Bunim/Murray Shocker : Somebody Outsmarts Veronica

By all accounts the current season of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Inferno II is as enjoyable as any challenge season in recent memory. Other than the first few challenges when the idea was still new and interesting, the recent reunions have been largely absent of many reasons to watch. Sure there are elements of the population who will need their fix of the latest Bunim/Murray gossip, but as far as good television goes, there wasn’t much there. OK, I am kidding nobody here. While the actual competitions are quite a bit better this time around, the best part about The Inferno II is that it has give us seemingly endless opportunities to watch all of these people tear each other apart for increasingly petty reasons based on increasingly poor logic.Another big reason that people watch the show is that we also get the scoop on who are the next possible couples in the Bunimmurrayverse. Battle of the Sexes II enlightened us to Coral and Abe’s relationship, and let us watch as Robin and Mark cast their bets on love’s fickle flame as well. Our real-life encounter with Rachel and Veronica let us in on probably reality’s least kept secret, but there hasn’t been too much love in the air during this season so far. The only thing that has even qualified as a longing stare was when Dan was trying to tear himself away from Karamo.

Luckily, there is only so long before you can keep a bunch of fit and single men and women together in one place before people start flirting. The odds are simply against you. So when we saw that Jodi and the Miz were “relating to each other” and were happy to have somebody “who is a friend” and will “stay up late”, you knew that something was going to happen. When we heard that Jodi had made a bet and lost, you know that it was more than just innocence at play.

Jodi played one of the oldest tricks in the book. She doesn’t want to look like Tonya(notice I didn’t say slut, implying that Tonya is a huge slut and everybody hates her would be wrong. depending on who you ask, it may be true, but we aren’t going to say it) and just get naked at the drop of the hat, she wants a little more intrigue. An easy way to do this would be to place a bet on something saying you will get naked if you lose. Now, I can’t be sure how badly Jodi wanted to win, or if she simply wanted to lose her bet and get naked, but she did lose, and she did get naked, and she did jump into the pool, per the bet. Sure she played like she didn’t want to get out of the water while Mike was holding the towel, but she did, and made sure he saw a little bit of cheek, tits, and cooter to peak the interests of the Miz.

This week’s “Bunim/Murray Contestant Attempts to Read” was brought to you by Landon. I am not sure if he just has a strange tone when he speaks or if Bunim/Murray hired the High School Reunion sound editors to splice the audio together, but it may me glad that he spent his seven years in college learning how to build playgrounds and not learning how to to teach phonics.

After a few minutes conclusively proving that the Sidekick II is not an Etch-A-Sketch, we learned that the everybody had to be at the marina wearing their swimsuits. Swimsuits are usually a good indicator that there will be water involved in the competition, and that was indeed the case. Dave Mirra explained the rules for “Fill in the Gaps”. There were two pieces of glass with a number of holes in them. Plastic tubing ran from each hole to container that held water. The water would flow through the holes, and the teams would try and stop the water from coming out. Each side split into two groups, and each group would be timed on how long it took their water to empty to a certain level. The better you held the holes, the less water would come out, and the longer your time would be. Abram eloquently explained that a team would lose if they had the most water flow out the quickest. Or, if that is too hard for you to grasp, a team would lose if they kept the most water in the tank the longest. Great job at explaining that one Abram. I heard Ikea is looking to add some additional redundancy to their furniture diagrams, why not give it a shot? Anyway, the two groups for each team would have their score added, and the highest score wins.

Fill your gaps was not terribly exciting. The water flowed, and people contorted their bodies to stop it. What was hilarious was listening to everybody talk about strategy. Each side was allowed to pick their own groups, which meant that it could be as fair or lopsided as you decided. Not knowing whether plugging holes would be more advantageous to the women or the men, both the Bad Asses and the Good Guys split their teams up evenly among boys and girls. And here I thought they were all just pretty faces.

If you though that was a killer strategy, you would have loved to hear CT talk. He was like “Yo Tonya! You should, like, take your tits and use them to stop the water. Like, your nipples could, like, stick in there” I am not sure if he was trying to be serious or funny. All you people from the Boston area, please tell me these aren’t the type of people that are considered intelligent or funny in the areas where you grew up. Don’t you have people to bully kids this stupid and lame into lives as social outcasts so they don’t show up on TV and torment the rest of us for years?

Like most other attempts at strategy in this game, it had little to do with the outcome. The Bad Asses won yet another challenge, and added another $10,000 to their bank. That makes it 50 large for the Bad Asses and only $20,000 for the Good Guys.

It was the girls’ time to go into the Inferno this week, and the Good guys decided that it should be between Tonya and Veronica. They know that Veronica is not that good of a player, but if she left, it would be a huge blow for their team. It would likely put Rachel in a bad mood. I don’t know what it is about Veronica that makes people on her teams listen to her and rally against whoever she hates, but it happens, and she uses it to her advantage. Julie also said that she would rather go against Veronica, but Jamie and Shavonda would have felt better going against Tonya. The official vote was for Tonya, but Julie said that if they are the second ones to pick who was to go into the inferno, why not switch their pick? If they call Jamie or Shavonda, they will say Tonya, if it is Jodi or Julie, they’ll say Veronica.

The Bad Asses had a similar strategy. Jodi is a strong player physically, easily the strongest of any of the Good Girls. At the same time, she is not mentally focused and breaks down easily under pressure – witness the citrus squeezing challenge. Derrick had said earlier that he would feel bad about voting for Jodie because “she’s my girl” as he said, but the rest of his teammates chose her anyway.

When it came time to announce the Inferno opponents, the Bad Asses went first, and selected Jodi. Jodi then did exactly as was expected and called on Veronica. When Veronica’s name was called, her entire team acted like it was some huge surprise. Let me think this one out. Tina has already gone into the Inferno and won, and Rachel is strong enough to play men’s lacrosse. Neither of those two had much of a chance of getting picked. Between Veronica and Tonya, it was a tossup. I just don’t get the huge surprise in that decision.

Not soon after the vote was cast, a few of the Bad Asses heard that the good guys had switched the pick. That basically means some associate producer filled them in on the whole thing, but let’s be glad they did. Immediately the Bad Asses started to cry foul. That’s not fair! You can’t do that! It’s against the rules! He took my lunch money! Well, maybe it was against the rules, but the producers would have decided if it was and made a ruling. Nobody took any actual votes, so it’s not like somebody was disenfranchised from voting for Tonya Nobody’s civil rights were violated since they were in Mexico. And if they had been chosen second, none of this would have happened.

It’s great to see how all of the Bad Asses act when something doesn’t go their way. Even though they have won two Infernos, they wouldn’t stop complaining. It wasn’t that they were upset, it was that they cared about the integrity of the game. If you could just switch your votes, then what next? I wanted Jamie or somebody to come out and say that it wasn’t a democracy but a cheerocracy, but the didn’t happen. We just got more bitching. Eventually, Veronica had fessed up to what was really bothering her. See, in all of the previous challenges, she was really a student of the game, and the stickler for the rules, but this time, somebody outsmarted her. WHOA! STOP THE PRESS! Hey Vicky Vale, there is somebody out there with more smarts than Veronica! You would think with all of that education and having spent the last 6 years doing these challenges, people would have learned not to mess with a girl who runs an online T-shirt business and had been in Playboy.

The Bad Asses say that what the Good Guys did was shady, and not in the spirit of the game. Apparently, they forgot about the time when they all threw a challenge in an effort to eliminate an unwanted member of their team. Not actually competing is more of a tragedy that some simple switch played for the Inferno. Did I mention that the producers could have stopped the “cheating” if they wanted to? I also think the Bad Asses are upset that they haven’t had any strategy that was worth anything. And both times they tried to use any strategy (one to save Tina, once to jump in the water) it has caused them to lose challenge.

Still, the Bad Asses acted as if Jodi had shat in tan oven and turned it on broil. I personally couldn’t figure out what the whole stink was about (ha ha). Without any sense of logic or reasoning, people just picked up on Veronica’s anger over the situation. Rachel acted as if they had just banned steroids in Mexico too. Even Derrick, Jodi’s best friend there, said he didn’t know who to believe. Dan, who we can usually count on for some logic, and who constantly laments how unreasonable and simple-minded his teammates are when it comes to reasoning, got in on the act. He told Jodi “I thought I was the biggest bitch in this place!” You got to admit, it was a good line, but it still didn’t lend any substance to their argument.

Eventually, Jodi broke down and cried. Mike tried to explain to her that this was all that Veronica can do. She is not the strongest, so she tries to make people weak-minded so she has some sort of edge against them. That usually involves getting a bunch of people to scream and/or gang up on people that can’t defend themselves and can’t find people to back them up (Sarah, Katie).

After all that was said and done, we are still reminded of the fact that Veronica can still win the life shield(maybe he team will throw the mission again, for the sake of the game’s “integrity”) and save herself from the Inferno. It is certainly going to be Rachel’s mission to win and save her. Also lost upon the Bad Asses was that the reason they picked Jodi (she cracked under pressure) hasn’t changed since she called out Veronica. Only Karamo has lost in the Inferno, so Veronica has at least a halfway decent chance.

As for what I think about this whole Veronica and Sarah, Katie, Jodi situation? Jodi, Please Maim Veronica.