Was The Challenge: USA 2 Final Good?

The Challenge: USA 2 is over, and we have another final in the books. It gave us two new winners, and like every final we’ve seen, this one had its ups and downs. Production made some great choices here, but there are some (one of them is fairly major) missteps that ought to be improved in the future.

The good

The single best thing about this final was the fact that it was truly solo. Very few individual seasons have finals that don’t require some type of partnership. Look at The Duel 2, Free Agents, or Dirty Thirty — these seasons were meant to be solo seasons, but some competitors were seriously hindered by their forced partnerships in the final race.

There were other good things to be found in the final, including:

• It was very easy to follow, and the benefit of winning checkpoints on day one was clearly explained. Often, competitors push themselves on day one without knowing the reward.
• The “double down” twist was fun, and fairly low stakes, but still had benefits.
• The length was good. It wasn’t overly drawn out like Ride or Dies, but it was interesting enough to fill an hour.
• No one is questioning whether production manipulated one of the winners, this can’t be said about USA 1.

The bad

Day two was plagued by the “risk stations” which were presented as optional. In reality, they were not. If competitors couldn’t successfully complete one of them, they were essentially out of the race. But, even opting to skip it was a death sentence, as we saw with Michaela.

Other frustrating things in the final included:

• A piece of the competition was omitted from the final edit.
• While day one consumed a longer portion of the episode, it had very little impact on day two.
• The end of the episode felt very abrupt; the credits were running as Chanelle finished.
• The purge was super uneventful and utterly predictable due to the risk stations.

The verdict

As kids would say nowadays, this final is “mid.” It’s not going to be incredibly well remembered, but it produced deserving winners. It was also fairly predictable, but this means people aren’t going to argue over how “rigged” it may or may not be.

While there were faults, competitors were aware of them before they happened, so no one really had the rug pulled out from under them. For the most part, fans are happy with the winners, so this means people aren’t going to be talking about this episode too much in the future. But given the status of other recent finals, that’s probably a good thing for the franchise.