The Challenge Season 37: Spies, Lies & Allies Mid-Season Review
The latest season of MTV’s hit show The Challenge is now halfway done and I would love to share my thoughts with you guys. So without further ado lets begin! Hold up, before I continue I just want to say Spies, Lies & Allies has to be the worst name these producers have come up with for a season. Okay back to the review.
The Veterans Pact
This season saw all the veterans make a truce; So their past beefs were put aside and they made it their goal to decimate every rookie. We’re now 9 episodes in with 10 remaining and their plan is already 68% complete.
This plan was smart on all of the vets’ part. If you remember back to The Challenge Season 33: War Of The Worlds (WOTW) , there was also a lot of new players, and the vets crumbled while the rookie alliance of Bear, Georgia, Ashley Cain, Theo and Zahida flourished. On War Of The Worlds Ashley Mitchell, Johnny Bananas, CT, and Zach got eliminated one by one. By the time the final arrived, there were only 3 vets remaining (Wes, Hunter and Cara) while there were five rookies remaining (Theo, Georgia, Ninja, Mattie and Turbo). A rookie ended up winning that season. Its good to see that the veterans this season saw the mistakes from the vets on WOTW and didn’t repeat them.
Josh and Devin have been instrumental to this alliance’s success. By them squashing their beef, they were able to link 2 groups together, thus providing more solidity to the vets alliance. There’s definitely alliances within this super alliance and the way Devin has found a way to integrate himself in almost every faction is commendable.
This season has been the vets giving the rookies a clinic on how to play the game. Right away the players from Survivor USA got targeted since they come from a show that encourages people to make big moves. Amanda ruined any potential for a global Survivor alliance to form by telling Emy she’ll be safe from the first elimination (called The Lair) if she got any lava about Michaela. They also went after Kelz and Corey L because they were strong and clever players and they quickly sensed how eager those 2 were to shake things up.
The way the vets have been systematically destroying the rookies is good gameplay and they deserve credit for thinking many steps ahead of the them. Would I have liked to see Fessy squirm non-stop after how he played on Double Agents? Sure but it would have been detrimental had the vets handed over power to more than 50% of the cast. There’s always strength in numbers and its understandable why the vets entered into self-preservation mode.
Since Priscilla selected Josh to be her new partner after her and Jeremiah defeated Berna and Hughie in an elimination, the vets were left with no choice but to break up and start attacking each other. Its going to be a really dicey game moving forward, so we’re in for a treat!
The Rookies Fumbled Hard
The reason there were so many new people added to the show and why there was such a focus on international contestants is because production doesn’t want to bring back Ninja, Rogan, Bear, Georgia, Theo, Mattie and a few others for justifiable or unjustifiable reasons. The theme this season is a soft reset of season 33. They didn’t need to take this route. I would have cast way less rookies and more familiar faces like Hunter, Sylvia, Joss, Asa, Amber M and Liv. If the people I just mentioned were on, the season would have been more intense and watchers would have been way more open to tuning into the show. Production seriously needs to break out of their formula of bringing on half the cast from the previous season. They need to do a better job at rotating players.
This batch of rookies barely put up a fight. It took eight episodes for someone to finally discontinue the cycle of creating a rookie-rookie team. Going forward, MTV needs to cast people that have a better understanding of the game and are genuinely interested in being on. The funny thing is there’s a reasonable amount of reality tv personalities that watch the show and have been vocal about wanting to be on, but MTV pretends as though they don’t exist.
What makes matters worse is there was 19 of them so they had a numerical advantage of 4, and by the first house vote deliberation it was 5 since Nam got medically disqualified. So for them to have dwindled down so rapidly is pitiful.
I think the best rookie so far has been Emy. She’s just a hot mess that has me cackling almost every episode and she’s showed a ton of heart in competitions which as a viewer I love seeing!
Michaela is also someone I really like, even though her time was short, she at least had the initiative to start an uprising. I watched her compete on Survivor Gamechangers, and the hype is real. Michaela would be a dangerous player in an individual format.
Out of all the males, Hughie has been my favourite. His ability to go from 0 to 100 so fast is quite remarkable, that episode where he’s arguing with Corey L while in the middle of an elimination is an all-time classic.
The Twists
A new twist got implemented into the game which is that the winning pair of a challenge could pick any male and female of their choice to battle together in the elimination arena. This twist would have been great in most seasons but unfortunately for this one it made the vets games easier and the rookies didn’t catch on to what they were doing until it was too late. The vets absolutely abused this twist. Out of the 8 eliminations so far, only 2 vets have gone into elimination, whereas 17 rookies have battled in The Lair. This is a clear sign to me more gamers are needed for The Challenge.
The other twist this season is being able to pick a new partner for yourself after winning an elimination. When watching Double Agents, I felt like the twist got overplayed and needed to be put in the recycle bin. The people in charge clearly love this twist, but I prefer when teams are together for an entire season because we get to see if they can overcome their differences and grow or be at each other’s throats the whole time which leads to their downfall.
Conclusion
This season so far has been solid but it could have been better had there been less rookies and a better mix up of vets. Overall I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen up to this point and I’m looking forward to the second half of the season cuz there’s bound to be plenty of fireworks.
