For the first time this season, we saw a stalemate at the nomination ceremony on episode 5. TJ called for a revote, only allowing competitors to vote for the two vulnerable teams (Yeremi & Ashley or Ben & Olivia), but there was no decisions.
So TJ took matters into his own hands… literally. He just flipped a coin.
This was a surprising way to resolve the tie, mostly in the sense that it was very anticlimactic. So we have to wonder why production wanted TJ to toss a coin when there were other ways to determine the outcome.
The most obvious resolution would have been to ask the winning team — in this case, Michaela & Jake — to split the tie. Production even could have given the whole decision to Michaela since it was a male elimination day. Her victory didn’t give her much more than points, at least Jake won immunity from elimination, and this would have been extra power for someone in her position.
While this would have been the simple way to resolve the stalemate, it also would have been somewhat unfair to Michaela. She would have gotten blood on her hands if she had to break the tie, and we’ve reached a point in the Challenge franchise where power is often a bigger punishment than a reward.
We also need to consider that making the winning team the tiebreaker would make stalemates somewhat predictable. We seen this on seasons like the World Championship where teams wanted to force a tie because they wanted the winning team to pick a side, especially when they knew the winners’ allies.
On The Challenge, randomness is one of the few things that are worst than getting power, so from that perspective, a coin toss is a suitable way to break the tie. If it was truly random, there’s no incentive for the non-winning teams to try to force a tie.
However, The Challenge has also been notoriously shady when it comes to coin tosses. Often, heads or tails isn’t clear, and that was kind of the case on episode 5. We know the coin ended up on tails, and Ben went into The Arena, but TJ tossed the coin into a pool.
The shot of him flipping the coin is not a continuous shot, and we didn’t see the cast verify the outcome. As a viewer, it looks quite sketchy.
The Challenge has used coin tosses in the past, usually to determine which competitor plays a game first or whether males or females will compete in an elimination tiebreaker round. One thing about this method on the show: the coins always vary, but usually the footage is quite unclear. The instance on episode 5 is no exception. The coin looks like a Chilean 100 pesos coin, but even the best shot of the landed coin is (intentionally) under rippling water.
Despite the possibility of production manipulation, the coin toss still incentivizes the non-winning teams to not reach a tie. The cast has the power to reach an outcome and not give the power away. Whether a coin chooses the outcome or an editor behind the scenes, it doesn’t really matter. The cast has relinquished their right to choose.
I don’t fault production for relying on a random method to break the tie, but it’s hard to ignore the possibility that production put Ben in the Arena because they wanted Olivia to have a Hangnail story line. To be fair, we see the full cast vote twice, so they gave that power to production, but the end result doesn’t feel fully random.
If it were up to me, I would have still put Ben in the elimination, simply because he had fewer points than Yeremi so far this season. We still don’t know what these points mean, but using them as a tiebreaker would have been one way to assign value. But I don’t make the rules, and apparently the coin toss was the best solution production could come up with.
Stop Being Polite 