The Challenge: Vets And New Threats Recap: A Shocking Elimination Turns The Entire Game Upside Down
Last week, Johnny Bananas led the deliberation with a very bold statement. "I am The Challenge!" he so eagerly posited. My, how quickly the tables have turned.
In this week's daily challenge (aptly titled "Amazed"), challengers raced through a maze of shipping containers to find and complete a Sudoku puzzle. The closer puzzles to the maze's exit were the hardest ones to solve, with the puzzles decreasing in difficulty the farther away they were. Most of the players knew how to solve Sudoku puzzles, despite the fact that no one — and I mean no one! — knew how to pronounce the word. The Top 2 teams came down to CT and Adrienne, and Ben and Michaela, with the latter taking the big W for the week.
Multiple teams DQ'd when the 45-minute time limit expired, but the team with the least correct answers, making them the losers of the week: Bananas and Leka. And since it was a male elimination week, Bananas was doomed to go straight into the Arena. At deliberation, the winning pair nominated Derek C. to go up against Hangnail Gabe in the jury vote. But the jury ultimately wanted to stomp Bananas out of the game, so they selected the large, beastly former WWE wrestler that is Gabe to go up against Bananas in the elimination.
The Arena eliminator was called "Hold 'Em Back." In the game, the offensive player had to deposit three tokens into three goals while clipped into a rope attached to a harness. The defensive player (who can't see what the other guy is doing — they're separated by a large wall) must then figure out which rope his opponent was attached to, and attempt to prevent the other player from running to the goals at the end of the track. The player who deposited his tokens the fastest stayed in the game and lived another day.
Gabe took the defensive post first and did one hell of a job wearing Bananas down. And even though Bananas knows strategy and pulled off some decent fake-outs during his time on the offense, he was no match for the monster truck that was Gabe. At the end of both rounds, Bananas locked in a time of 11 minutes and 33 seconds, but Gabe had him beat with a time of 2 minutes, 1 second. And with that, seven-time champ Bananas — the man, again, who self-proclaimed that he IS The Challenge — became the fourth person sent out of Vets and New Threats.
Were you surprised by Bananas' early boot? And were you Team Bananas or Team Olivia? Sound off in the comments below!