Photo: MTV

The challengers are past the halfway point of the season, and the boredom of sitting in their “mansion” without TikTok, Xbox, or PornHub is starting to erode their psyches. On an off day, they decide to channel their inner tech bros and make DIY ice baths to torture themselves with. Imagine Josh as a San Francisco start-up founder … he’d be peddling some dating app that gives you matches based on how much you can deadlift.

Torture is a major theme of this episode. The daily challenge is the dreaded mini-final, and it takes place on the set of Dune: Part Two in the blazing Vietnam heat. If that’s not enough to make the cast want to vomit, it’s also a purge: The man and woman who come in last will be sent home immediately.

Theo is in a tight spot with a two-minute time penalty after losing last week’s challenge. Plus, like Troy Bolton juggling basketball, learning to grapevine, and a crush on Gabriella, his head is very much not in the game — he’s getting complacent, distracted by the appeal of sucking face with Olivia.

The grueling mini-final involves a series of checkpoints. First, the competitors must dig through the sand to retrieve a key. They’ll then unlock a paddleboard and paddle one mile to the worst part: a memory match game that requires a fuck-ton of running back and forth, like the pacer test from high-school gym class on steroids. Once that’s complete and you have nothing left in the tank, it’s another slog jog up a steep hill to the finish line.

Bananas and Tori make this archeological key dig look as easy as finding a poet in Bushwick, speeding off after only a few minutes. Cara Maria, however, complains that every time she starts to make progress, the hole she’s digging refills with sand, like a bottomless bowl of zuppa toscana at the Olive Garden. After half an hour, Cara, Olivia, Aviv, and Derek time out of checkpoint one, allowing them to catch up with the rest of the competitors who have made their way to the memory game.

It’s so hot the players are starting to feel high on the spice. They’re seeing frozen margarita mirages. Lucifer himself is running the host stand, personally welcoming the cast to the lowest depths of hell and giving them the specials spiel (grilled monkfish with an olive tapenade).

Kyland and Jordan take off first for the guys, and Kyland secures his second win in a row. For target Jordan, second is the first to lose, so he’s still at risk. But hold fast! Here comes Tori, his beloved ex-fiancée, to his rescue! Tori wins for the women, which means Jordan is going to sleep as well as a grandma during the second half of Jeopardy!.

Even though Jenny has to take a hit of her inhaler every three minutes, she’s able to push through, making Michele and Laurel the last girls remaining. This gives me flashbacks to when Michele was purged last season on Battle for a New Champion after a nearly perfect game. Lucky for Michele, Laurel starts to break down, incapable of finding the will to continue this demented game of Royal Match.

When Michele finally solves her puzzle, Laurel tells the camera, “I am peacing the fuck out.” She puts on an act like she’s totally okay with leaving, and maybe she is, but I would wager it’s a defense mechanism to counter the embarrassment. Cara hypothesizes that she knew she wasn’t going to be able to win the final against this crew of Challenge girlbosses so she dipped early.

I’m typically not a huge purge fan (outside of the original 2013 horror classic … #RottenTomatoesWasWrong) because it’s not super-rewarding as a viewer to see someone’s game end so anticlimactically and unceremoniously. But in this instance, if it means not having to listen to Laurel humblebrag about how she wants to use the million dollars to make the world a better place by saving the baby egrets, I’ll absolutely take it.

For the boys, Nehemiah comes in last place, which he finds disappointing since he was generating so much “momentum” in the game. Um, is the momentum in the room with us? He needs to see the MTV psychologist on his way out because he’s clearly having delusions of grandeur.

With Theo in second to last, he’ll face elimination against Bananas unless Jordan runs back his Free Agents shenanigans and puts himself in. But he’s not going to do that because he’s desperate to get his fifth flagship win, putting him in the same echelon as C.T. As a respectable gentleman, he doesn’t count his win on The Challenge: World Championship toward that total — somebody tell that to Laurel! Actually, never mind, she’s already back in Florida treating dogs better than people.

Back at the house, the Chamber commences, but Tori’s mind is made up, so she’s just there so she doesn’t get fined. Except maybe a fine would have been better than sitting at the head of the table while Bananas blows his toenail clippings at you. His loutish gimmick of the week is an obnoxious get-ready-with-me tutorial that the rest of his Chamber mates, unfortunately, can’t scroll past. When Tori tries to extend an olive branch to him, expressing that, game aside, she has “nothing but love for him as a human,” he can’t meet her halfway and instead moans about how everyone always burns him and then storms out in a huff.

Bananas loves to bloviate on his podcast about the importance of playing an emotionless game, yet he consistently gets disproportionately offended and enraged whenever people take that advice in a way that works against him. He refuses to let his new rivalry with Tori exist in the spirit of competition and instead chooses to continue to escalate it on a personal, emotional level. We know he fancies himself an honorary producer, so it’s possible that the outsize reaction is, in his mind, in service of the show. In reality, however, it just makes him come off as a whiner and a hypocrite, and it would be much more fun to see him embrace the matchup as more of a Neil McCauley–versus–Vincent Hanna or Danny Ocean–versus–Terry Benedict cat-and-mouse game.

The elimination is called “Cramping Out,” and your brain will cramp out when you try to follow its Ticket to Ride–level convolution. Two long glass cylinders sit in the center of the arena with holes scattered across them. To begin, each player places eight metal poles in their opponent’s cylinder, strategically arranging them to make it as difficult as possible for the other person to crawl through. When T.J. sounds the horn, the guys will race through their cylinders — if they both make it, they join T.J. for a game of high-low, the outcome of which determines if they’ll get to add one or two poles for the next round. This process is repeated until someone gets stuck.

In the Era Invitational, Theo’s size worked to his advantage tremendously. He got to Hall Brawl against Paulie, who is half a foot shorter than him. This time, being a big, burly lad is a detriment, especially given that Bananas barely comes up to his shoulders.

The guys place their initial poles, and with a whole minute to slide through, there isn’t much suspense. They go back and forth for a whopping 13 rounds with neither competitor showing any sign of slowing down. Josh diplomatically cheers for both sides, and Michele yells at him for supporting someone who is working against her. All these people act like cult leaders! Michele is like, “Cut ties with all your friends and family and only worship me.”

Finally, T.J. tells the boys that they now have to escape the cylinder in 30 seconds, down from 60. There’s poles poking out every which way, and both cylinders look equally daunting, but Theo is too hot and hunky to make it through, meaning Bananas gets his second elimination victory of the season. Unsurprisingly, he selects Michele, Olivia, and Cara as next week’s targets. With Theo out of the game, all the showmances are officially out of play. Unless Josh finally works up the courage to take his crush on Bananas to the next level.

 It’s an especially brutal episode for our challengers, who are not taking the ruthlessness particularly well.