The longest season ever has concluded!
In the only quasi-purge we get all season, Episode 18 starts with a lair vote for who will go into a pre-final elimination. Amanda and rookie Emmanuel are voted in.
For the first time ever, I listened to the “Death, Taxes & Bananas” podcast. Host Johnny Bananas had Amanda on the show and they both spoke about how important it is for them to drive plots. Both Bananas and Amanda are fully aware they are making a TV show. Because of this, Amanda says she was angry that people kept hooking up in the bathroom (the one place the cameras don’t really go).
Also, Amanda said that she has a fragile custody situation with her Baby Daddy and needed to be back in the states after a month. Due to COVID-19 protocols, filming ran long and Amanda says she needed to go back, so she volunteered for the elimination off-camera. Amanda was confident in her podcast interview that she would have gotten the veterans to vote in Emy, if Amanda herself hadn’t said she needed to go in.
The idea of making good TV and needing to go home also explains why she picked Tori and not the one competitor Amanda could have beaten: Nany.
Nevertheless, Tori beats Amanda in “Drone Drop” which is a physical challenge (25 points for Tori). Amanda is sad to lose right before the final and cries (10 points).
Rookie Emmanuel calls out Devin, but it’s a puzzle and Devin wins (25 points). If Emmanuel had known, he would have been wise to choose Nelson. More on Nelson’s supreme thinking later. Nevertheless, there’s some controversy as the non-competing cast members are yelling puzzle help. Tori is trying to slyly help her bedroom boo, Emmanuel, but it’s kinda hard to yell down hints without others noticing. The rest of the veterans are not cool with Tori trying to help Emmanuel.
Many viewers (according to Bananas, but also from Reddit comments) do not like seeing the non-competing players help anyone in elimination at all. Tori should have either helped Emmanuel and stood by her choice or just not tried to help anyone at all. But instead she insisted she was helping Devin or both of them, which doesn’t really make sense. This is why Amanda doesn’t like Tori: because Amanda finds this behavior to be disingenuous.
Nevertheless, the little bit of help Tori gives Emmanuel isn’t enough and he loses.
Thrilled to make the final in her rookie season, Emy does what she does a lot and cries (10 points).
Finally, the final! A two-day thing (does it have to be 2 days every time? What about a straight up race with checkpoints and fewer gimmicks? I digress…)
- Checkpoint #1: Players assemble a puzzle map of the world before putting 10 national flag icons on the country they represent. Then they race to board one of four helicopters. Each helicopter holds two players and depart in the order that players completed the puzzle.
- Checkpoint #2: Players are flown to a drop zone in the lake and they jump from the helicopter, swim towards a sea scooter and ride it to shore (Bananas made fun of them getting scooters, pointing out that he never got a scooter – just a canoe or kayak). Along the way, they collect a puzzle tied to a flagged buoy. After reaching shore, players run down a rocky path to the next checkpoint.
- Checkpoint #3: Players arrive at a puzzle station to find 15 puzzle pieces in addition to the piece they collected during the previous checkpoint. They must use the 16 pieces to solve a puzzle before going down a trail. Upon completion, players could then choose to join either the Orange or Purple Cell, each of which hold two male and two female players. Devin finishes first and jumps on Purple. CT is next and joins his pal Devin. Tori and Emy are the first female competitors to finish and they join CT and Devin. This makes Kyle, Nelson, Kaycee and Nany the Orange Team Cell Diamond thing. Players are told they will compete in these teams until further notice.
- Checkpoint #4: Teams unravel ropes and chains to release a cage with a safe inside. They must then dive and memorize a code submerged underwater before climbing to the top of a mountain. There, they must find nearby signs and decode the code they memorized to unlock the safe, retrieve the key inside and proceed to the next checkpoint.
- Checkpoint #5: Teams use a key from the last checkpoint to unlock a “missile” and carry it up a winding path to a puzzle. Orange Cell (self-proclaimed underdogs, because they don’t have CT), are in the lead. There, they combine their missile with 11 other missiles to make a matchstick puzzle, which they solve before proceeding to the next checkpoint. Unfortunately, to solve the puzzle, they need to move sticks to form squares. Nelson suggests moving a stick to form “a long square” which, Kaycee points out, is a rectangle. Goodbye Orange lead!
- Checkpoint #6 & Overnight Stage: Teams roll a large metal sphere containing supplies for the overnight stage down to a cave. The first team to reach the cave are safe, which is the Purple Team. The losing team has an elimination the next morning.
The losing team has to go against themselves in the “Back Me Up” elimination we’ve seen before. Kyle beats Nelson (25 points) and Kaycee beats Nany (25 points). Nany cried (10 points). Kaycee vs. Nany was a long, dramatized scene, despite the fact that it was obvious how the competition would play out.
It’s announced that teams are over. Contestants will complete the end of the final in male-female pairs. The winners of the elimination are rewarded with the ability to select any player of the opposite gender as their partner. So winning that first day really just kept those four Purple People out of elimination… right.
Kaycee picks CT, of course. Kyle chooses Tori over rookie Emy. Devin and Emy, therefore, formed the final team. The team pairs raced to the top of the mountain, where they memorized a 20-digit code.
Then they ran down this loose grave path (which gave Kaycee a scary deja vu from her injury in that same circumstance last season). CT and Kaycee got to the safe first, just a small bit ahead of Tori and Kyle. CT and Kaycee entered the code to unlock the safe and retrieve the black diamond inside, making them the 1st place champions (150 points each). Tori and Kyle came in a close 2nd place (85 points each). Way behind, Emy and Devin finished in 3rd place (40 points).
As winners of Spies, Lies & Allies, CT and Kaycee are given the decision of how much, if any, of the $1 million prize money to award the remaining finalists and how much money to keep for themselves. They decide to give each other team $100,000 each.
Considering Kaycee and CT were never thrown into an elimination all season, very much protected by all four other finalists, this is not just generous or fair, it’s also an appropriate appreciation of the veteran alliance + CT/Emy friendship.
Officially Unofficial Challenge Fantasy League 