The Challenge Recap: A Waste of Good Chocolate

Thirteen teams of exes! Which combo will act stupidest this week?

We get a Tarantino-esque intro, in which there are ominous bits of the conflict to come. Thunder! Rain! “Why are you freaking out?” “Don’t ever f’in talk to me again.” Ooh! I’m intrigued! So, fooled by MTV again. Shame on me. I think it was the shot of those wet tree branches bobbing in the wind that did it.

Oh crap, did I leave some chocolate on my nose?

Two days earlier the sun was out, and everyone wore sunglasses and life vests on a boat to Paradise Island. Isn’t that where Wonder Woman’s from? Seriously, hard frickin’ lives. I can see why so many cast members lose their dang minds.

Circle o’ jerks

Johnny explains that the guys are all rubbing sunscreen on each other to multiply something weird by 100, so it’s not weird anymore. Haha, I followed that philosophy in high school with my appearance. Then Ty moves his slimy hands over to Paula, and the whole cast watches them make out on a blanket. He’s known her for some time, he says, and he wants to take it to the next level. She rebuffs him. What the heck is the next level? Is he saying to dump her boyfriend, or that they’ve actually only gotten to second base so far? Anyway, no dice. But he loves her! He’s one of those men who love too much. Emily, in direct contradiction to what she says on the Aftershow, interviews that she doesn’t like them together because Paula’s going to distract Ty, like a giant-boobed weasel.

Boom! The moon is out, suddenly, and full. Ty and Emily are talking. Flashback to DC, when they started loving each other. And they still do! She’s made him a better person or something! Aw! Let’s see if that betterment went both ways.

Her drinkware suggests nobody loves loading the dishwasher.

The clue alludes to the fellas catching their runaway brides, and it interrupts Johnny when he’s in the gym getting swole. Paula posits that the ladies will have to jump in the air and be caught. I would watch such a challenge and not even complain.

Diem has become slightly manic with the stress of not talking to CT. She rattles off all the things she hasn’t done, like looked him in the face, while Ty silently curses himself for not having eaten faster and getting stuck at the table with her. She is the Crazy Lady from Central Casting right now. Get her on SVU with an imagined assault. She’s really selling it. Ty’s like, “That’s—” but nope, she’s still talking. He finally gets a chance to speak and notes that the negative energy is going to erupt and get worse if she keeps going the way she’s going. And he would know, ‘cause he used to put uprooted trees in people’s bunks and stuff while covered in shaving cream? I didn’t see that season, and I’m sure I’d find Ty much less dashing if I had. Anyway, he was a querulous bitch on previous seasons, and it didn’t go well.

He’s expending such energy! I bet he gasses out later.

She’s impressed by his sage advice to sit CT down and go over all the crap again. That’s bad advice. Particularly when at least one party is going to put the emphasis on how she was grievously wronged. This approach works only on TV. Okay, he finally gets to the apology-and-move-forward part, which is decent advice, and she drunkenly praises him. He adds that he doesn’t want to be around when she does all this. Ha.

The Moon That’s Always Full is back. Diem has washed her hair, and she and CT walk to their maximum advantage camera spot and sit down. So, things were done, and now they’re both sorry, and I guess it sinks in this time. CT suggests they take their fire out on somebody else.

Cue vagina music.

Playa Grande. There’s an altar, a rack of tuxes and dresses, and several giant cakes. This is almost as fascinating as CT and Diem’s relationship. There’s gonna be a series of tasks. The last couple to complete each task is out, until there is only one couple standing, who will get married in Diem’s head (spoiler). Oh, and be Power Couple and get $2,500.

Everyone rushes to get dressed in the clothes. Dunbar remarks that the girls must really be ready to get married, as fast as they got into their clothes. Or they just had fewer components. CT can’t find his bowtie. You can guess how Diem takes this. Then the men help the ladies over a wall in their dresses, which quickly turn into skirts, which get thrown over shoulders.

Saving nothing for the honeymoon

Then they have to dig a box with a garter out of the sand. I don’t know if Ty and Emily’s is just buried deeper, or if they dig a hole next to it, or what, but they are screwed. One by one, the other couples find the garter, put it on, and run to the next task, until Emily and Ty are left alone and Domed. She immediately sheds her dress and kicks it. They tell the camera they have no one to blame but themselves, and Ty is sporting his ever-present head-sand.

I’d eat two layers of that cake. Noms. 

Task 2: Eat two layers of wedding cake, take the veil hanging nearby, and run to the next task. They make a big deal of highlighting this on the screen, so for a minute I think there’s going to be a directions screw-up and a come-from-behind, and maybe an Amazing Race-style penalty, which proves for the second time this ep that I’m a fool. Johnny and Camila hate cake. Eating, gagging, spitting. CT and Diem run off without their veil, and Paula and Dunbar do the same. And then TJ helpfully calls them back to get them. Well that was zero fun.

Task 3: Change a tire on the Just Married car. In the sand. I’m not a huge fan of the beach, but I do like the way the sand is thwarting these people. CT and Diem finish first, and they begin Task 4, which is that he has to carry her down the beach. Mark’s back locks up or something – maybe from trying to cut corners and lift the car without the jack, in an awesome feat of strength we didn’t see? So it’s kind of fortunate that he and Robin lose this round. I’d hate to see him sustain permanent damage carrying her down the beach.

Chippen-decrepit

So now it’s CT & Diem vs Paula & Dunbar for the win, the former with a giant lead.

The latter with a more practical and less romantic transport style

At one point, poor Paula gets dropped in the ocean. CT and Diem take the win, and Diem is elated.

A little too elated, Crazy Lady.

CT and Diem have their winner dinner with wine and reminisce about the past, when they made some yucky-sounding omelets for breakfast this one time. Bla bla shit-eating grins bla.

Beg-a-Thon. The Power Couple asks each powerless couple which team they would throw in. Mark serves up Paula and Dunbar, due to Paula’s sleeping with Ty, who’s on a “rougue” team, which I guess means “without allies.” Mark apparently had a unibrow-waxing mishap or something, from the way he’s wearing his hat, and later his bandana. Say Ty and Emily come back, posits Diem, and then lose again. Who would Mark throw into The Dome, Johnny’s team or CT’s? Mark works his jaw and chews his lips and says he’ll cross that bridge when he gets there. CT is wise to Mark’s terrible gameplay.

Johnny gloats about not having been on the begging side of the Beg-a-Thon much. Who would he throw in against Emily and Ty, if Paula and Dunbar had been eliminated? Johnny also dodges the question, saying how well he and Chris are working together, for the first time, and how good that is. Diem likes seeing him squirm.

CT is over this crap.

Paula and Dunbar, OTOH, would throw in Johnny and Camila. Paula puts on her Wise Walnuts voice and talks about making a smart choice instead of a comfortable choice.

Da Club! These crazy kids are having a bachelor party. Which is pretty much the same as a regular party, except the guys wear white t-shirts and bowties, and Diem wears her stupid veil. She actually looks a little bit nice, probably because she’s beaming. Shots and fun are had. They pile back into the bus and Camila does impressions of people.

Back at the house, Emily is heard saying, “We gotta do this.” She and Camila scamper upstairs to get their minstrel show on. Camila smears chocolate over Emily’s face and stuffs herself a tank top full of Paula boobs. Emily asks Camila if she’s sure this isn’t racist. And granted, Camila didn’t grow up in the U.S. with its particular shameful slavery history, but, terrible call there Chiquita.

Bad, stupid, drunk behavior on both parts.

I will say that the Aftershow reflected pretty well on both Emily and Ty. She was overcome by guilt, and he was very adult about it accepting her apology and telling her to just not do it again. I’m usually pretty skeptical of staged apologies, but this one actually did a fairly good job of neutralizing the awful incident.

Emily and Camila come downstairs in their garb, and their little joke fails supremely. “She’s… not that smart,” Ty remarks. Camila and Emily are too caught up in themselves to read the room and get the hell back upstairs in a timely manner before anyone can process it. It’s actually Camila who finally says, “No, they’re really pissed.” But then she disses everyone in an interview for not laughing with them. The rest of the cast continues to be stunned.

I’m shocked! Wait, is that frosting?

Ty is the furthest thing from amused. The blackface is terrible, and it’s terribler that it’s his own partner doing it, who’s supposed to, well, be his partner. He decides this is bullshit and he’s going home, right after he eats his delicious cheesy eggs.

Way to trust your instincts there.

He goes up and tells this to Emily, who’s starting to fight back tears in her interviews. Downstairs, Johnny suggests to Paula that the whole thing could have been motivated by jealousy, recalling that she and Ty do play grab-ass right in front of Emily on a fairly constant basis. Paula looks chagrined. She and Johnny go upstairs and try to convince Ty to wait and think about things overnight. Emily, now completely aware of her giant misstep, approaches the suitcase-stuffing Ty and insists she wasn’t coming from a bad place. But she doesn’t fully understand why he’s pissed. He says he can’t even talk to her if she can’t grasp why what she did was wrong.

So apparently she never heard of blackface before? On the aftershow, she says that her cultish upbringing was no excuse. Bottom line, she was dumb to do it, and he was not wrong to get pissed. Johnny, of all people, convinces Ty to hold off for a bit. Surprisingly, Johnny doesn’t turn around and get pissed at his own witless partner. Emily snuffles and feels bad some more. Ty and Paula go to bed.

Most likely in Emily’s room

They entwine their limbs and talk about how Ty is hurt and how Paula doesn’t want him to go. Some latter-day Pearl Jam manqué sings about friends coming and going. Shut up, payola-fueled cross-promotion.

Too many exteriors in this ep. Where else would they be but the house? CT acts surprisingly mature and tells Ty, who’s eating eggs again (still? I guess they could have partied until the morning. And the permanently full moon shots tell me nothing) that CT can’t know how Ty feels, but CT does know it would be crazy for Ty to throw the challenge away at this point. Ty compares the incident to getting jumped at a bar and having the person you’re with high-tail it out of there. He admits in an interview that he’s traditionally been the shit-starter, that this was unexpected, and that it hurts more than he thought it would. He goes to a showered Emily, who’s been nibbling her nails and biting back tears, and tries to explain why he was angry. She reiterates that she had no ill intentions and she’s sorry, and she never wanted to upset him. He accepts her apology and explains his feeling of him-against-the-world. I gotta say, that could have been a ton uglier.

In the excitement, CT and Diem haven’t yet decided who they’re Doming. And Diem looks busted again – possibly she’s bloated from alcohol consumption.

The orangeface she’s wearing is not helping matters.

Everyone takes their places in the room, on the throne, and in front of the group with TJ, who’s not touching last night, since it didn’t violate challenge policy, strictly speaking. Diem and CT say stuff about their arduous Dome-choosing process, and then the ep is over! Tune in next week, when you care even less?

So who does everyone think will get thrown in? Paula and Dunbar are the easy target, but the other two teams have also pretty much admitted they’re more loyal to each other than to CT and Diem. This might be a good time to try and dispose of a slightly scattered Johnny & Camila, or an unsuspecting Robin & Mark, no? It’s what I would do, in the bizarro world where I’m 10 years younger, good at challenges and happy to be on TV. I don’t think our Power Couple will, though.

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