The Biggest Joke of a Challenge in the Show’s History

The Challenge has gone through eras: It started with fun, backyard games and involved into a competitive pseudo sport. While the show has tried to label itself as “America’s Fifth Sport,” true fans know that’s not the case.

Unlike real sports, luck is a key element in being successful in the challenge. Sometimes, this means the show will implement daily challenges designed to be equalizers (something a real sport would never do), and to make matters worse, production doesn’t fully test the equipment. Case in point: Drone Control from Double Agents.

I’d argue this is the worst mission we’ve ever seen in The Challenge’s history, because it really offered nothing to the show. Daily challenges should do at least one thing such as testing relevant skills, creating entertainment, or at a minimum offering cool promotional shots. In every case, the challenge should strive to be entertaining.

Drone Control put the pairs in a cave and forced one person to navigate a drone using a VR headset. The catch: That person needed to bark out commands to their partner who was blindly steering with a remote control. Essentially, it was a challenge rooted in communication, but everything about this challenge felt wrong, including:

• Drones served no purpose for Challenge competitors beyond this mission, and this challenge was a forced attempt to shove the spy theme in viewers’ faces. We never saw drones again this season, and the equipment wasn’t well tested. Drones would get stuck on rocks and agents would be DQed.
• Competitors just stood in one spot and guided a drone through a dark cave. We’ve seen many challenges in the past that aren’t physically demanding (like trivia, for example), but at least they offer something viewers can enjoy. This challenge was just a string of disqualifications, and competitors didn’t even realize they were getting DQed because their drones were so far away.
• The cave was dark, so there was no way to make this competition look cool. In fact, once the drones left the base, viewers had no way to confirm the footage actually corresponded to the agents being shown on screen.

Drone Control ended with only one team, Devin & Tori, completing the course, so they won by default. Despite the fact that the season had heavy hitters on the cast like CT, Darrell, and Kam, they couldn’t finish this mission because it was so poorly designed.

Double Agents gets a lot of passes because it took place during the pandemic, and there were a lot of limitations put on filming. Still, there was no reason for this mission to exist. Production could have implemented a simple foot race and it would have been more interesting.

Luckily, we haven’t seen a daily challenge as bad as Drone Control. The show has given us many more underwhelming missions, and we’ve had our share of challenges that look cool, but were just glorified puzzles. Still, nothing is a bigger joke than Drone Control, because at its core it was a bad idea that had even worse implementation.