The Grey Team needs a captain — and who knew the Challenge had a code of conduct?
Three Players Gone, Two New Captains
TJ shows up and reveals Josh, Nelson, and Leo have been sent home for breaking the Challenge’s “code of conduct… whatever that means. He doesn’t elaborate further, but this means the Grey Team and the Blue Team will need to name a new captain. At the next challenge, the Grey Team picks Chris, and the Blue Team picks Anna Leigh. The new captains will be leading their team in the daily competition, Mean Cuisine. Each team will row a boat down a river through a floating market serving less-than-savory dishes. Competitors will need to grab five items to give to their opponents, and the meals are first come, first served. Then, the teams will eat the dishes they’ve been assigned. The first team to clear their plates wins.
Want to know why Josh, Nelson, and Leo went home? Here’s the real reason.
Girls’ Day Buffet
Once the horn blows, the Orange Team struggles. They have seven people and three people rowing their boat, so they move slowly. The other teams are smaller and lighter, so they make a pact. They give the worst dishes to the Orange Team — including two plates of pig snout — while they give more manageable plates to each other, like onions and hot peppers, water bugs, and durian smoothies. The men on the Orange Team struggle to get down their food, while the Blue Team seems to be making progress. The Grey Team also finishes some of their plates, but Chris cannot manage to choke down his half-developed chicken eggs. Miraculously, this gives the Blue Team their first victory, which came at the perfect time. It’s a girls’ elimination day, and the team only has three women on it, and they’re all safe.
A Splitting Reveal
After the challenge has ended, TJ breaks the news to the cast — the captains will have all the power in the end. If they’re leading the winning team, they will choose how the prize money is split, if it’s split at all. This gives Tori more motivation to keep her position as captain, while it could change whether other teams stage a mutiny. After the challenge, Bananas wants to ensure Tori intends to split the money. She claims she would split it, and Michele backs her up, because Tori believes in karmic energy. In Tori’s defense, she said she shared her prize money on Ride or Dies. She earned her first-place finish, and it was never expected that she would share.
Talking Split
Adrienne walks into the Orange Team’s room while they’re chatting with Tori. She says she’d split the money, and she believes Chris would split it with his team, but she doesn’t think Cassidy would. Cassidy eavesdrops on this conversation, and she’s offended that Adrienne was talking behind her back. Cassidy insists that stealing all the money would eat her alive, so she wouldn’t do it. Still, Adrienne feels she’s done nothing wrong by expressing her opinion, and she doesn’t fully believe Cassidy.
Random Accusations
The Grey Team deliberates before the Arena, but it really turns into Cassidy and Adrienne rehashing their drama from the other night. Again, Cassidy insists she’d never steal money from Adrienne, but Adrienne knows that Cassidy just met her, so the thought of keeping the money has to have crossed her mind (again, neither of these girls are captains). Adrienne says she never wanted to upset Cassidy; she just wanted to be honest, and it seems Chris has taken pity on her. He knows the Orange Team will be nominating Izzy, and he feels it would be emotionally challenging to send Adrienne to face her BFF in the Arena. So, he proposed drawing names from a bucket, and he randomly pulls Cassidy’s name… though Bananas believes this draw might not have been entirely random.
Sliding Home
At the Arena, Tori asks if captains can nominate themselves. She’s still sending in Izzy; she just asked a clarifying question when she didn’t need clarity. Then, after the draw, Chris sends in Cassidy. The two girls will play Slide Show, and there’s a steel wall with a slider revealing a puzzle key (which is just the faces of Cutthroat competitors from both season 20 and 42). When the key is revealed on one side, it blocks the answer key on the opposite side. So when TJ blows the horn, both girls try to push the slider to be the first player to catch a glimpse of the answer key. After nearly half an hour, Izzy stops pushing, and Cassidy sees the puzzle board. This gives Cassidy the advantage, and she takes her time holding the wall. After a few back-and-forths, Cassidy hangs onto her lead. She calls for a check, and she takes home the win, sending Izzy home.
New Team. Captain?
After the Arena, TJ addresses the Blue Team. The next episode will be a male elimination, but there are no men on the team. So, they need to merge with the Grey Team (which probably won’t do much since there’s just one man on the Grey Team, but whatever; the format is a mess anyway).
Stop Being Polite 