When Does the Mercy Rule Come Into Effect?

I never thought that writing for Battle of the Sexes 2 would become such a difficult task. How hard is it to sit through a 30 minute show, then make fun of the people in that show? Considering all of the people in the show are now caricatures of themselves, it really shouldn’t be that hard. Well, with the current pace of the latest Real World/Road Rules challenge, it is becoming almost painful to sit through those 30 minutes. Still, there is the possibility that I could get some sort of enjoyment out of the show if there was only some suspense in the outcome. Unfortunately for me, the girls have played so pathetically, they have taken almost all of the suspense out of the game. What I am left with is to find some sort of pleasure in watching our All-Star personalities on the screen. Thankfully my balcony is only three stories up, or I would have put myself out of this misery a long time ago.So I lament about the sorry state of the Challenge, but there are a few reasons to watch it. If you are feeling kind of dumb and your boss dumped on you, you will come to realize that you aren’t that dumb compared to some people out there. If you just lost job, you will gain confidence knowing that there are at least some people out there less qualified than you at, well, anything. And if you’re taking some heat for being the office floozy, you’ll soon realize that you could sleep with every one of your coworkers and still come away with more dignity than the cast of this show.

The producers finally took the gloves off, sort of, when it comes to the true intentions of the contestants on the show. They have spent weeks trying to convince us that the challenge is somehow fair, and that they go into each season figuring out how to inspire the greatest competition among the players. In fact, their goal is really to bring out the bitchy, selfish, greedy, and backstabbing nature of everyone involved. Now, if the girls were somehow competitive, or the guys were a little more petty in their elimination decisions, it would make for some intrigue as we got to the end. But at their current pace, the girls involved are playing for nothing more than a chance to be humiliated by the guys during the final challenge.

This week’s competition was called “Cargo”. Each team had to pull a set of chains to raise a car 10 feet off the ground. Thanks to the wonders of physics and mechanics, and an ingenious pulley system, this task wasn’t as hard as it sounds. The difficult part was that each team was required to pack a lot of luggage into each car, requiring at least thirty seconds worth of strategy. For their win, the team would win a bunch of exercise equipment. It was really funny to watch Arissa jump around with excitement at the idea of winning the prize. If you closed your eyes and imagined really hard, you could actually come up with a mental image of Arissa actually eating enough to have the energy to exercise later. With such high stakes, the teams were going to have to pick their leaders very judiciously.

On the guys side, they seemed to pick Dan and Eric very quickly. Brad immediately called bullshit on this. Eric is pretty much the in 5th place on their team, so if he is not in the inner circle, he is almost certainly gone. When Brad says that he doesn’t think they have thought this through, the guys start talking about their packing credentials. Mark defends his friend Eric by saying “I know from first hand experience that he’s a good packer.” Hey Mark, what you do in your free time is your business, and you can even do it in Texas now. Apparently, Dan worked for FedEx “We spent the whole day just packing trucks.”. Oddly, it seems that Brad worked at UPS, and he also knew how to pack. Wow, all of these guys know how to pack. In the interest of good taste, I won’t take that joke any farther. In the ummm, end, Eric said that he was taking the risk being a leader, so why is Brad complaining. In a perfect world where the girls are competitive, this might be true. In reality, this means that Eric has a 99% chance of staying another week.

The girls have also come to the realization that they are going to lose every challenge and that it is dangerous to be a leader. Tina steps up, but when the search for a second leader comes up, nobody wants to volunteer. Coral volunteers Ruthie, saying she hasn’t done well and that it’s a chance to prove that she should stay. Although Ruthie hasn’t been stellar, she is easily one of the five best women overall in terms of performance, and the ones that were much better than her have already left. Everybody knows that Arissa should be the one to step up and take some heat, but Coral knows that “it’s no longer about winning the mission, it’s about keeping your ass alive”. Arissa is Coral’s only ally, and Coral is Arissa’s only ally. If neither one of them is a leader, they get to choose who is eliminated. Ruthie, who knows what is going on, but doesn’t want to be a bitch, decides she will be a leader.

Right away, there is conflict with how the girls are packing. Ruthie prefers a horizontally stacked approach, while Tina prefers a vertically stacked approach. As it turns out, neither way was going to be that much more time consuming or space-saving (at least from the edited view we had), but the girls did finish their packing a few seconds after the guys were finished. Although the pulleys and whatnot make raising the car easier, it still takes a lot of work. The girls basically had to hope the guys would take longer packing, and they could use that time to get a heard start raising the car. It didn’t work out that way and the guys smoked them – badly.

For some reason, the girls got it in there head that if they had gone along with Tina’s idea for packing instead of Ruthie’s, they might have had a chance. Even Jonny Mosely said “The guys seemed a little faster at packing their car.” Again, it may be the editing, but the girls were WAY behind the guys at pulling the car. They would have needed a huge advantage at packing to have had a shot at beating them. And with nobody who worked at FedEx, UPS, DSL, or the Magic Eric Neis Jump Rope warehouse, how could they have had a chance?

Deliberations went as expected. The guys stuck to their plan of the weakest link, and since Eric was in the inner circle, it meant either Theo or Brad. Dan and Eric thought it over, saw that the only person who hadn’t been in a final challenge was Brad, and so voted him out. I was sad to see him go, because his no-nonsense approach really was refreshing among the rest of the idiots we had to deal with. In the end, he just wasn’t enough of a friend of Eric or Mark. For Mark and Eric, they had a great strategy. They said they both wanted to make it to the end. By getting the win this week for Eric, Theo and Mark can go next week, so no matter who wins, there will always be one of them left over to campaign for the other.

Although Sophia tried to be Ruthie’s lawyer and defend her side, Coral and Arissa were not having any of it. All they need is one more week sitting on the sidelines, and they are going to be in the final. Coral said she wasn’t going to take any chances because it was a $60,000 matter. Once again, if the girls had done anything to convince me they had a chance at anything, I could buy this “I just need to make it to the end strategy”. In the face of certain defeat, Coral simply looks selfish and greedy. Arissa is not going to be a help to anybody who is left in the final three, she has proven she just isn’t up to any sort of physical challenge.

At elimination hill, the results were announced. Brad knew what was coming a long time, felt pissed, but took it quite well. He knew what was going on, and he knew he couldn’t stop it. Theo complained about what was going on, and it is refreshing to hear that he cares about how other people are treated. It would be even more convincing if he had said something after a couple of the more shady decisions earlier in the game, or anything the girls did any week. Now, he just comes across that is worried that all of a sudden the playing field doesn’t favor him.

Coral came out to do the elimination, but Sophia stopped her. In between sobs, she told Ruthie how much she loved her and Ruthie said she was happy she didn’t sell her soul just for some money (she only sells her soul for fleeting amounts of fame). She is going to show just how much she won’t sell her soul by appearing on the next challenge and letting the same thing happen again.