Taking on 'The Challenge: Battle of the Eras" | "Payback Era"

Season 40 of the MTV staple The Challenge is past the midpoint and each Thursday afternoon, The Alabama Take continues coverage of Battle of the Eras in the form of recaps, analysis, thoughts, questions, and answers. Find it on the site every Thursday evening. 

It’s the “Payback Era,” and a lot of the house comes down on Bananas upon reentry. Kyland questions his choice of Nia and Michele confronts him with tears. Soon, though, it’s time for a daily, which is a video game come to life: in a structure similar to Donkey Kong, the players must climb up one edifice, slide down a pole, hop onto tilted ramps, collect gold coins, solve a puzzle at the top, jump onto a moving bridge, shimmy down a rope, collect even more coins, and eventually get to swing into a stack of boxes, signaling their time to stop. The fastest of the men and women will be the winners, the slowest of the women will go straight into elimination. If you fall, you get a disqualification. The loser of the men, who will get a penalty next week, is Theo, who opts not to put the coins in the bag. Cara Maria, Michele, Nia, and Olivia all DQ in the challenge with Nia getting the loss and Michele’s penalty from last week not even being a factor. Since Michele and Olivia are the weekly targets, they are on the chopping block for Kyland and Jenny to choose. They decide on Michele, but it matters not to Jenny as she wants revenge on her era for always forcing her to be a target and generally being unfriendly to her. In the bar scene, Bananas blows up on Olivia, but he turns into an explosion on Jordan and Tori, who fights back. Later, Nia questions Johnny on if he was telling the truth: does Jordan value Nia as low as Bananas says? In Nia’s discussion with Jordan, that seems to be. In the elimination, heavy trunks are chained to one another but the only way to unlock them is through a lot of equations, and then the players must move their respective set of boxes into their designed, empty square. Michele can math faster than Nia, and it allows her to move the heavy boxes, get them in a stack, and garner the win. As a winner, she immediately picks a crouching Bananas as a target as well as the big pick of Jordan and Nehemiah. 

How good is Michele? Even she remarks that she’s merely making it through politics and a social game, yet she gets victories when you least expect it. 

Blaine: For better or worse, Michele ran season 39 up until the final. Her skills as a social player – up to a point – can’t be denied. I suppose we’re stuck with her for the future of The Challenge because she’s not bad in the least. She seems to be the type of player who’ll repeatedly get right up to the final and then go home. Will she ever win? I don’t think so. 

TD: While her physical attributes are her weak spot, Michele is a fairly well-rounded player. She plays the political game extremely well, doesn’t piss off too many people, and has a lot of heart. That said, I think if the math equations weren’t part of the elimination, Nia would’ve boat raced her. I think Michele’s best trait is her ability to find the right person to ride with as far as they’ll take her – she may well make the final, but I just don’t see her as a threat once she gets there.

Is Bananas’ outburst in the bar a Challenge masterclass on taking control or is it the exemplar of ego getting the best of a great player, who believes he can manipulate more than he actually can? 

Blaine: With age, comes wisdom. At first, I questioned if he had too many drinks and was simply going off out of frustration. Then the grin and the wink at the camera. Wow! From there, the truly unexpected: Nia comes to him in a sober moment to find out if what he said had any validity. The Johnny Bananas Game is now afoot. Bananas may be one of the oldest left in the cast at this point in the season, but he knows how to do two things better than anyone, maybe ever, on The Challenge: play for the camera and make others question the game within the game. When Nia asks him about Jordan and then goes to Jordan, that’s some two- or three-step trickery by Bananas. The mind games don’t work, though, unless there’s a kernel of truth in them. In this case, Jordan really does have Nia slotted low on his list, whether the list is coming to him in the moment or decided upon a while ago. The question now is if Bananas (and Jordan) survive being targeted next week.  

TD: When that scene started playing out, I said to myself “this is like watching an artist in their element, creating another masterpiece.” Unfortunately, for Bananas anyway, the elimination didn’t quite pan out the way he needed. Still, he accomplished another of his goals: to get the focus on himself. Bananas not only loves the attention, but if other players are focused on him, that means they’re not focused on what’s truly important: winning. 

Cara Maria crashed out of this week’s challenge quickly, do you still rank her as one of the top females, or has she lost a step to the others?

Blaine: After this week, I was questioning her relevance. That was supposedly a challenge where she should not only excel but dominate. She hints at it herself: when you come on the show in consecutive seasons, like Tori, you get better and better. She’s lost something. I do think she can regain what she once had with another appearance, assuming she has it in her. 

TD: At the top of her game, she’s one of the best competitors ever on The Challenge, male or female. But, we haven’t seen her on the main show since War of the Worlds 2, which was pre-Covid. That’s a lot of time off, and it’s hard to come back in and dominate right away. That said, if she makes it to the final, she’s still a favorite to win it all. 

Did Michele make the right choices for her targets, or is she being short-sighted and playing the game emotionally instead of strategically?

Blaine: Jordan, Bananas, and Nehemiah are huge targets to pick. One of them could easily win next week’s daily. That’ll hinder Michele’s plan. But it’s late in the game now. It’s time to shit or get off the pot. She made a decent selection. I suppose the argument, too, is that if she voted emotionally, so did Bananas last week. 

TD: With any competition, emotion is going to factor into the equation. The best players are those who know how to use emotions as a weapon. Where I think Michele is being short-sighted is she’s not looking ahead to the final. We already know there’ll be a male and female champion, so she’s not competing against Bananas or any other guy. And if you know your Challenge history, you know that likely means we’ll see the final played in stages, with competitors randomly paired together. So, strategically speaking, you want the strongest players of the opposite gender to make the final, so you’re not burdened with a weaker player in the final. Bananas knows this, look who he’s aligned himself with: Rachel, Aviv, and Laurel – all of whom are former champions and strong players. So, when he picks Michele, Nia, and Olivia, he’s picking emotionally, and playing strategically.

Confessionals:

• How many viewers nodded in agreement with Jordan’s “You wrote the book on this game” about Bananas? - Blaine 

• Proof in this week’s elimination is that a “Lady of Leisure” really shouldn’t be on The Challenge; Olivia dominated her first season so it’s odd to see her adopt the nickname so readily. - Blaine 

• When kids say they’ll never use math again, I hope they watch The Challenge and see differently. You could win millions with math skills! - Blaine

• I also came here to speak on the lack of simple math skills by Nia (and many other competitors over the years) – y’all, the numbers might be big but the math ain’t hard. - TD

• That tease for next week…oh baby, a mini final and a purge challenge all in one? Can I watch that now, please? - TD