The Challenge Final Reckoning Finale Recap
The episode opens with a slight bit of what we got the last episode; with TJ addressing the teams and informing them of the twist at the end, to split the money or take it all for yourself. He also gives each team a grenade. These grenades can be used at one of the stations to give a different pair a disadvantage. After that, the group heads to a helicopter to climb down a ladder for the start of the final. It’s hard to say who wins since each group goes separately, but Marie and Cara don’t seem to do all that well while Hunter ends up falling halfway through.
After this, we head to the next step which is Run to Vengeance. Natalie and Paulie get out to a pretty sizeable lead, with Paulie especially being way out ahead. Joss and Sylvia and Hunter and Ashley are pretty close with Cara and Marie close behind. However, Natalie ends up missing a direction on a sign and heads the wrong way. Paulie finishes and is surprised to see Joss and Sylvia behind him instead of his partner. Ashley finishes next with Hunter behind her, and then Cara and Marie finish. Natalie finally finishes seemingly a while behind everyone else. We are of course subject to producer wizardry, but it seems like it took Natalie a LONG time to get there. Natalie breaks down crying upon arriving and apologizes profusely to Paulie.
After Natalie shapes up, we head to the next step which is entitled Final Stand. This step has the competitors attempt to stand on a small platform for as long as possible, with the teams being assessed time penalties based on when they fall off. The grenade for this section is the opportunity to give one team weighted vests which they have to wear, but none of the teams take that option. The leg starts, and Cara and Marie cannot get set up on the platform. Marie eventually starts to fall backward and then bails completely ending Cara and Marie’s time. The girls never really seemed to find their balance, and clearly, their once promising communication has dissipated. It starts to rain on the competitors, adding to an already strenuous situation. She heads inside the house and pulls out a large bottle of wine, much to Marie’s surprise.
Cara and Marie resolve to start drunkenly heckle the other competitors while sitting like soccer moms in front of the other pairs. Marie starts chirping Paulie about how his girlfriend is going to react to his relationship with Cara, causing Paulie to tell her she doesn’t believe what comes from pieces of trash. Cara and Marie then start arguing over who they are going to throw their grenade at and due to editing it’s hard to see what is going on, but it is clear they’re back to being angry at each other.
Once Cara and Marie go back inside, things really get interesting on the platforms. Natalie tells the other pairs that the first one of them to step down will not get a grenade thrown at them. Ashley tells them that this isn’t Big Brother and they don’t make deals in the final mission (not sure I agree on that one) and Sylvia asks Natalie and Paulie why don’t they hop down then. Natalie says they are behind the other two teams by a significant margin and need the margin. After mulling it over for a while more and reaffirming the deal with Natalie, Joss and Sylvia step down followed by Ashley and Hunter leaving the win for Natalie and Paulie. I think this is immediately a gross miscalculation by Sylvia and Joss. Even if you could guarantee Natalie and Paulie are not throwing a grenade at them, to give up two and a half and five minutes is a ton of time in a Challenge final. Back in the Rivals final, Wes and Kenny finished the first portion of the final forty-five minutes ahead of Tyler and Johnny but were only given a one-minute advantage on the final leg of the event. To put trust in another team with what is at stake and also give up a time advantage seemed like a very erroneous decision.
After sleeping for the night, the competitors awake the next morning to find an assortment of disgusting items awaiting them. This step is entitled Breakfast of Champions (no word on if they had to pay a royalty to Wheaties or not) and has the pairs consume 32 plates of disgusting food each. The first pair to complete it receives no penalties, while the other pairs receive a one-minute penalty for each plate they do not consume. TJ then introduces the grenade for this section, Amasi Fish Milkshakes that each member of the given pair has to consume before finishing. Ashley and Hunter decide to throw the grenade at Sylvia and Joss, while everyone else holds it. Considering the only reason Sylvia and Joss are paired is that of an eating mission, it makes sense they would get the grenade.
The mission starts, and Joss and Sylvia immediately get to work on the milkshakes. They seem to get through them rather quickly, and start working on the rest of the items. Hunter absolutely destroys this mission, and Ashley holds her weight as well getting the first place and an eleven-minute advantage over the second-place pair Joss and Sylvia. Natalie and Paulie are thirteen plates behind, while Cara and Marie are way back at nineteen plates behind.
The next step of the finale is the Savanna Sprint, a 3K race between all the pairs to a cave at the end of the course. The grenade for this leg forces the given team to wait for ten minutes while the other teams get a head start. Joss asks Paulie if they are using their grenade for this leg, to which he responds no prompting to Joss to throw his grenade at Ashley and Hunter. Everyone else holds their grenades, and the pairs get going on the run. Natalie and Paulie get a little bit ahead of Sylvia and Joss, while Cara and Marie are a solid bit behind. Ashley and Hunter then get going, with Ashley chanting to herself “One Million Dollars, One Million Dollars” as she is a few steps ahead of Hunter. Paulie and Natalie are able to put some distance between themselves and Joss and Sylvia and finish in first by a considerable amount. Joss and Sylvia come next, followed by Cara and Marie and then Ashley and Hunter.
This puts the competitors at the last step of the finale, appropriately entitled The Final Reckoning. This final step has the pairs race across hot coals to reach the finish line. The grenade for this step has the given pair get a chain tied around their ankles with a set of keys they have to leaf through to unlock themselves. TJ asks about the grenades, and Paulie starts by saying he knows Joss and Sylvia are out in the lead, but he made a deal with them, so he does not want to break it. However, Natalie gets an evil look in her eye and starts telling Paulie that if they do not throw it at Joss and Sylvia they will win. Joss and Sylvia start badgering Paulie that he swore on his family’s life and they do not know the times so who is in the lead is in question. Eventually, Paulie just throws the decision to Natalie who puts the grenade on Sylvia and Joss. Joss is literally crying in his confessional as Sylvia screams at Natalie while the decision moves to Cara and Marie. Marie immediately shouts to throw the grenade at Natalie and Paulie while Cara mostly just shouts at Marie, causing TJ to declare the grenade dead.
People were giving Joss and Sylvia a ton of heat for this, but I think Natalie and Paulie’s decision needs some analyzing as well. First off, I don’t see why they are so certain Joss and Sylvia are in the lead. Ashley and Hunter got a massive lead on the eating portion, and also had an advantage from the platforms portion. Plus, Cara and Marie still had their grenade which could be used on Joss and Sylvia if Natalie and Paulie do not send theirs that way. While Joss and Sylvia obviously should not have made that deal in retrospect, I’m not so sure Natalie and Paulie should have broken it either.
The final step starts, and it seemingly takes five seconds for the pairs to walk across. While I would suggest producer chicanery on something like this, the coals did not stretch far at all, so I can’t see it lasting any length to be significant in the outcome. The only real suspense for this portion is Sylvia and Joss, but they do not seem to take terribly long either to find the key and unlock themselves from the chains.
After Sylvia and Joss reach TJ, we get to the end of the finale and the announcing of the teams’ placements. Cara and Marie finished in fourth place, with a total time of 104 minutes and 28 seconds. Natalie and Paulie ended up in third place with a time of 71 minutes and 33 seconds. Joss and Sylvia ended up in second place with 69 minutes and 43 seconds, giving Ashley and Hunter first place with a time of 69 minutes and 3 seconds. Ashley and Hunter explode in celebration, while Sylvia and Joss cry off to the side. However, the theatrics are not done yet.
TJ reminds the crew that the final decision will only come down to one person and announces that Ashley finished with a better time giving her the decision to split the money with Hunter or take it for herself. We get a commercial break in between, but it doesn’t seem to take long for Ashley to tell TJ Hunter has “belittled me, put me down, slut-shamed me, and threatened her life and her family’s life” and she is keeping the money.
Everyone doesn’t really seem surprised but more so seems emptied by her decision prompting Cara to remark “I mean, duh” while Joss goes to comfort Hunter. Ashley says this nothing compared to what she went through all season, which considering they both were pretty terrible to each other (and I honestly thought from what we saw Ashley was worse than Hunter) that trying to equate Hunter’s treatment of her to the money is probably the most ridiculous claim of all. Hunter actually apologizes to the other three teams for not just throwing the final because he knew Ashley would do this if giving the opportunity. Hunter ends up just breaking down crying as Cara comforts him, while MTV plays a clip of Hunter talking to some of the other guys about Ashley saying, “If that slut costs me half a million dollars, I am coming for her family.” Well, I don’t Ashley weighed that threat all that seriously considering her decision. Hunter screams for his tennis shoes so he can leave before telling Ashley he will pray for her.
In her closing confessional, Ashley goes on a spiel saying this is for any girl who has been slut-shamed, put-down and any other form of being demeaned. MTV and Ashley really are seeming to be trying to turn Hunter from sympathetic Anti-Hero to straight Villain. You already feel bad for Hunter considering he just had life-changing money literally ripped from under him, but for the producers to portray him in this way without showing any of the footage of how poorly Ashley treated him is really a shank job I did not think was necessary.
A lot of complaints were thrown around about this finale episode of this season of The Challenge. Their primary issues were with the competitive aspect of the episode, which I completely agree with. This finale was way tamer than previous ones. The Rivals and Battle of the Exes finales were multi-day finals for substantially less money than this one was. The longest time by thirty minutes on this final was Cara and Marie with 104 minutes (and that is with at least 29 minutes in penalties given), while Johnny’s winning time on Free Agents was eight hours. There were also some issues I had with how each part of the final was weighed, where the only things that contributed to individual time were the two running portions and each individual plate in the eating portion had way too much weight given to it. However, despite the issues with the actual competition, it is hard to deny how entertaining this final was from a dramatic perspective. Each of the four pairs remaining had some form of drama to cope with, whether it was Cara and Marie’s frenemy rollercoaster or Natalie/Paulie reneging on Sylvia/Joss or of course Ashley and Hunter; there was drama persistent throughout the episode, and an ending that brought to light a theme that is ever present in The Challenge: It is better to live or die by your own wills then leaving your fate in the hands of someone else.
Extra Notes
o Marie had an excellent interview on AfterBuzz TV where she dissected a lot of aspects of the final. I’d definitely recommend giving it a listen for yourself, but I’ll give a few of the highlights. There was a puzzle section that was completely cut from the episode, Ashley apparently had talked about taking the money from Hunter leading up to the final, Marie actually attempted to throw their grenade at Ashley and Hunter but eventually just gave up after she and Cara couldn’t get on the same page, and the chains Joss and Sylvia had to get out of did not take much longer than what was shown.
o A commercial for CT’s wedding special played during the episode, and for those not aware it should be a two-week event starting on December 11. The cast members at the event are Weston Bergmann, Cara Maria Sorbello, Tony Raines, Derrick Kosinski, Shane Landrum, and Leroy Garrett. All credits to PinkRose of Vevmo for information on the special.
