into letting her win, but she forgets that he’s gay. She finally beats Bananas by a hair (and passes Tori and Rachel in the water), which is bad news for him because his next and final opponent is Kyland the Calculator.

Checkpoint VI Results: 1st Place, Jordan and Jenny; 2nd Place, Derek and Michele; 3rd Place, Kyland and Rachel; 4th Place, Bananas and Tori.

There’s one more checkpoint to go, but like an Olympics where Simone Biles is Yurchenko double-piking, it’s a competition for second place. It’s called “Champion’s Cove,” and the players will use underwater scooters to retrieve a token from a cave and zip back to the Sinister one last time. It’s an anticlimactic finale. It actually looks fun, like the type of activity you would pay to do at a Hawaiian resort. Jenny can’t figure out how to use her scooter properly, giving Michele some leeway to secure first place and a bit of redemption.

Checkpoint VII Results: 1st Place, Jordan and Michele; 2nd Place, Bananas and Rachel; 3rd Place, Derek and Tori; 4th Place, Kyland and Jenny.

The finalists hug it out. The experience was beyond miserable, but they created a memory and some lifelong trauma bonds. T.J. finally reveals the scoring process and how these wretched Karma Votes factor in. Each checkpoint was worth a maximum of four points depending on where you placed, and the Karma Vote was worth two checkpoints for a maximum of eight bonus points on top of your total.

He starts with the guys’ scores, which were not impacted by Lady Luck. Jordan wins (I’d like to give myself brag points for calling this in my recap six weeks ago), Derek formally disposes of his layup name by coming in second, Grandpa Bananas saves himself total embarrassment with a bronze, and sweet baby Kyland is just happy he didn’t drown.

For the women, on the other hand, it’s about to get “gnarly.” The Karma Votes have an unfortunate stranglehold on these standings, with the exception of Tori, who was destined to lose on her own accord. The actual results would have been Jenny (22 points), Michele (19 points), and Rachel (16 points), but since Jenny had minimal relationships coming into this season (she’s only played twice before) and Rachel had many, Rachel’s eight Karma Points catapulted her two places into a completely unearned tie for first with Jenny. Michele, who beat Rachel soundly, is collateral damage, demoted to third place (and, notably, one point away from a three-way first-place tie).

It’s such an uncomfortable way to end the season. Michele is so despondent, she looks like she just walked in on Devin sucking face with Olivia. And how can it even feel good to “beat” someone based on bullshit? Derek states it directly, explaining that he’s so relieved that he bested Bananas due to his performance, not because he did drag shows and baked birthday cakes. Who wants a win with an asterisk? I hope the true winners, Jordan and Jenny, use this prize money to follow their dreams. Jordan, to become an F1 racer, and Jenny, to fund and star in the live-action remake of Wreck It Ralph.