Beth Gives Up On Her Plans For Sabotage

Last week’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Inferno II ushered in one of the best twists I have seen in a long time, and it wasn’t even dependent on a producer’s fabrication of the situation or altering of the rules. After Beth was pretty much shit on by all of her teammates, she decided that when it comes to the Inferno, revenge is a dish best served cold. If nobody on your team likes you, why don’t you just sabotage it so they don’t win any challenges? The other team was never going to vote her into the Inferno, so she had the chance to go down swinging, and if the way she handled herself at the end of our previous episode was any indication, she was going to be swinging at a lot of people. Unfortunately that was not the case. Oh well, you really can’t win them all.After Beth had given me so much hope last week, she sort of reversed her idea of vigilante justice in favor of a slightly more mellow approach. She just left. She literally packed up her bags and went home. Some people are going to speculate that this was the work of the producers. I have to admit, Beth’s departure was sudden, and she was kind of dodging the question about why she wanted to leave (she felt her property wasn’t safe). Then again, she did say her best friend on the team was Karamo, so it’s easy to understand just how detached from the rest of her team she must have felt.

As soon as Beth was gone, we were able to get an idea of what people really thought about her, and the verdict is that they talked about her in the same way. Didn’t matter if she was heading to the airport or was sitting right next to them, they really didn’t have very many good things to say about her.

I agree with much of what they said, but there are a couple of things that you have to understand. First, it really sucks when almost your entire team hates you, and to make matters worse, nobody is trying to defend you. Even if you don’t like somebody, it’s very rare to wish harm upon them or want their property to be destroyed. Second, the guys were talking a lot about how Beth talked a big game, but didn’t have anything to back it up. Well, what the hell was she supposed to do to back it up fellas? Steven barely smacked Shane last year and he was eliminated. If Beth had tried to back up any of her tough talk, she would have been gone anyway.

With all that being said, it is very weak to simply leave the show. Beth, for the love of God, will you please just say no when Bunim/Murray asks you to do this shit next time? Luckily, the people we are left with are going to be good for just as much drama. One thing we can always count on from our Real World/Road Rules reality stars is the utter disintegration of any sort of logic abilities whatsoever.

The reward challenge was called “Shirt off my back”. The teams had to don some clothes and swap these clothes with the person next to them. The challenge part of this competition was this all had to be done while trying to keep your footing on a balance beam that was suspended over the water.

Overall, the task was not that difficult, and was basically the type of activity we have come to expect. Although there could have been some strategy involved, the biggest advantage either team would have would be a sense of teamwork. In fact, the thing that seemed to be giving people the most trouble was the little speedos that the guys were forced to wear underneath their trunks.. We haven’t seen such gratuitous displays of superfluous man crotch since, well, since any episode of the Amazing Race this season, but you get the point. These outfits left little to the imagination and just for good measure, Mike pulled his up a little hihger than everybody else and gave himself a thong. Hey, at least he didn’t give us the fruit bowl, right?

Anyway, the Good Guys are clearly the team with better team chemistry, even if they haven’t been able to turn that chemistry into domination in the challenges. Still, they really haven’t been out of any challenge, and it’s not hard to imagine that had things been a little different, they would have had the 3-1 lead in competitions. What did the bad guys have? Veronica admitted that she was very good at taking off her clothes, and it’s probably safe to assume that Tonya would have some of that same skill.

While much of this might sound difficult, both teams handled the challenge with easy. The balance beams were shaking, but it seemed like a nice methodical approach was going to work. In fact, the only person to actually fall off of the balance beam was Dan, and he did it on purpose. No, he didn’t try and pull a Beth and sabotage his team, it was part of the strategy. See, the players had to lineup boy/girl so when you put on your clothes you would be wearing something from the opposite gender. For the people on the either end of the line, they would also swap

The Bad Asses decided they could save a lot of the time required to pass the clothes from one end to the other by diving into the water on purpose. So, in Dan went, except there was one problem. When Dan got out, his clothes were soaked through, and he had a difficult time getting his wet cothes off. It wasn’t a huge difference, and the producers might have completely faked the advantage this act gave to the other team, but it was another indication of how the Bad Asses were trying to outthink the game too much instead of simply beating the other team. Was it simply a coincidence that they tried to use strategy or brains to sort of manipulate their game in their favor the last two times, and Koror lost both of those times. Maybe not, but this is something I can live with.

I have to take a little bit of a sidetrack here, but does anybody notice how ridiculously tan Veronica is? Do we know what salon she uses? And please don’t try and tell me that that she’s half spanish or part italian or something. You can’t get that brown from the sun alone if you dipped yourself in crisco. Shavonda isn’t going to be confused for Nina Simone but take a look:

And while I’m complaining about things annoying me this season, can I talk a little bit about the pathetic attempt to pimp the Sidekick II? Could they make it any less natural? “Oh, how are things on your brand new T-Mobile Sidekick II” and “Wow, is their a message on our T-Mobile?” And as sucky as all of that is, I must admit that the CT Taxi Driver look is starting to wear a little old.

Competition over, it is now time to decide who is going to go into the inferno. For the good guys, they are assuming that the Bad Asses are going to pick Mike, so they try and decide from that exactly who they should pick. They are going to stick to their plan and pick a weaker member of the Bad Asses just like last time when they picked Dan. The one gay guy defended himself pretty well, so the other gay guy, Karamo, is going to have his chance to show how he’s not a stereotype.

The Bad Asses don’t really think things through too strategically. They assume that the Good Guys are going to pick one of their stronger competitors, so they should pick one of the Good Guys stronger competitors. I would think that they would want to compete against a weaker opponent and work on the numbers game, but they decided that the Miz was the heart of the team, and if you took him out, the rest would be easy.

This strategy didn’t sit so well with Karamo. He knew that he was a weaker competitor, knew that the Good Guys picked a weaker competitor last time, and thought he would have a better chance against Landon. I have to admit, I think Karamo was right. He had no way to know that he would be picked, but he would have a better chance against Landon. From their interactions, you can tell that Karamo is inside Landon’s head. And to be quite frank, it seems like Karamo could get stoked about going up against Landon. Nobody would listen to Karamo, and so it was decided that they would pick Mike.

Karamo was upset that nobody really listened to it, and let him know. When CT tried to say something, Karamo told him to “kiss my black ass”, which got CT even more upset and he accused Karamo of playing the race card. Now we all know that Karamo will pull the race card at the drop of a hat, but saying “kiss my black ass” is not a racial thing, and I think Karamo would have said the same thing if CT was white. I just think CT has rage issues. In the end, Karamo was vindicated when he was picked, forcing the great strategist Derrick to apologize for not thinking it through. You can’t really fault the strategy of the Bad Asses, but they shouldn’t pretend that they would be devastated if Karamo left.

We were done with all of the things they usually need to finish in a program, but why was there so much time left in the show? What happened was Abram. I am not sure what goes through his head, or why other people should be held to a higher standard than he should, but he is always getting pissed whenever people are talking about him. You would think that coming onto one of these challenges would be the last thing that he would want to do.

Earlier in the episode, Abram admitted that he wouldn’t want to vote for his friend Mike to go into the Inferno. Apparently, the success of the bad asses means less than his friendship. In any other situation, I would say fine, but this is a competition, and he will likely get a chance to be on Mike’s team again, so why be so upset about perhaps having to compete against him now? But what really got Abram mad was when people started talking about alliances. People kept on speculating about alliances throughout the game, and a possible alliance between Abram and Mike was discussed. Abram has already said that his friendship with Mike would affect his voting, and while that might not be an alliance, you can’t really blame people for speculating, can you?

Abram can. People were talking casually about the game and alliances in the kitchen, when Tina happened to say “Mike” and “Abram” within a few words of each other, which set Abram off. He started screaming about all these people accusing him of being in an alliance, and when people tried to calm him down, he just continued to shout. I don’t make it a habit of defending Tina, but she really wasn’t talking shit about Abram, she was just making conversation about the game. Abram wouldn’t even listen to his own teammate’s who were trying to calm him down. Tina started it, but Abram was going to finish it, and there is no better way to finish a conversation than by picking up a dinner glass and throwing it out the door. And they all called Beth the crazy one.

My dream scenario for next week is for Mike to win the life shield, and then have him go against Karamo in the inferno. Karamo said he wanted to kill Landon if he was stranded on a tropical island with him. Do you think Karamo would try and kill Landon if they were stuck at a semi-tropical hotel with him. I guess we’ll find out next week.