The Challenge: Double Agents
Episode one recap and a really beautiful essay that captures why I love reality TV so much.
The Challenge: Double Agents Premiere Recap
The new season of the Challenge starts off with a bang, bigger and badder than ever. Set in Iceland, the Challenge: Double Agents is a follow up to the last season Total Madness, where red skulls were handed out for competitors who won gauntlet challenges, the only way to proceed to a final. It’s brutal, it’s cut throat, it’s “one of the most grueling Challenges yet.”
T.J. Lavin opens the show in typical T.J. Lavin style. If it’s not riding in on a tank like last season, it’s flying a helicopter over the snowy planes of Iceland, panning over the tips of white mountains and crystal clear seas to show off this Challenge, like every one, will be endurance based. You’ve got to keep up with the land to survive the land, especially if you’re hoping to make it to a final.
The Challenge has a lengthy history of folklore my friends and I would love to rant about, if given the chance. To summarize this season’s players would be impossible, but I will try anyways. Leeroy and Kam, both previous Challenge competitors, are back and they are a couple. We love this. They have never won a Challenge. CT, Ashley, and Wes, all previous Challenge winners, are here again, a staple to recent Challenge seasons. Bonus: Darrel Taylor is back and he’s a god who has won The Gauntlet, Inferno, and Fresh Meat. We screamed when we saw him (take your shirt off?).
Nany is here looking as insufferable as ever. Kaycee, the lesbian Big Brother competitor whose relationship ended because she flirted with Nany, is back. Cory and his obnoxious little brother Nelson are ready to battle. Big T is here along with our fave problematic Kyle. Jay from Survivor and, most importantly, from our hearts is here to potentially take on CT again. Nicole, Teresa, Tori…
Wow. I was right. I can’t fit everyone in.
TJ meets the group down at the beach to dole out their first Challenge. He is met with applause because he enters in a fashionable manner that can only be met with applause (see: tank). Quickly, the groups are split up by sex, as this is typically how challenges are carried out. Often, I wonder, where would I, or any transgender person, fit on this show if we were to somehow get on it? I’ll never know, since I’m so weak shoveling peanut butter out of the jar is a task, but I would like to know through the eyes of someone stronger and sexier than me.
For this challenge, the groups must run up a hill, retrieve a small canister with different colored string on it, memorize them, and plug in the coordinating wires to a briefcase in order of which colors show up first on the canister. The first win is Aneesa followed by Fessy, a returning competitor who crushed it as a Rookie last season. Out of the two, Aneesa had the fastest time and gets to pick who her partner will be for the remainder of the season. To Fessy’s dismay, Aneesa picks him.
The pair up is unexpected. Given how the past few seasons have been United Kingdom vs. United States, the challengers anticipate another season of competing individually or in groups. TJ shakes the game up by allowing them to choose their partners, a devastating blow to Kam, who goes for CT and is promptly turned down for Ashley. To this, my friend group screams. It almost feels like a travesty to turn down Killer Kam for Ashley, the person kicked off her season of Real World for telling Cory “my family could buy and sell your family.” But alas, here we are, Ashley and CT.
Don’t worry, it gets better.
The contestants get back to their bunker and here we see how truly desensitized they are to the entire competition. As the camera pans over the new house they’ve been given, the groups locate their beds and gym with relative ease then go immediately in to strategizing. When I was younger, the house reveal on the Challenge and Real World was my favorite part, always ready to see where they put the hot tub and how many people could make out in it. Opposed to earlier Challenges, where the television came from Tony and Camilla fights or Cara Marie and Kyle hookups, now the content comes from American Gladiator esque throw downs. The drama takes second place to the politics. Romance gone in lieu of the $1 million-dollar prize.
Nothing shows this competitive side more than the new additions to the team. Lio Rush, a WWE professional wrestler, is added to the mix alongside Lolo Jones, an Olympian and a three time NCAA title holder. We scream at the TV when everyone passes up Lolo, who out competed the girls in the first race. The rookies are often mistaken as easy one-ups, overshadowed by the weight that comes with their first season. Veterans notoriously team up to get newbies out, so much so that MTV has intentionally stopped calling new people “rookies.” This season, however, with ten red skulls on the line, people are more particular about who they get out first. The votes for the first elimination ceremony show that in this Challenge premiere.
Conspiring takes place to get out Gabby, a Love Island Season 3 candidate, and Lio. Seeing as how they are new to the show, people think this will be an easy lay-up to lay out. Aneesa and Fessy walk to the Double Agents booth to see who everyone voted for and are shocked to find out it’s CT and Ashley, two former Challenge winners. As an added twist, the booth shows the two who everyone voted for, prefacing the screen with a message reading “Do as you wish with this information.” The two turned to each other stunned, just as we lose our shit on the other side of the screen. The Challenge: Double Agents is already off to a juicy start.
CT and Ashley are livid as they go into elimination. With another trick up his sleeve, TJ announces this will be a woman’s only elimination. Whoever wins may either stay with their partner, choose the loser’s partner, or steal any other person in the house they may want to compete with. This toss up tells us that loyalty is futile. The smart decision would be to consistently swap out strong competitors until making your way to the finale, red skull in hand. At least, that’s what I would do if I was buff and sexy competing for a million dollars.
Aneesa and Fessy must pick someone to go up against CT and Ashley. In a twist nobody saw coming, the two pick Wes and new comer Natalie, a Survivor contestant who is built like a truck. Natalie must face off against scrawny Ashley in a competition where the two are strung by their hands and legs to a metal beam which they must cross from one direction to the next, all the while underneath another metal beam that is on fire. The two begin, with Natalie ahead, until a literal bump in the road is met. Ashley swings herself over the hump on the beam and continues while Natalie sways back and forth, eventually catching up. As the two begin their pursuit back, Natalie out performs Ashley and sends her home, proving once again that Ashley fucking sucks and shouldn’t be on this show.
The Challenge: Double Agents alludes to a season filled with betrayal and underwater competitions that will drive my anxiety sky high. As somebody who has been watching the show since high school, I cannot emphasize enough how important a cornerstone the Challenge is to American television.
For reference, here’s insight into how much my friends and I love the show:
The Silver Screen: Taming Trauma with Reality
At the Season 30 Real World House before they transformed it. Rude.
I grew up alongside reality TV. Ask anyone close to me how many hours I’ve watched MTV and they’d safe roughly a year’s worth, maybe two if we’re being honest. I fill in the blanks for friends of Real World seasons that aired during college, from 2012-2016 before it went off the air. I plug my computer in by HDMI to show newly queer people season 8 of Are You the One? When new people are introduced to our Wednesday Challenge Premiere parties, Laura and I pause to catch everyone up on 30 seasons of history.
It’s not that I breathe reality TV, it’s that I bleed reality TV.
This past week the drama has been between Bear and Georgia. Background information on the two include that Bear and Georgia were hooking up on the Challenge, continued seeing each other outside of it, and Bear was extremely annoying/borderline abusive to Georgia. Recently, he leaked an X rated video of them having sex on Onlyfans and has received an incredible amount of backlash from British press. The man now is threatening suicide to double down on his already manipulative behavior.
Ah, men. Do they ever learn?
In college, I dated someone not too far from this behavior: threats of nudes leaked and suicide attempts bounced from him to me like lightening. We watched a season of Real World set in Chicago and I was absolutely transfixed by Tony, a man who treated every girl like shit but had a charming southern twang. He hooked up with Madison in the house, impregnated her, and producers brought on his current girlfriend and ex-girlfriend Alyssa, the woman he ended up married to years down the line. I staunchly defended, and still defend, Tony as one of my favorite MTV characters. Whether that stemmed from my exes infatuation or not, the answer is lost on me (the answer is yes). Even in his cameo to me, Tony admits he “doesn’t understand why I like him so much.”
I watch the Georgia and Bear situation unfold like origami, one layer leading to the next in the never-ending maze that is reality TV trauma. I comment things like “hope you enjoy jail!” on his posts heightened by the emotions this brings up for me, the fear of falling back into that place, the understanding I survived it. My friends joke about how often I comment on reality stars Instagram’s, ready to take up the torch on behalf of women or the LGBTQ community. I’ve been blocked by so many people, I couldn’t tell you who all has me on their shit list at this point. There’s no barrier between us and the silver screen and, because of that, their lives feel accessible and intricate to mine.
Sometimes I’d watch episodes before my boyfriend and I had the chance to watch them together, desperate to see the latest drama happening on MTV. I had fallen into this hole in high school but didn’t fall nearly so hard as I did when my life went to shit, a mirror of emotions reflected by people with the liberty to lose their shit on national television. I reveled in watching breakdowns I couldn’t have, the strength to express anger and see it through to the end. All my idols from the show happened to be men, maybe because masculinity masked their pain through hurt and throwing furniture. Backed in a corner, I cheered them on.
If I couldn’t do it, shit. At least they could.
I had dabbled in the Challenge in high school but never loved it the way I did post college. Sure, I had posters of Evan up and sure, he was later kicked off the Challenge for assaulting a woman with a tooth brush, but I still own up to him being a problematic fave from my childhood. I didn’t know that until I dove in head first to the MTV world. Finding that out was devastating, but not soul crushing. I grew into adulthood alongside the Challenge and realized men truly are infallible, which grew into the all-encompassing phrase “all men suck.” It’s not far from the truth, a more convoluted answer than “men ain’t shit.” They’re impacted by the same patriarchal hell that pushes women down every day.
Still, “men ain’t shit.”
I grew sympathetic to the women in the show with the understanding that I could have these experiences and work them out alongside characters who are not characters, characters with loosely written scripts that resembles themselves at the end of the day. I root for their relationships when mine are hard and mourn at the breakups on Instagram. I introduce partners to the show slowly as insight into my life hoping someday I can explain fluently why the people on the show matter so much, because this is how I healed. This is how I broke the cycle. I watched their hardest times and how they battled it, how they continue to battle it, and I grow into myself the same way they grow with the phases of their life.
I see Bear and offer no sympathy. I see Zach gaslight Jenna and offer no sympathy. They don’t deserve it and sure, maybe it’s because men are stunted in their emotions. Mostly, it’s because I feel sorry for them. At some point, you must grow your wings and fly away from the image you’ve grown into, sorting toxic from healthy like it’s a box going away to Goodwill. I hope they grow from who they have been the way I’ve grown with MTV, the new Challenge formats, the Real World houses that keep getting better and better. It never leaves you, it shapes you. As Douglas Coupland writes:
“Your past isn’t something you escape from. Your past is what you are.”
I’d allude to this being a “hard to say” situation if it was but it’s not. It’s quite easy to understand why I love reality TV: it’s transparent, ludicrous, and there’s no unnecessary, convoluted nuance added to the characters. They’re not characters, they’re people, highlighting how infallible existing is with the added stress of work, relationships, and heartache. Reality TV cuts to the heart of humanity, it’s messy, chaotic, and it’s easy to see yourself reflected in it, for better or worse.
The ex I have now reconciled with. We’re friends, I swear. Gotta X his face tho. You get it.
If you’re a friend of mine who’s read and subscribed to my newsletters, DM me (yeehaw_meg) that you read this whole thing and have recommended it to everyone you know. I will literally give you someone’s cable information to watch the Challenge with me.