Season 35

[5.5/10] Total Madness was rough for many reasons.

First off, the host, T.J Lavin, took it upon himself to institute a twist where the players would be required to go into elimination and win. They had to do so to obtain a ‘Red Skull’ to qualify for the final.

I don’t ever recall a time when fans of the show were whining about players not going into elimination rounds. The beauty of The Challenge is, like Big Brother, the best players are able to use their social game and political prowess to avoid the elimination round by making deals. Blindsiding unassuming players were some of the best parts of a particular season.

The twist limited gameplay and players not deemed as physical threats still had targets on their backs whether they had a skull or not. Earning multiple skulls served no benefit. T.J.would “threaten” the players at various points about the need to get a skull, but players had plenty of time to obtain them.

After episode 10 aired, MTV/Viacom fired Dee who made some racially insensitive remarks about BLM. Because of this, Dee’s arc was mostly edited out of the remaining episodes which screwed up the narrative. Dee was being characterized as the villain of the season, so it took the steam out of an already lukewarm season at that point.

Wes and Bananas finally teamed up after feuding for years on end, and it was a nice change up for once. Unfortunately, it was not enough to save this train wreck.

The final was absolutely horrible and had many fans questioning the integrity of the rules. There were reports of parts of the final being edited out, and many production favorites still were able to skate by even though we were promised not to see that.

The more production tried to change things, the more they remained the same.