Everything wrong with The Challenge Final Reckoning: A Thread

Let me start off by saying I actually enjoyed this season when it aired, and it features an All-Star cast that should have produced a great season. Unfortunately, the producers were on crack when it came to everything else.

Creating teams with unbalanced genders: This set the stage for the entire season to be full of unfair challenges and eliminations with “equalizers” to try to arbitrarily balance out the competition between men and women.

Having a redemption house: Redemption houses are lame and take away from the excitement of what’s actually happening in the main house.

Zach/Amanda get to automatically send Jozea/Da’Vonne to redemption after winning the first challenge. It was completely unfair for them to be put in such a compromising position without losing any competition.

The double cross: allowing the fate of the redemption teams to be decided purely on luck was ridiculous. If you insist on having a redemption house every team that gets sent there needs to have a fair shot at coming back.

Essentially, the only way to truly be eliminated from the game while redemption was happening was to not pull the double cross or be picked by the team that did. This made the season drag on way longer then necessary.

Preposterously, the team that loses the redemption challenge STILL gets to stay in the game and go back to redemption. Because of this, Natalie and Paulie were defeated on 3 separate occasions before winning their way back in episode 15.

Kailah and Melissa were both DQ’d over a relatively mild physical altercation that easily could have been swept under the rug. Instead 2 of the most entertaining girls on the cast were sent home in the first episode.

The redemption house was given way too much screen time over what was happening in the actual game. All this did was stretch out the season even longer that it already was to show people who maybe had a chance at pulling a cross to get back.

Mercenaries. While on the surface this is a fun twist, it’s still incredibly unfair to the teams that have been competing all season that someone can stroll in, win one elimination, and take away a spot from them.

Due to being power team, Zach and Amanda were forced to break a tie between two teams that they didn’t even originally vote for. This was incredibly unfair to them and resulted in their demise when they couldn’t come to an agreement on who to put in.

As if the season wasn’t being stretched out enough, they decided to randomly bring TWO teams back at the third redemption challenge. By this point we were 15 episodes in and not even half the teams had been eliminated yet.

The final challenge is easily one of the worst in history. It consisted almost entirely of running and put more of an emphasis on throwing “grenades” at your opponents to slow them down. It only took about 70 minutes total across two days.

It was said the individual winner between the winning team would be given the option to take all the money themselves. Ashley did just that, but it’s still unclear how she even beat Hunter individually when so little of the final was shown.

A common conspiracy is that Joss/Sylvia actually had the best time but production fudged the numbers to allow Ashley to create a huge tv moment. Believe what you want but it’s certainly plausible.