Meet the Blockers

The Challenge: USA
Season 1, Episode 9 “Nevertheless She Persisted”
Original Air Date: August 31, 2022

When Connect Four gets cutthroat…

At the end of this episode, for the first time, everyone in the game has the necessary 5,000 Challenge Bucks to qualify for the Final. Exciting! And also not. Like the flagship show’s Red (and Gold) Skulls, USA’s Personal Challenge Accounts didn’t amount to much. No one will be barred from the Final for not having enough money. No one even struggled to earn it – Some people just had to wait longer than others… I’ve always liked the addition of a prerequisite for participating in the Final, but want it to be more demanding. I won’t be satisfied until someone misses out on competing because they didn’t meet the requirements! 

Get Your Towels Ready – It’s About to Go Down:

The cast is on a boat! But not even a day off spent day drinking can stop the Challengers’ wheels from spinning… Their rudders from rotating? We learn about an alliance of five women appropriately called “The Fab Five.” It’s Cashay, Cayla, Desi, Justine & Sarah, or all the women minus Alyssa & Angela, who’re much happier in their Big Brother girls/Survivor guys alliance anyway. Speaking of odd women out, Sarah is the only she who still hasn’t earned enough money to qualify for the Final. Hopefully The Fab Five can help her win the next challenge, because her old Survivor allies are starting to move on…

Back at the Compound, Ben struggles to straddle his new BB/Survivor alliance and his old friendship with Sarah. He’s sketched out by her formation of The Fab Five, and she’s “turned off” by his willingness to work with Angela, who all the other women (Alyssa excluded) urgently want to get rid of.

Elsewhere, in his own storyline (that I’m much more invested in), Danny wants a win and enough Challenge Bucks to compete in the Final – He’s the only man who hasn’t got the green. He does have a newfound friend, though, in Domenick. They’ve bonded as a couple of “straight-shooters” among their chaotic castmates, and Dom wants to help Danny get his Final-qualifying money. Working too closely with an ally who’ll eventually beat him in the end is how Dom lost Survivor. It’s either surprising or not surprising to see his reality TV history repeating, depending on your opinions about human nature…

The Challenge:

The cast arrives at a football stadium to play “Collect Four.” Basically, it’s Connect Four but everyone plays on their own individual, oversized grids, and the game pieces are hidden around the stadium’s 60,000 seats. It’s one of the season’s most memorable settings, inside which the players compete in one of the season’s simplest challenges: Everyone searches the seats for their designated color chips. When they find one, they take it to their grid on the ground, then return to the seats to find another. Line up four chips to win the challenge. 

Or you can turn your chips over, revealing a black underside that can be used as a “block” on another player’s board. Sabotage someone by blocking all their possible moves, and you’ll disqualify them from the challenge. The first man and woman to finish split 10,000 Challenge Bucks and earn the ability to send one woman into The Arena. The last woman to line up her chips, or the first to be blocked out of competing, automatically enters the season’s first female elimination. 

This is my least favorite type of challenge because if a majority of the people competing are in an alliance together, then it’s comically easy for them to target the outlying players, who don’t have a snowball’s chance in any of the nine circles of hell… At least that’s what usually happens…

Right away, Cayla and Sarah see Collect Four for what it is, a chance for The Fab Five to collectively block either Angela or Alyssa (but probably Angela) into losing the challenge/competing in The Arena. After, the alliance would help Sarah win. That way, the entirety of The Fab Five would be Final-qualified and they’d have the power to send Alyssa into The Arena against Angela. Meanwhile, Alyssa and Angela plan their own group block, but against Sarah. It should be a lost cause since it should be two-against-five, but never underestimate people’s willingness to ignore their allies when the endgame is in sight (or when they don’t like their allies that much)…

As Sarah realizes that her grid’s getting blocked, she barks and begs for someone, anyone, to help sabotage Angela’s board in response. Sarah frantically orders her Survivor allies and the rest of The Fab Five to donate their chips to her cause, but everyone except Cayla ignores her to fill in their own grids instead. Only after the challenge is won (by Desi) do the remaining Fab Fivers start helping Sarah and Cayla, but by then it’s waaay too late. Alyssa & Angela out-endurance their castmates and obliterate all the spots on Sarah’s board where she could’ve once connected four. She loses the challenge and will see her second elimination of the season. To camera, Sarah complains that Angela thinks she’s the “HBIC,” a phrase I haven’t heard uttered on reality TV since the mid-00’s. In her own interview, Alyssa says it’s “hilarious” that she and Angela were able to keep themselves out of last place given the gang-up structure of the challenge. She’s right. It was.

As for the men, the “omens” are on Danny’s side. Not only is Collect Four set inside a football stadium, (He’s a former NFL player.) but his assigned chip color is blue, his late dad’s nickname. Factor in his new friend Dom, who blocks anyone in the lead, and the challenge is Danny’s to lose… He doesn’t, though. He wins… On Survivor 41, Danny’s Individual Immunity win also came while he was thinking of his father, making this challenge especially special. It also means Danny finally has enough Challenge Bucks to compete in the Final. 

Once the chips are down (on the ground) and the challenge is over, Sarah announces to everyone (including T.J.) that she’s glad to be going into elimination because she knows Desi will let her choose her opponent… Desi might, but will Danny? We’ll find out!

Doubting Desi, Seething Sarah:

The three Survivors meet to discuss who’ll compete in The Arena. Sarah asks Desi & Danny to let her “go big” and take on either Alyssa or Angela. Desi’s down, (Duh.) but Danny wants to honor his secret Survivor guys/Big Brother girls alliance (and also get rid of Cashay in case the Final has partner sections). After Sarah leaves, Danny spills the beans to Desi about the Survivor/BB stuff… sort of. (So much for “straight-shooting…”) He says the alliance was supposed to be between the Big Brother women and all the Survivors, but the guys didn’t get around to telling Desi yet. It’s not a very good lie, but the thought of being outside the majority on a show like this is scary enough to make you believe a lot.

Danny rushes to explain the lie to Domenick, who then rushes to start damage control with Desi. He’s at it into the night, even while the cast is at the bar, but Desi is too sketched out for things to be that easily smoothed over. She knows the Survivor men are up to something, but does she have the power to thwart them? (Spoiler Alert: No.)

At another table, Sarah urges the rest of The Fab Five to harness their own powers and stop “doing the boys’ dirty work,” kind of insulting toward her ally Cashay, the men’s target-of-the-episode. Sarah also talks to Alyssa – Really, Alyssa talks while Sarah condescends in response. She calls Alyssa “sweetie” and makes strange woodchuck faces behind her back… Is Sarah the Julie Stoffer of The Challenge: USA?

The Scrambling Hours:

By morning, it seems like someone told Cashay to prepare for elimination because she campaigns to Danny for her safety. She reminds him that they’ve never partnered together during a challenge, so they “don’t know each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” but who could forget Cash getting dragged through the water by Tyson during Barrelled Treasure? In response, Danny admits that he doesn’t want to send Angela into The Arena because he’s not sure Sarah would win. 

After her unsuccessful campaign, Cashay decides that “men are easily manipulated by women they think are talented.” (A.k.a – She realizes Danny won’t vote against Angela.) Desi comes to the same conclusion; Danny won’t budge, and she won’t risk their relationship by continuing to nudge him. The Fab Five adjusts and asks Danny to send Alyssa into The Arena instead of Angela. Desi tries to convince him that the Survivors will “run the game” once Alyssa is out of it, but she doesn’t know that there are no “Survivors” anymore, just Survivor guys and Big Brother girls.

Heading into the last act break before The Arena, Desi and Danny are still in disagreement. Panicked, Danny asks Domenick what he thinks the penalty will be if the power duo doesn’t vote in unison…

The Arena:

Two huge steel hamster wheels are set up in the sand pit. Both are connected to 300 feet of rope with a ball attached to the middle. Earlier, Cashay joked that Sarah would “eat her” should they ever face off in elimination… I hope she’s hungry, because Desi and Danny vote Cash into The Arena against her. In an interview, Desi explains that “it just became the right move” to go along with the Survivor guys (meaning she probably couldn’t get enough support to pull off the Alyssa thing). This storyline – the Survivor guys last-minute ditching their female counterparts in favor of other “more competitive” women is reminding me of The Island… Will it work out for them like it did for Derrick, Kenny, and Johnny Bananas?

The Arena game is called “In a Roll.” Each player is positioned inside one of the steel wheels. They run (like hamsters) to turn the wheel and coil the rope. Wind enough rope, and you’ll pull the ball toward your side of The Arena. First person to pull the ball twice wins. Earlier in the episode, Desi assured us that she “has Sarah’s back” despite not helping her during Collect Four. Turns out, Desi meant it, because the elimination is a blowout. In Round One, Cashay can’t figure out how to move the wheel. She runs up the back. She pushes. She does the Running Man in place. Nothing works! Eventually, she does get it spinning, but too late to catch Sarah. Cash takes what she learned to Round Two, and though her wheel spins the whole time, she’s still too slow. Sarah wins 2-0, steals Cashay’s 7,500 Challenge Bucks, and qualifies to compete in the Final. She also declares that The Fab Five is “over.” 

Cashay leaves The Challenge content that her story will be about more than her breakup with Cinco, but I’ll only be content if she comes back to compete again. Maybe she wasn’t the most “prepared” (as Kyland would say), but who am I to talk? I can’t swim either…

Leftovers:

-Desi says that Angela “ostracized” much of the cast early on because she “felt so good with her core people.” I guess her social strategy hasn’t changed since Big Brother 20…

-After Danny wins his 5,000 Challenge Bucks, Tyson tells us that he “isn’t too concerned with Danny’s threat level.” If he beats Tyson in the Final, then this soundbite will be very important, or does its inclusion in the episode mean that it already is?

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Thanks for reading! Come back next Wednesday for another Challenge: USA recap!