‘The Challenge’: It’s the Turbo vs. Theo Show (Even When It’s Not)

[Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Challenge Season 41 Episode 14, “We Have to Boogie.”]

At the start of The Challenge‘s latest episode, there weren’t many champions left in the house, and that number was reduced by one by the end of it.

Of the 16 contestants still in the game, only three had ever won before (Aviv Melmed, Ashley Mitchell, and Turabi “Turbo” Çamkıran), with the others being systematically targeted, sometimes out of respect for the threat they’d pose in a final, and sometimes out of utter disrespect for what they still had to offer in the game.

In Wednesday’s (October 29) edition, Theo Campbell successfully diverted the house vote away from himself and Adrienne Naylor, which landed Turbo and Sydney Segal in the arena instead. Theo and Adrienne were fresh off their third elimination win and feeling confident about their de facto assassin status… not enough to want another round, of course, but enough to try and make a big move against Theo’s now-nemesis Turbo. During the team’s victory lap, Theo rallied his allies with a plan to remind people just how competitive Turbo would be in a final, something he himself experienced on War of the Worlds.

The daily challenge, “Rune Race,” took place on a runway with a table full of runes at one end and an equation at the other. Players had to memorize the symbols, solve the equation, unlock a cage hiding six feet underwater in the nearby lake, retrieve the puzzle pieces, and then solve that. Michaela Bradshaw and Cedric Hodges smoked the competition, with Ashley and Leo Dionicio in last place.

Since that result took two vet teams off the voting block, the alliances in the house were split evenly between votes for Theo and Adrienne and Turbo and Sydney. Theo tried to suggest a third alternative option — Nany González and Justin Hinsley — while Turbo refused to engage in any kind of politicking about the vote. In the end, nobody budged from their already-existing alliances, forcing a tie, which led host T.J. Lavin to flip a coin as the deciding vote. Fortune favored the bold, in this case, as it was Turbo and Sydney who found themselves thrown into the sand as a result of the coin toss, and Theo and Adrienne couldn’t believe their luck in sitting this one out.

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In “Wake Me Up,” each team had to split into runners and climbers, with the runners retrieving heavy cannonballs one at a time to place on a paddle wheel, which lifted their climbers up to retrieve puzzle pieces from a wall. Then, they worked together to solve a puzzle. At first, it looked like Leo might run away with it, as Turbo, who was sick but didn’t complain about (or maybe even admit) it, was lagging far behind in the retrieval portion. However, Turbo made up for it by decoding the puzzle quickly enough that he and Sydney narrowly defeated Ashley and Leo, and, well, he had a fiery choice of phrasing for Theo after the deed was done.

Now, it’s Turbo and Sydney’s turn to be confident — not that they weren’t already — as they rightly noted, “No one wants to see us in a final.” With that, the Turbo versus Theo feud lives to see another day (read: episode). With so few household names left in the game at this point (and Ashley’s exit ending the storyline about her clash with Aneesa Ferreira), count on this topic to remain a hot one in the final stretch of this season.

The Challenge, Wednesdays, 8/7c, MTV