As Everlasting Gets Physical With A (Disastrous) Obstacle Course, Let's Rank The Villains Of UnREAL

With Coleman newly at the Everlasting helm and running with Chet's testosteriffic vision for the show, things get very physical very fast in "Guerrilla," this week's episode of UnREAL: Chet is excited for Darius to drive an ATV through a field of explosions until both Romeo and Darius himself have to explain to Chet that Darius -- a professional athlete who's taken out a significant insurance policy on his body -- can't subject it to reckless risks like that. No problem: Chet pivots to a concept which finds the women taking on the physical challenge (in the form of an obstacle course) while Darius watches from...a gentleman's study set up in the middle of the woods?

Quinn still delivers explosions of a sort by goading MMA fighter Brandi into showing off her athleticism on the course; Brandi gets too aggressive in her race to the finish and yanks Chantal off a climbing wall. That's when we learn that, as luxurious as the mansion seems, it has some locations that never make it to air -- for instance, The Hole, which is where Brandi's sent once she knocks out Chantal. On another show, that might be the catastrophe that closes the episode; on UnREAL, that only takes us to the end of Act 2.

With Quinn battling Chet and Rachel battling Coleman for the heart, soul, and boobs of Everlasting, pretty much everyone gets a chance to show how low they can go for the sake of a win. Let's count them down from most grubby to least. (Not ranked: Cynthia, who doesn't even need to appear on camera or say more than a single word to become the episode's unquestioned moral champion -- but we'll get to her.)

1. Quinn
   Once Chantal, one of Quinn's Wifeys, gets picked off the wall by one of her fellow hopefuls and falls from a considerable height, Quinn can make a credible case to Coleman that she needs to take over from Chet for the day and salvage some usable footage out of Chet's fuckup. She stops by The Hole, where she reveals to Brandi that she knows about the horrors of Brandi's childhood in the foster system (and that she has a pretty good idea that being kept in a confined space would cause Brandi significant anxiety). After an interval, she then sends in her surrogate Rachel to prep Brandi for the date she won with Darius by dominating the obstacle course: Rachel advises Brandi that if she opens up to Darius about her trauma, he'll fall in love with her for sure. Brandi complies; Darius is moved by her tearful description of a mother who didn't want her and foster fathers who abused and physically scarred her; and Quinn's objective is met.
   

   Except: manipulating Darius and Brandi into this moment of "honesty" was only the first phase of Quinn's plan. What happens next is that Quinn brings Darius to her office to meet Brandi's mother Bea -- not a foster mother, as Darius assumes, but Brandi's "only mother." According to Bea, the tales of Brandi's experiences as a foster child are invented; Quinn says Brandi's a pathological liar, and Wagerstein adds that Brandi gave herself the injuries that left the scars she showed Darius on their date. Darius goes on to an elimination ceremony where instead of cutting four women, he ditches only one: Brandi, for her falsehoods. Brandi only makes herself seem crazier than Quinn's description when she claims never to have seen Bea before in her life, and physically attacks Darius until security guards pull her off.

   Tough luck for Darius! Brandi's story was true; her "mother" Bea is just an actor. Gary wanted suicide ratings without the suicide; a rampaging bachelorette trying to claw out the Suitor's liver will do. If an already mentally unstable woman backslides further thanks to her televised humiliation, she shouldn't have applied to be on the show -- right, Quinn?

2. Chet
   Based on his actions in the first 7/8ths of the episode, Chet would never earn a ranking this high: his ideas for broing up the show are so dumb that even the alpha males he's trying to align himself with have to bail, and by bedtime have decided they should move back into the mansion and stick with Quinn's blueprint for the season. Then Chet calls his ex-wife Cynthia -- who's been awarded sole custody of the baby she'd spent half of UnREAL's first season gestating -- and tries to arrange a visit; like the hero she is, Cynthia doesn't even bother to say no, hanging up on him instead.
   

   So Chet sneaks into the baby's room and kidnaps him. ESSAY QUESTION: would this new, MRA-ified Chet have taken this extreme action if the baby had been a girl?

   

   Honorable mention for shittiness goes to Chet's screaming white New Balance sneakers -- the official shoes of sexually insecure dads.

3. Wagerstein
   On its face, Wagerstein doesn't do anything vastly more immoral than any of her colleagues do. The difference is that she's supposed to be a mental health professional.
   

   The show's female contestants probably think, when they speak to Dr. Wagerstein, that they are safe to be candid because she will keep their confidence, and not that she is just listening for bullet points she can regurgitate for Quinn to use against them. Everything Wagerstein does in the course of working on this show was already grossly unethical before she participated in discrediting Brandi to Darius.

4. Rachel
   When she's not playing her part in Quinn's frame job on Brandi, Rachel's expertly spinning Coleman. Since she mentioned in the last episode that she admired a documentary about sex workers that he did through his network, Blink, he tries to shame her for working on Everlasting. Rachel obviously knows this isn't the most noble work a person can do -- we watched her grapple with the matter all last season -- but she explains that the current season is the culmination of years of advocacy on her part for a non-white Suitor, so it's important to her to see it through and to get the story right in order to make it the cultural moment she thinks it could be. And then, by needling Coleman about his trust fund, and about his last relationship and why it failed, she agitates him into going on the offensive and then interrupts him in the middle of a rant: "Hey, Coleman. Just so you know, that's how we make the show." This is beginner-level manipulation, but it works.
   

   Coleman is not only impressed by this display of Rachel's power...

   

   ...he's turned on. Starting up another inappropriate workplace affair might not have been Rachel's intention when she effortlessly filleted Coleman in the control room, but turning him out as her bitch is basically a victimless crime. (Yes, she's complicit in ruining Brandi, but that was mostly Quinn's op.)

5. Gary
   This shithead. When Quinn turns Chet's nonsense into nonsenseade, Gary's response is to drive onto the set in an eye-rollingly showy sports car gift and then, in front of the entire production staff, toss the keys to the person responsible: Coleman! Quinn takes Gary aside to correct what she thinks is his incorrect impression, whereupon Gary doubles down on his pro-bro stance on the grounds that Coleman's mere presence is pushing Quinn to reach higher (lower) than she ever has before -- and it can, in fact, only be Coleman's presence that's causing this effect, since he did dick all the previous day. THEN Gary disputes Quinn's claims of mastery over the production on the basis that her underling came to him privately and narced on Quinn and Chet.
   

   STAY OUT OF THIS, GARY.

6. Yael
   Hot Rachel is so determined to win, she's willing to point her ass directly at Jeremy and give him a good long look as a prelude to kissing up to him and trying to form some kind of alliance. With JEREMY. Hey, I like to win things too, but not enough to try to ingratiate myself to a flannel-wrapped turd like Jeremy. Looks like Yael was never the star of Sarah Lawrence's DIGNITY team.
7. Coleman
   His worst crime is accepting Gary's car and kudos. Scummy, but it's TV. No one turns down credit, whether they've earned it or not.
8. Madison
   She gets a little further along in her quest to be the new Rachel by encouraging Beth Ann to be herself (read: a bigot) on camera; when this newly confident Beth Ann later inserts herself between Darius and Ruby at a cocktail party, leading Ruby to start a verbal altercation, Darius is pretty much unruffled. Jay, who's trying to keep Ruby competitive, is on his way to a stress-related heart attack, but that's his job. Anyway: Madison is mildly grubby, but surely Rachel would have notes on how she could have pushed things further.
9. Darius
   Darius shows how well he can take direction when he goes to visit a recovering Chantal.
   

   It's kind of gross, but it's also exactly what he's supposed to be doing. It's not great that he so readily believes Quinn's story about Brandi's lying, but I wouldn't necessarily expect any civilian to be sufficiently well versed in game theory to try to untangle the machinations of a person on Quinn's level. Anyway, Darius may not have all his faculties about him, since the last shot of the episode -- a desperate-looking Darius, immobile in bed -- seem to prove true Rachel's suspicions that he's hiding a serious physical ailment.

10. Brandi
    Well, she intentionally pulls Chantal off the wall, which isn't great. But it would be hard to argue that the events that follow aren't sliiiiiiightly more punitive than her crime deserves.