The Challenge, the best show MTV has ever produced in the history of reality competition series, entered into its infamous final on Wednesday night. The final eight challengers are almost all well-known Challenge repeats with the exception of Amber B, who is absolutely killing her rookie season. Throughout this season, which has been titled Double Agents, one challenger in particular has stood out for being more insufferable than Johnny Bananas after his sixth win: Fessy Shafaat.
Fessy is your typical Challenge man: he’s big, he’s muscular, and because he once played a sport at the Division I level he believes he can go into the Challenge house and “come for the crown” despite the fact that Challenge legend Chris “CT” Tamburello still draws breath. For the entire season, Fessy has been talking about making it to the final and establishing himself as the new top guy, a position currently held mainly by veterans like CT and Wes Bergmann. But the one thing standing in Fessy’s way, according to him, has been his revolving door of inept partners.
In last week’s episode, Fessy threw himself into elimination all with the goal of stealing Leroy’s partner, Kaycee, who is part of the Big Brother alliance. Fessy and Kaycee, who are both fuckboys, believed that if they could only get to each other they could kill it at the final and dethrone the hardened veterans.
But the thing about The Challenge is that it comes at you hard and fast. On the first day of the final, Fessy’s partnership with Kaycee broke down almost immediately as he started yelling at her and criticizing her for not sprinting through rocky terrain during a five-mile run. As Kaycee attempted to match pace with her partner, she slipped on a rock and went down screaming, in tears, telling a medic that her knee had popped out of place. While his partner was writhing on the ground in pain, in the middle of a hurricane, Fessy sat on a rock and reflected on how this slow down would affect him.
Kaycee got up and was able to hobble to the next checkpoint, which was an eating challenge. The challengers had to drink a pint of blood and eat sheep skull, ram testicles, and other innards in order to complete that leg of the race. Still in tears from her fall, Kaycee immediately started chugging blood in an effort to make up for the time she’d lost on the run while her partner just stared at the food.
By the end of the episode, Fessy had not touched a single testicle or taken even a sip from the blood cup. Instead of trying to eat the animal parts, Fessy did what I call “Quitter’s Math.” He looked around, saw that every team was ahead of him, and realized there was a 50/50 chance his partner would not be physically able to run for the rest of the final, which is a timed event. So instead of putting forth the bare minimum effort, Fessy slowly but surely started to convince his partner that quitting was the only option because he no longer had the “motivation” to try and win.
Anyone who watches this show knows that the worst thing a challenger can do is quit. The motto of the show may as well be, “Teej hates quitters,” because every time someone quits, the host TJ Lavin gives them a disappointed dad speech and tells them to get out. So the philosophical question facing viewers right now is, should Fessy have eaten the testicles anyway? If your answer is no, then explain to me using MLA format why you’re wrong and how long you intend to be wrong about this important issue.