Pluto Rewind: The Ruins Episode 6 — Winners & Losers

Welcome back to another edition of Pluto Rewind! This week we crack into an episode of The Ruins titled “Ruining On Empty”, also my favorite Tom Petty song. Inside this edition: How much zooming-in is too much zooming in?, Johanna does a Brad Stevens impression, Casey explains the difference between men and women, and much much more…

Loser: The Champions Team

The episode intro for this season isn’t completely off the rails like some other seasons I can think of, but it’s absolutely wild nonetheless. There are two main forms of transportation that the teams take to get to the arena where they’ll stand directly apart and stare at each other until TJ arrives.

The Ruins was split into two teams, the Champions and the Challengers. The Champions team, bursting at the seams with Hall Of Famers, arrived at their destination being introduced one by one via a pretty sweet boat.

Definitely fits the motif. The Challengers?

They got to ride in on motherfucking elephants.

Look, we’ve been all on boats. And we’ll probably all end up on another boat at some point after you read this. But I reckon most of us haven’t ever ridden in on a God damn elephant like they’re Aladdin pretending to be rich to impress a girl he barely knows.

Winner: T-Mobile Sidekicks

Only the coolest girls in school had these phones. And my phone number wasn’t in any of them.

Loser: Johnny’s Jaw Hair

Yikes.

Loser: The Zoom-in Feature

“Zoom in and get right up into Evan’s face.”

“What part of zoom-in don’t you understand?”

“Perfect.”

Winner: Fruit Merchants in Phuket, Thailand around 2009

Holy hell. What a boon the local fruit economy this daily was.

This daily challenge was basically using your entire team to transfer fruit from one end of an obstacle course to the other by performing various very “challengey” tasks along the way. But I mean it mostly just seemed like a giant waste of food.

I gotta say though, if there was fruit salad at the production craft services table the next day I would be so damn suspicious.

Winner: Cohutta’s Parents

His name is Cohutta Grindstaff.

Cohutta Grindstaff.

Is there a better name in the history of names? Say it out loud. Cohutta Grindstaff. My name’s Brian, so, I guess maybe I’m just jealous.

Loser: Kimberly’s Expectation Management

Winner: NBA Head Coach Johanna

Winner: Johnny’s Messy Political Game

There was a time on his reality TV journey that Bananas was known as John. Then somewhere along the line John became Johnny, and it settled there until another Johnny showed up and forced (although I’m sure he was psyched to play along) him into the full on Bananas moniker he’s known as to this day.

But back in 2009, in his Johnny days, the idea of him being any sort of Greatest of all Time was a pie in the sky notion that probably only he had. He had finally gotten off the schnied two seasons prior on The Island and became a champion for the first time. But his standing in the game was wobbly at best. He was friends with the right people, but he was always towards the lower rung of the totem pole.

After the massive food shortage they created during the daily challenge, Johnny immediately went into campaign-mode. But he displayed none of the tact that he used for the rest of his championships (mostly due to the fact that he clearly had no confidence or sway in any of the decision making like we usually see him with).

Watching him sloppily scramble around the house with a huge blue bandana and awful facial hair was both funny and bit jarring.

Winner: iPods

Wow, who knew they were allowed the have earphones back in the day. What do you think was on Evan’s workout playlist?

…

Yeah I don’t really care either.

Winner: Leroy

Do you guys think Leroy watched this episode? What do you guys think Leroy’s doing right now? I miss Leroy already.

Winner: Larry McMurtry

This sounds like the greatest novel that hasn’t been written yet.

Winner: Casey

Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure that’s right.

Loser: Honestly, This Episode

There is such a dark cloud of surface level toxicity and surface level anxiety over this entire episode I actually didn’t even really enjoy it. And I enjoy any and all Challenge content. It was just not a ton of fun. It was a lot of “boy rule girls drool” type behavior happening and like, ya know, gross. Just not a ton of fun to be had here.

Oh well. I guess we’ll get em next time.

Thanks for reading!! Be sure to check back later this week where hopefully we’ll get a more interesting and fun episode than this. And as always, happy Challenge watching!