[Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Challenge Season 41, Episode 2.]
The second episode of The Challenge Season 41, Vets and New Threats, should’ve probably been about the buckwild challenge of the day, or that heated women’s elimination, or the twist T.J. Lavin announced about post-elimination team shakeups, or even the weird position being a “hangnail” puts someone in. Instead, though, Episode 2 of the season — aptly titled, “We Used to Hook Up” — was all about how Johnny Bananas‘ latest hookup turned a muscly rookie into a drunken sadboy who punches walls.
Yep, as ostensibly resistant as Dee Valledares was about getting into any kind of cahoots with Johnny in the premiere episode, even expressing ire over being chosen as his partner for fear it’d put a target on her back, that all went out the window in week two. After getting a new partner — perhaps ironically, she chose Leroy Garrett for his tendency to avoid drama — she still stayed firmly in Bananas’ orbit, cozying and cuddling with him all week. (Cara Maria Sorbello predicted this decision to be her eventual undoing on The Challenge as a whole. We shall see.)
We soon learned that Dee formerly had a hook-up situation going on with Will Gagnon, and the reason we learned as much was because during a night out on the town, he got a little too drunk and started to lose all chill over the sight of her with Bananas. First, Will took it out on the bus seat in front of him on the ride back. Then, he had a pity party at the house with several new friends following him around, dutifully talking him out of just staring at Bananas and Dee all night. Then, he connected his fist with drywall off-camera and found his knuckles swollen to twice their normal size. When he woke up, he was ready to wipe his own slate clean, but these are not the kind of behaviors that tend to win friends in a Challenge house. What’s next for this messy showmance triangle? Nothing good, probably, especially for Will with that temper.
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As for the other events of the episode, things got interesting in the daily challenge, called “Side by Side,” when the spectacle aspect of it proved to be pointless. The setup saw the players huddling in a dirt hole as dune buggies with different patterns printed on their undercarriages raced overhead, and they struggled to see through the dirt and speed to memorize them. Some players smartly recognized a pattern in the puzzle board itself and managed to finish without relying on watching the cars zip around. Turabi “Turbo” Çamkıran led the charge on that, bringing his new teammate Ayoleka “Leka” Sodade to a win that earned her safety and the power position of choosing who to send up for potential elimination against challenge loser Blue Kim.
While “hangnail” player Adrienne Naylor was automatically put up for the vote, Blue wanted the second-to-last-placer Tay Wilcoxson, and that’s what she got — both from Leka as nominee and the rest of the house in the jury deliberation. The arena, “Laser Focus,” was basically “Balls In” but with laser beams, and the two women put up a spirited fight with one another. Each won one round before the third and final stretch saw Blue simply too gassed out to succeed. She became the second casualty of the season and earned her former partner and Challenge super-veteran Derrick Kosinski the fancy new title of “hangnail.” Womp!
Elsewhere in the episode, a new alliance was formed between Yeremi Hykel and Dee, who declared themselves each other’s number one but brought along Leka and the oh-so-confident Sydney Segal for numbers. The quartet dubbed themselves the “Janes and the Jungle Man” (Yeremi originally wanted it to be Tarzan), and the whole thing has some definite Johnny’s Angels vibes for obvious reasons.
The Challenge, Wednesdays 8/7c, MTV
