2013: Unlucky for Most

The year 2013 has, to put it politely, not been among the better years of the reality TV genre's existence. Sure, there were some definite highlights throughout the year, but the problem is there weren't enough of these shows and those that were honestly weren't high-profile enough to attract mainstream attention. I mean, how do you sell a show like The Genius: Rules of the Game to someone when the basic concept is "South Korean celebrities (who aren't Psy) compete against each other for money in strategy-based cocktail party games"? Or Canada's Greatest Know-It-All, whose two main problems are right there in the title? Or The Great Australian Bake Off, which seemed to make a point of being the cooking-themed reality show for people who hate cooking-themed reality shows?

That last one might be comparatively easy to sell, especially for a new show, but it's surprising how few of the long-running reality shows managed to dish up enjoyable entries this year. In fact, aside from maybe Project Runway successfully fixing something we didn't even realise was broken, it's been one disastrous production decision after another this year, to the point where it wasn't hard at all to come up with this list of thirteen of the year's stupidest decisions. It's probably not too surprising that nearly half of the list comes from Australian reality shows, and five come from various versions of Big Brother, but... you know. If these shows were better, that probably wouldn't be the case.

#13 The Mole (Netherlands): Episode 6

This year's Dutch season of The Mole, filmed on location in South Africa, took a while to get going. While much of the issue there isn't entirely the show's fault - one player got seriously injured after a freak accident in a challenge the week before a planned non-elimination twist and had to be removed from the game to recover, making the season feel as though it was moving at a glacial pace when there wasn't a proper elimination for three episodes (not that anybody would try that deliberately or anything) - even once the show got moving again it was hard to care that much until we got down to the final four. Episode 6 was the first episode following this meandering section, and though it featured three challenges to keep it moving at a swift pace, the problem is all of them were beyond awful. Given the goal of the show is to win money while working out who is trying to lose money, it seemed like a bizarre decision to have two consecutive challenges that didn't involve money at all and ultimately didn't affect anything, followed by a challenge where only one player had any role in winning money at all. It doesn't help in the slightest that the non-cash, non-exemption challenges are invariably the worst of whichever season they are in, and as a result a show which had a good but not spectacular opening episode didn't start to feel like the Mole of old until about the eighth episode 8 of a ten episode season, where the final episode was a reunion and clipshow. Sigh.

#12 The Biggest Loser (Australia): The Fridge

Still, at least the above production decision only affected one episode. The latest game addition to completely fail on Australia's version of The Biggest Loser managed to suck most of the fun out of the show. Having been incredibly unpopular during its original incarnation as 'The Walk', where the winner of a challenge got to randomly pick one of four similar variations of the week's twist and had to deal with the consequences, I'm still not sure months later why they would revive it while removing the one mildly tolerable part about it, that there was some way to affect the result. Here, with the Fridge, there was only one twist and the team who lost the most weight the previous week had to decide whether to take reveal it themselves or give the responsibility to someone else. Which would be bad enough, except that out of six times the twist appeared (it didn't show up in the first week and the standard gimmick weeks later in the season meant there was no time), the twist of the week only had an impact on the game three times. Complete and utter waste of time.

#11 Big Brother (Canada): Too Many Cooks

Having watched and been annoyed by the Americans continually fucking up Big Brother beyond all recognition, the Canadians finally got in on the act this year. And while the show wasn't bad, in that it went about as well as a fusion of the bastardised American format and the original format could have gone without becoming unrecognisable to its audience, there still seemed to be a lot they didn't understand about the show. It was great to finally see the concept of secret missions (a staple of the format internationally) make its way to North America, and to see the return of an official Big Brother voice onscreen, even if only in a minor role. BUT. I'm not sure we needed a mock payphone in the store room to give players secret missions in the Big Brother voice PLUS a talking ornamental moose head in the Diary Room airlock when they both serve the same function and when they could have just given missions in the Diary Room itself and called "one player" when they didn't care who had to complete the task. Indeed, when the phone was first used in the season premiere, the player who answered was sent to the Diary Room to get the rules for their task anyway, so what was the damn point? I know it's a small issue, but it's one that could have and should have been thought about in more depth.

#10 Big Brother (UK): The People's Puppet

Meanwhile, the British version of the same show has been well-known for years for testing the limits of its format, with many iconic Big Brother twists appearing there first (though ironically the three most iconic additions to the basic format were all introduced on the Australian version, which generally speaking would find it hard to copy more from the Brits without actually flying its host in every year). This year's opening twist came in two parts - a split launch over two nights, which has been done before elsewhere, and an actor entering the house for the first week pretending to be a genuine player while acting in accordance with the results of polls on the show's website. We've had real players be forced to take on the role of an insider in the past (most notably in the US, where it was used as a surrogate for not giving the audience the power to evict), but here where a professional actor was used it just didn't work. Part of it may have been the actor just couldn't get the mix of emotions right and came across forced a lot of the time, part of it may have been that he wasn't likable enough for us to get behind, part of it may have been that the fake twist invented to give him the power needed for the twist to work seemed like it would have been much better with a genuine player, and part of it may have been that having this player make the week's only nominations essentially made it so the audience got a free shot at whoever they wanted (though this was nicely mirrored in the subsequent celebrity edition where they were told the nominees were selected by the audience but were actually selected by some players who had been hidden elsewhere in the compound). Whatever the case, this is one twist that should NEVER be repeated.

#9 Big Brother (US): MVP

Oh, American Big Brother producers. So consistently abysmal it's a wonder there isn't a drinking game. This time around, the version's big twist was that while the winner of a challenge got to select two nominees as usual, the audience got to select somebody to pick a third nominee. And if you're thinking that doesn't sound so bad and what's the problem isn't this a show where audience interaction is good, I'd agree with you. Except for one minor thing. Three of the previous four seasons featured at least one returning player with a decently-sized fanbase, and while this season didn't, it did feature the sister of a player who has appeared twice on this show and once on The Amazing Race, giving her enough of a head start to sweep the poll every week she was in the house. Producers realised the problem early and made a blatant attempt to fix the issue, by making the audience its own MVP and having them directly pick the third nominee, but they didn't realise that while the former player in question was popular with a sizable part of the audience, they are incredibly divisive and there are just as many people who hate her with the passion of a thousand gurning nuns, allowing those people to automatically nominate the sister every week. The twist was finally scrapped for good when it was realised it was never going to work, but they really should have noticed the incredibly obvious problem beforehand.

#8 Celebrity Big Brother (UK): Rylan Clark's casting

Speaking of huge fanbases. What do you get when you put a very popular current singer in a glorified popularity contest with such comparable celebrities as, um, Toadie from Neighbours and a woman who was in a cheesy pop band in the late 1990s? (Nothing against Steps, who were awesome at the time, but COME ON.) It turns out the answer is "a boring season of Celebrity Big Brother in which the only people who don't act like the result is a foregone conclusion and therefore don't try to be entertaining are a pair of obnoxious American imports who probably weren't even aware how the show works". Say what you will about a British show casting the awfulness that is Speidi, but at least they weren't popular enough in the UK for it to matter too much (see also: Heidi "My cousin invented The Bachelor" Fleiss, who finished eleventh out of twelve in 2010). Meanwhile, Rylan is now hosting a Big Brother spinoff discussion show, so I'm sure the result wasn't predetermined at all.

#7 Masterchef (Australia): Weekly Themes

We've all heard the phrase "don't fix what ain't broke" before. And this is one of two cases this year where the end result could be used as evidence in a court of law. In the past, Masterchef Australia has been quite content to experiment with its format while retaining enough familiarity that you could forgive them the occasional misstep. This season, all of that goodwill evaporated within seconds once the preseason commercials using derogatory stereotypes to sell a "battle of the sexes" theme started. It was so bad that it made headlines on major international blogs, with Huffington Post calling it "a new low for sexism" among the cafailcade of criticism. And yet, sadly, that wasn't the biggest problem in the season, nor was the bit where they neglected to mention that the gender divide was only the first of several weekly themes designed to make each week stand out (though certainly they both played a huge role in the season's low ratings). The biggest issue was that the themes selected didn't lend themselves to interesting challenge design, leading to a series of dull and repetitive team challenges followed by gimmicky elimination challenges, which in turn caused the mediocre cooks who would normally have struggled to make it through Top 50 Week (scrapped for this season) to make it far too far into the competition, and which resulted in someone being eliminated despite having the best dish of the day simply because their partner didn't pull their weight. Hell, in the FINAL we had someone end up with a raw chicken dish and attempt to serve it after lightly browning the sides to hide how obviously undercooked it was. And she got an average score of 7/10 for the dish. Unfuckingbelievable.

Incidentally, if you don't believe me regarding the challenges being gimmicky, these were all actual concepts this year:

• 'Italy's flag is red, white, and green. Cook a dish using only food in one of these colours.'

• 'In pairs, make two identical copies of the same dish while being separated by a wall and unable to see what your partner is doing.'

• 'Our sponsors Qantas fly all over the world. Here are a series of ingredient-laden tables arranged like a map of the world, cook a dish using only ingredients on one "continent".'

• 'Kids like to play games. Cook a dish using ingredients collected from the pantry while it is pitch black.'

• 'Fast food is fast and all, but actually going to buy it takes too damn long. Cook fried chicken, souvlaki, and a burger with the lot before one of the judges is able to buy it all and come back.'

There is not enough derp in the world, you guys.

#6 The Mole (Australia): Soap Opera Edition

Look, I've been there and said it already. Moving on, shall we?

#5 Dancing with the Stars (Australia): Double Play

Even when the Dancing with the Stars casting department takes 'stars' more as a suggestion than as an actual requirement, it's still possible to enjoy and appreciate how the non-stars' dancing ability improves over time. But this season, Channel Seven left it too late to bring the show back, forcing them to schedule the show two nights a week in order to finish the season before the summer non-ratings period kicks in. Not only does this limit our opportunity to watch the non-stars develop over time in that the season is several weeks shorter, but having them lose most of their practice time in the tight schedule also means they genuinely won't improve as much because they're too busy trying to learn several dances each week to get any of them to a decent level. If the situation ever arises again in future - and let's hope to the deity of our choice it doesn't - they need to just have a smaller cast instead. From a show that started so well, it's honestly surprising this isn't the final nail in the coffin.

#4 The Amazing Race (US, Canada): Double Express Pass

The Amazing Race was once one of those shows where the focus was entirely on teams' merit rather than luck or how well they interacted with the other teams. Since about season five, however, we've been forced to deal with several similar twists that treat inter-team relations as a key part of the show, while simultaneously losing the part of the show where how teams interact with non-taxi-driving locals affects their performance. In addition, the leg design has now reached a point where everything is spoonfed and all that really matters is how well you do in the various tasks, with the travel elements mostly falling by the wayside. And the tasks themselves are timed to within an inch of their life to boot, with most not featuring much of a chance for players to fall too far ahead or behind. In season seventeen, a new twist was added where the winners of the first leg got an 'Express Pass', which basically allows them the option of skipping any one task they are having trouble with without penalty, simply by forfeiting the pass. It somehow escaped producers' minds when planning this twist that the pass amounted to glorified quitting on a show that's supposed to be about merit, making it feel undeserved whenever it is used (and it has been present in all seven seasons since it was introduced), especially when the season premieres are now traditionally underwhelming in design because WE CAN'T MAKE THEM WORK HARD FOR A MILLION BUCKS. Or something. In both of this year's US seasons, and in the Canadian version which aired in the months in between, an additional twist was added where the winners of the first leg got one Express Pass for themselves and a second they had to give to another team. In short, it is now possible and entirely within the show's rules to quit a task without penalty, without having to do anything to earn it beyond not being a raging asshole in comparison to other teams. Why was this twist even allowed out of the planning phase?

#3 Survivor (US): Redemption Island + Loved One Switches

Four words that strike fear into the heart of every Survivor fan: "Executive Producer Jeff Probst". He's been running the show from the host's chair since season twenty-one a few years ago, and in that time he's seen the show's audience dip from an average of 12.25 million viewers to an average of just 9.6 million. That can't be explained solely by audience fatigue, since the show has been on for nearly fifteen years and ratings were fairly consistent before he took over, which means there has to be something else going on to impact the ratings. In those seasons we've seen an avalanche of failed twists, including but not limited to countering the problems of an 'old versus young' team division by adding a token that allows a team to take an advantage in a challenge, without realising that it becomes pointless once the fit young team gets the advantage, making both teams live on the same beach but dividing them by gender to ensure they remain segregated anyway, and the infamous Redemption Island, where the show's entire pacing was thrown out the window by allowing players who were voted out by their teams to compete in sudden-death challenges to try and win their way back into the game. It turns out all those years of 'fire represents life' were bullshit and 'the tribe has spoken' means nothing if you were wearing invisible headphones, apparently. And this season it's gotten even worse, with players coming into the game with pre-existing relationships with a person on the other team. Now, if you are voted out you can escape Redemption Island immediately by switching teams with your partner and having them take your place. So not only can you (1) get voted out of the game and have it mean absolutely nothing at all, but (2) you can get eliminated from the game without being medevaced or quitting and without getting a single vote against you, if you switch with your partner and lose a challenge. Not surprisingly, but very hilariously, this happened at the first available opportunity to the player Probst was undoubtedly hoping would dominate the season in spite of his not being great at challenges or at the social game. Oh, the irony.

#2 Big Brother (Australia): Strategic Nominations

The basic idea of nominations in the Australian version of Big Brother is that you get five points each week, and you have to allocate them to the two people you want to get rid of, and whoever gets the most points will face a public phone vote to determine who is eliminated. Traditionally players have been forced to make these nominations for personality only, but in recent years the option to nominate for strategic reasons has been added, although discussing nominations with other players is still strictly forbidden. This year, one week of nominations was held with players specifically told that they had to nominate for strategic reasons only. Reading between the lines, you can already see the boneheadedness of this decision. If you are a player in this situation the only possible strategy you can have is to nominate the people you believe are popular in the outside world, hoping to eliminate your biggest competition before you end up in a vote against them, and the only way you can guess who is most popular is to pick the people who are most entertaining in the house. In essence, getting about 45 seconds of bored non-surprise from players who don't care that much who goes as long as it isn't them is apparently enough payoff for the small cost of basically forcing the elimination of one one of the most entertaining players in the season. This twist is such a stupid idea that it's frankly not enough to guarantee it will never be used again. The producer responsible for it needs to be fired from the show. Immediately.

#1 The Biggest Loser (Australia): Trainers Vote

Though this final idea is easily the worst of the year, it's also certainly in tight competition to be the single worst production idea in the show's history. Basically, The Biggest Loser is a televised fat camp, and each week the players who lose the lowest percentage of their body weight face a vote with the other players deciding who gets eliminated. Early in this year's Australian season, a twist was introduced where the other teams played no role in the vote and the three personal trainers had to vote instead. Or, at least, that was the plan, until the trainers in question unanimously decided to abstain. It's bad enough when players refuse to go along with wacky twists. But when people who get paid to work on your show refuse? You've got serious problems.

But Wait, There's Mole!

Can you believe the current Australian revival of The Mole is somehow managing to find ways of getting worse and worse? Why are we at the point where we need a third big post about what went wrong, when we shouldn't have even needed one? And why do I feel the need to dumb it down to match the show's tone?

1. How is it this season is so awful when most of the ideas are being taken from the excellent Dutch version of the show? We're not even in 'worst Mole season ever' territory any more. We're coming up on 'worst season of a reality show ever', if not indeed already straddling the fine line between it and 'worst season of a TV show ever'. And we're only about halfway through. I mean, even the tonedeaf BBC intern who picks the British Eurovision entrant is thanking their lucky stars they're not involved.

2. With eight players left, we've got tall, blonde, dark, and lean, rough and tough and strong and mean all covered (thank YOU, Sam, Erin, Aisha, Nick, Ally, Kerrie, Hillal, and Shaun). But it's raining molls (and Moles), and what we really need right now is a streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds. There's four utterly irredeemable twunts left. Assuming one of the four tolerable players is booted next, because it's been that kind of a season, we have a 63% chance of getting at least two of them in the final three. Those aren't good odds. In fact, we'll even lower our standards. He doesn't have to be a white knight upon a fiery steed, and he doesn't have to be strong, and he doesn't have to be fast, and he doesn't have to be fresh from a fight. And with the success we've had so far, we'd actually kind of prefer if he wasn't larger than life. Is it too late to clone Hillal? I know where we can find a good home once you're done with him.

3. Eleven episodes in, there are still too many people to even pretend to give a flying fuck about. And it doesn't help that there are still too many assholes hogging all the screentime to make us care about the few redeemable cast members left. One of the basic tenets of reality TV is 'don't cast anyone you wouldn't want to see win'. So who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to have even one player along these lines, let alone SIX?

4. When you lose over 35% of your audience within the space of a week as a result of having more padding than the Wipeout course, that's a bit of a hint that it's time to get the show back in the edit suite and recut it. Instead, the only noticeable difference in the late night timeslot is the removal of the joining sections between episodes that are now back-to-back. It wouldn't be hard to find unnecessary scenes to cut out. Seriously, cut the flashback rewinds, the endless re-exposition (including the obnoxious graphics reminding us what jokers freebies are every time they are mentioned), the self-aggrandising confessionals (SAM), and the 'before/after the break' scenes (yes, thank you, we know what we saw three minutes ago), and you're probably most of the way there already. In related news, challenges that were designed for about ten minutes of airtime? Stop dragging them out into half-hour ordeals, some of which seem to be being shown in slower than real-time pace. They become less 'psychological pressure cooker' and more 'psychosomatic slow cooker'.

5. 'But aren't the confessionals like the meat in the sandwich?' No. The challenges are the meat in the sandwich, and with the amount of recycling this season it's probably more like Spam than actual meat at this point. The confessionals? You don't win friends with salad.

6. When you don't air an episode of the show in some markets due to a live program's overrun earlier in the night, and when it's a show perfect for encouraging online conversation (and when direct prompts to do so are added into the show), it's probably a good idea to treat those viewers with respect. As opposed to, say, not announcing the episode's replacement with a repeat of Criminal Minds on air when the episode was supposed to begin, not changing the electronic program guide listings until ten minutes after the show was scheduled to begin, not putting the episode on the show's website for affected viewers to catch up on, and removing the show from both the dropdown search menu and the A-to-Z program list on the network's website. Not that this show would do that, of course.

7. For a show that's been advertising a maximum prize of $250,000 every episode, it's worth noting that we're already at $259,500. And I'm not counting the three challenges with open-ended prizes, or the one where the total possible prize isn't calculable, or the one where the maximum prize depended on the previous challenge. With half the season still to come, it's flagrant false advertising. And if the actual kitty is going to wind up at about that value, it's going to make the Mole look like they did absolutely nothing to sabotage the team.

8. Even then, whoever has been picked as the Mole has done a terrible job. After the first week, I wrote a post detailing the reasons why Shaun was the Mole. And he's still a huge suspect - he's somehow managed to find himself in the ideal position for the Mole in most challenges AND has tried to sabotage almost every challenge in every possible way from his position (both subtly and blatantly) - but... it's too easy if it's him. On the other hand, if it's not him we'll be in the same situation as in 2005 where the Mole did very little and nearly a decade later people are still swearing they weren't actually the Mole at all and Seven fucked up when they revealed it. Which would not be surprising at this point.

9. As Shura's terrible scripting and inability to adlib stated way back in Episode 3, 'every advantage must be defended'. Unless, of course, they are jokers freebies. Or if you are Erin. Seriously, if you're going to make a big deal about Kerrie having to 'defend' her first-test free pass (in a challenge clearly not designed for either defending a free pass or for being used at that point in the game, the latter being another recurring issue that makes it look like producers have been throwing darts at printouts of the Mole challenge guide when selecting the season's challenges), then make sure you follow your own damn continuity.

10. Likewise, if you're going to go to the effort of providing graphical explanations for most challenges, spend a few extra minutes and make sure they're accurate. There have been so many errors so far this season it's ridiculous. In Episode 4 alone, for example, the H was missing from the value chart graphic for the jetboat challenge and three separate iconic Melbourne locations were mismarked on the map graphics in the subsequent navigation challenge, one of them by over four city blocks. Also, nobody buys that Shura is watching the challenges happen in real-time on his product-placed tablet.

11. Allow me to explain rudimentary supply and demand, as taught to most Australians in high school. If there's a limited amount of something important, its value is greater and people are willing to do more in order to get it. If this same item is ubiquitous, its value is lesser and nobody cares about the implications of having it, because they know they can get more. Or, in game terms, if you want jokers freebies to have any impact at all beyond being used immediately and making each and every elimination a total crapshoot, defeating the entire concept of the show, STOP GIVING AWAY SO DAMN MANY OF THEM. (For context, since they were introduced in the Dutch version in 2006, there's usually only been two chances to win them during the season, and in most cases designed so that each player is only able to win about three at a time. So far this season, they've been available five times, and in the best possible scenario a player could currently be holding onto nineteen.)

Product Recall: Australian Reality Shows, 2013

Presented without much comment, because these just angry up the blood. These are all ACTUAL commercials for Australian reality shows. First, The Celebrity Apprentice, which began its third season last week:

I... I don't even know where to... huh?

Next, The Mole. Cancelled in 2003, revived in 2005, cancelled again after a disastrous season (live eliminations, WHY?), and revived again for this year. Now remember, this is a show about espionage and deceit and all the related stress and tension that goes along with it:

It's seriously like advertising Lost with clips from Gilligan's Island and expecting people not to be pissed because they're both about people stranded on an island. For comparison, here's the promo for this year's Dutch season:

So much better, you guys. Why is it so hard for Australian TV networks to understand how television works?

Third, Masterchef. Fifth regular season, tenth season overall (there have been a LOT of failed spinoff attempts).

Rightio, then. Because if there's something we all love on reality shows, it's obnoxious gender-split themes. And we'll just ignore the elephant in the room, all the judges being the same gender, shall we?

And then there's one - just one, mind you - that's actually pretty good. I KNOW! This is from The Great Australian Bake Off, a new show featuring - rather ironically - a former Junior Masterchef judge as its host.

I mean, it's clear the two hosts are both going to be autocue-strugglers, but aside from that it's just the right level of camp for this exact show. But still, can we PLEASE stop with overly-camp choreographed pre-season commercials?

Wie Is De Mol? Netherlands: 2012 (Part 1, Iceland)

If Survivor is the grandfather of the reality genre, then The Mole – which actually premiered in Belgium a whole year before Survivor started – is the long-lost great-aunt who can simultaneously steal money from the Monopoly bank, carry an ironic conversation about Anderson Cooper's ambiguous sexuality in Portuguese, and bake a batch of delicious cookies. Unfortunately, it's been a long time between cookies. The last Belgian season aired way back in 2003, and there have only been two English-language helpings since: an overdone Australian relaunch in 2005, and an American relaunch three years later that seemed to replace sugar and spice with salt and capsaicin. And until fairly recently, most of the foreign versions were nigh on inaccessible. But with people harnessing the power of Youtube, a new batch have turned up for fans to devour. All of the British and Australian seasons are there, as are four out of five American seasons, a Belgian season, a German season, and nearly TWELVE Dutch seasons. It's still running in the Netherlands, and a group of enterprising fans have taken to subtitling episodes into English in order to promote their show for an audience that, let's be honest, doesn't find one of western Europe's most esoteric languages entirely gemakkelijk to understand. A few random episodes have received the treatment from various sources, but one group in particular has done three entire seasons – the 2005 relaunch season, and the two most recent seasons. Each of them have coincidentally covered two countries (compared to only one of the remaining ten seasons), which handily gives them a nice point at which to split the analyses.

Format wise, the show is very simple. If you complete a given task successfully you win a preset amount of money that goes towards the winner's prize. Simple, right? Except one of the contestants is the Mole, and has been hired to sabotage the team's efforts without being detected. At the end of each episode, players take a multiple-choice computer test about who the Mole is and what they've done in that episode, with the lowest scorer being eliminated. When there are only three players left (the final two genuine contestants and the Mole), the test is longer and covers the whole season. The highest scorer on this test wins all the money earned throughout the season. Less simple, right?

There's one major thing about this season worth noting, from a behind-the-scenes standpoint. The season was originally supposed to be filmed in Morocco and Spain, but with the Arab Spring leaving the political situation in Morocco relatively unstable right as the producers were planning the season, the Morocco half of the season was moved to Iceland instead, with new challenges. It won't make me be more lenient in my analyses, but... you know.

EPISODE 1

WRECKAGE: Dropped off in separate locations with only their luggage and a photo, find the location where the photos (different for each player, and forming a panorama) were taken.  €2500 if everybody arrives within the time limit.

One of the issues with the basic format of the Mole is that the show isn't particularly fair if players complete different challenges. Normally, this would take the form of two simultaneous tasks at different locations for different prizes, meaning players would be forced to team up in order to learn everything and do well on the elimination test. Luckily, this particular franchise doesn't do that too often, although this possibly overtakes the opening challenge of Australia's fourth season (where players were split into pairs, with the eventual winner being paired with the Mole) as the worst opening ever. At least in that instance, players could get a vibe from one of the others. Here, with all ten players starting alone (and the Mole being dropped off at the final location to change the countdown timer), there is literally no chance of any genuine contestants noticing any sabotage, making the entire challenge a waste of time. Plus, from a viewer's point of view for a second, watching people WALK AIMLESSLY for twenty minutes? Absolutely scintillating televizzzzzzzz.

GLACIER: Five players use a compass and coordinates to locate five tubes hidden on a glacier (each amongst a cluster of five), then draw a map for the others to follow and collect them.  €500 per correct tube collected, decoy tubes are either empty or contain €500 fines. One cluster is near three free pass tokens (one for each of the first three episodes), and whoever picks them up can allocate them at will – but they must go to three different players.

Here we have your fairly standard “we don't want the contestants to win this, so let's make it brutally hard and hope they don't notice” challenge. Precise compass navigation is very hard at the best of times. Add an uneven, wet terrain. Now add the decoy tubes, spaced VERY closely together. Now add the fact that some of the decoy tubes contain fines. Now add the need to relay information between the two groups. It's frankly not surprising the team wound up with a negative amount in the kitty after this challenge. I don't have a problem with reality TV producers making challenges they don't want to be won. But they should be a little bit less obvious about it when they do.

BRIDGE: The free pass winners from the last challenge become defenders and must cross a barrier-filled bridge one at a time; the others become attackers and must stop them from making it across, each attacking only one player. All ten get paintball guns, anybody shot is out. If the defender is shot or has the token (at their starting point) stolen before finishing, they lose their free pass but the team wins money:  €1500 for this week's free pass, €500 less for each subsequent week. If the defender crosses without their token being stolen, they keep it but the team wins nothing.

Watching contestants shooting each other is always fun. Always. Sadly, given the state of reality show casting, we usually have to make do with paintball or lasertag guns. And that's almost as good a substitute when the players are shooting each other from close range, like in this challenge. With the bridge being fairly narrow, it's astounding that even one of the players defending their free passes managed to make it across, let alone all three. This challenge really should have been one of the ones that's impossible for the team to lose at – while the design was alright, the setting wasn't ideal. So how did these incompetent nitwits manage to do so?

EPISODE 2

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN: Solve an equation about the group (eg “Craig's age minus the last digit of Naomi's phone number”), then leave one player behind and climb that many stairs on a large outdoor staircase  before repeating the process. Equations get harder, but yelling to each other is allowed. Each full minute taken to answer an equation costs €100 from the maximum prize. €2000 if after eight equations the final player finishes at the very top step, where the host is waiting.

And so the stretch of inadequately planned challenges saved entirely by an incompetent cast continues. Sure, this particular one doesn't sound all that bad in theory. But what would have happened if the contestants realised that to win the money all they needed to do was finish at the top step, not get every question correct? I think we would have seen them choose deliberately high numbers for the first couple of questions, then reduce them as they got closer until the final couple of people could see exactly how many steps were left, and coordinate their answers accordingly. That's really not a hard “break” in a challenge to find (a challenge in the Australian version once actually depended on players finding a similar break), and it's lucky for the producers that players didn't.

DRIVING TEST: Two players must use walkie-talkies to guide the others in jeeps across a saltflat from an adjacent mountainside, following the routes shown on provided cards. Drivers must change at specific points. After twenty minutes, the guides must each select somebody from their jeep, who is brought to their location and must guess the word formed by the two routes.  €2500 if correct.

Decent idea, if a little unremarkable. One of the major issues in a group challenge like this is ensuring everybody has a role to play. Here, the producers didn't quite get it right. With two navigators and two drivers in each vehicle, somebody would have missed out on doing anything in this challenge regardless of who the guides picked. If they pick people who also drove, then even more people are superfluous. What probably would have worked better in this instance is holding off on the challenge until the next episode (where only eight people would have remained) and making it so the two people who don't navigate or drive are automatically those who have to guess the word.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Eight players are split into pairs. Taken to separate locations, they must use smoke signals to relay the four-digit combination to a lock from the first pair to the fourth, who must then use it to open the lock. Meanwhile, the ninth player must guess whether they'll be successful.  €3000 if correct.

I'm torn. As far as “relay this message from person to person” challenges go, this is definitely one of the cooler ideas I've seen on any reality show. But at the same time, this is also one of the worst examples of the “predict whether or not this will happen” challenge The Mole has ever had. I'm not sure how much of it was a fix to get the team to win at least SOME money – this is to my knowledge the only time in any version the team has started by failing to win ANY money in the first five challenges – but it seems like it was far too easy for the ninth player to predict the difficult-to-handle smoke signals wouldn't relay the message correctly, especially once a player who wasn't the Mole was chosen for the role. Had the team had any success, I think it's more likely the ninth person would have just been a fifth part of the chain, with the final pair relaying the message as well.

EPISODE 3

JETBOAT: Scattergories. Three players pick categories (from three options, different for each player) and first letters (each worth a different value from  €30 to €200), then paint their choices on a sign. Three others must then ride along a canyon in a jetboat, read the signs, and write down as many valid examples as possible before the end of the wild ride. The remaining two must then read the answers given. Each correct answer correctly read is worth the letter's value. Two rounds, with choosers and readers switching after the first.

Oh, budgets. Budgets, budgets, budgets. The single thing that most often ruins an otherwise perfectly fine challenge. And while that's the case here (why not start at €100 and go to €500?), there's an even bigger issue at play. Once again, there are two people doing jack shit here. I'm sorry, but “read what someone wrote on a piece of paper” isn't a task. I understand they had to find something for everybody to do, especially given one of the contestants was pregnant during filming and couldn't have gone in the jetboat, but still. The producers did the best they could with the tools they had, especially at short notice, but it's worth noting the challenge introduction (with host Art Rooijakkers riding the jetboat through the canyon accompanied by a faux-80s-cop-show piece of music) was more exciting than the challenge itself.

MYSTERY OFFER: One at a time, choose between taking one joker or a mystery envelope. Select the envelope and the alternative is increased to two jokers. Take jokers at either point and win them. Pick the envelope in the second offer and win the mystery prize:  €1000 for the kitty. The first player to win the money also earns a sneak peek at an answer from Episode 4's test.

I'll discuss them at more detail in a later post, but jokers are basically tokens that can be exchanged during an episode's elimination test to score an extra point, potentially saving a player from elimination. They're probably the best single twist I've seen on a reality show in... well, ever... and it probably saves this entire challenge from being another failure. Instead of being an automatic cue for players to take the envelope once they know what it contains, the value of jokers helps to make the decision much tougher than it otherwise would be. Without question the best idea of the season to date, although that's not saying too much.

TOWER TOUR: Two players are taken to the roof of the National Gallery in Reykjavik and must use the information visible to answer a series of questions, with the answers combining with two given digits to form a mobile phone number. Meanwhile, the other six take a walking tour of Reykjavik, ending at the gallery.  €2000 if the players on the roof can work out the main group's phone number, call them, and convince them not to enter the building when prompted.

...Or they could just wait for everybody to arrive and yell over the walls to get the same result. The actual idea as a test of reverse psychology is a fascinating one, but the challenge itself is designed dreadfully. Given one question revolved around the number of buses that passes through a nearby intersection, and another was about the number of Ferraris that did likewise (with the answer “zero”), what would have happened if a bus was cancelled that day? Or if someone owning a Ferrari decided to go for a Sunday drive? The contestants would have been screwed. Perhaps it would have worked better with the two chosen players solving a series of generic brainteasers, although that still doesn't hide that most of the group is doing nothing. (Worth noting: The mayor of Reykjavik was originally supposed to give the tour, but had to pull out. Lucky guy.)

EPISODE 4

BUNKER: Five players begin beneath cryptic signs in different bunkers at an abandoned military depot. The remaining two must ride a tandem bike around to find a waiting player, use the sign to work out who needs to stay there, and switch a cyclist with them (even if the needed player isn't present). No player begins beneath the correct sign. Time only counts when players are on the bike.  €2500 if all seven players are in the right place (with the final two cyclists ending at an empty bunker with two signs) within ten minutes.

I stand corrected. THIS is the best challenge idea of the season so far. Just... wow. Admittedly some of the hints were drawing long bows (“I AM” = “I, Anne-Marie”?) and keeping track of how much time the team had left would have been a nightmare from a production point of view, but I can forgive the odd hints given how the challenge would have been far too easy if everything was a dead giveaway. If only we'd had more challenges like this in the English-language versions, instead of making people run through Santiago in their underpants.

SNORKEL: Six players are split into pairs and must snorkel along a specified route, one at a time, passing by submerged photos of each player's parents. Working out whose parents each photo shows (with the seventh player listening), the pair must then match the player represented at two specific positions in the sequence. After all three pairs, the seventh player must match the remaining player and make any changes they deem necessary.  €2000 if all seven are correct.

From a season that started out so poorly, it's really picked up quite well. The challenge here still isn't perfect, but a slight flaw in design can definitely be compensated by showing off an aspect of the region that we wouldn't normally get to see. And who would have expected that it would be safe to snorkel in Iceland, even in what was probably the middle of summer? Design-wise, it was interesting to, for once, see it be possible for any of the players' positions to allow sabotage. There hasn't truly been a challenge like that so far this season, and it was refreshing for the show to return to its roots. Ten points to Gryffindor.

NEGOTIATIONS: Prior to the challenge, players complete the episode's test. Five have safe results revealed, with the remaining two kept in the dark. These five must then negotiate whether or not to eliminate somebody, one pair at a time, before voting in secret.  €3000 for a unanimous non-elimination vote; €3000 lost for a unanimous elimination vote; no money gained or lost for a majority elimination vote; but the kitty reset to €0 for a majority non-elimination vote.

There's so much to like about how simple this challenge is in its design, and how it plays on the celebrity contestants' fears of being viewed as assholes. But, unfortunately, there's also a lot to hate about it. From how it leaves the pacing of the season in doubt to how a majority elimination vote would make the first eleven challenges (and, as it turns out, the entire Iceland section) of the season entirely worthless beyond who collected jokers that time, I can't help but wonder if the challenge had too much impact. Why not at least give the team SOME money for the challenges so far by making it a “Win, lose, or have the kitty reset to x Euros” deal? You'd still have the same psychological issues at play, but it wouldn't make everything so far a waste of time.