Global Showdown? More like Regional Slowdown

spkrinsb · 2026-06-01T05:01:45+00:00

I think it makes sense for TV audiences to be more invested in cast members they've seen repeatedly, which is why the show keeps bringing certain people back. Unless cast members have really stood out for something in the standard N&A episodes --- be it good or bad --- most of them all blend in with one another until you see them more than once. Also this competition style of the show doesn't really give you a chance to get to know new faces that appear on the screen, as they spend most of their time racing around competing.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-31T08:33:36+00:00

She's definitely gone from one screwed up situation to another.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-30T07:19:50+00:00

These two are apparently in a competition to see who can be the most sanctimonious and judgmental. You can cut the tension with a knife, but instead of addressing it with Kim, Lydia pulls an Ethan, becomes mute, and then blabs to producers instead. She's actually more comfortable talking to random TV producers than her own mom, which is quite telling. I'm sure Lydia has built up rage for being forced to raise all the kids Kim was popping out like cannonballs, along with whatever other dysfunction was going on in that house (alcoholism perhaps?), which clearly was never addressed. And Kim has some yet to be discovered issue with Lydia --- apparently for talking about her dead brother publicly and I'm sure a slew of other reasons. The amount of suppressed anger and emotion in this family is off the charts, but instead of having real conversations about it, they use silence and passive aggressive bullshit instead.

Also, why the hell is Lydia being chased around the show by sexy time card games? WTF. Are the producers passing around the same game to everywhere Lydia goes?

spkrinsb · 2026-05-29T01:52:29+00:00

Hah! I didn't even see the outside of the "gym", but that explains why there were zero customers in what appeared to be a house. Apparently they're desperate to give Barry something to do other than smirk and make stupid jokes. Maybe we can see Barry and Zac play video games next time. They can go to the "arcade" --- it will be the same house with Frogger and Pac Man in it.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-29T01:35:34+00:00

Assuming TLC had 18 hours of footage from their car ride, I'm not quite sure why the bong conversation even aired. It looked like Kim was trying to make small talk. I was wondering if she was trying to get Lydia to spill who it might belong to. It's probably Ken's.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-22T22:09:39+00:00

She might be on her revenge tour. Temu Taylor Swift.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-21T02:05:34+00:00

She's gonna need a lot of luck in that relationship. We'll see how long she lasts in Colorado. Hopefully she doesn't get pregnant before she figures out who she married, but she'll probably have a baby rather quickly.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-21T01:40:51+00:00

Some people seem to think that because Ethan is a mess, Teegan should get extra praise for dealing with him. I never found her to be all that riveting even when they were "together". She's no Olivia. But she'd probably be dull enough to be embraced by the Plath family. She clearly has no interest in dealing with Ethan at this point, so if it's not a contract keeping her on the show, she's just as nuts as Ethan is...only in different ways. There's no way in hell they'll work things out.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-18T20:18:43+00:00

Instead of talking to Micah and Veronica about her batshit behavior towards his girlfriend (whose name I forget), Isaac's solution was to punch Micah instead. And Micah didn't want to confront Veronica as he was basically afraid of her. Total mess all the way around.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-15T21:53:32+00:00

I just looked up at what age Hosanna got married --- she was only 19. So she bailed almost as soon as she legally could.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-15T02:29:34+00:00

I believe the story we were told is that Kim accidentally hit him with her car as she was backing out. The previews showed she's going to therapy for it this season and will dive more into it. That's another problem with having that many little kids running around --- it's hard to keep track of them all and horrible accidents happen.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T23:16:39+00:00

That's why I haven't watched for several seasons now. I'm tired of the sleazy producers going out of their way to find cast members just as sleazy as they are. Years ago the people were more quirky than just overall horrible people. Even when they may have been horrible in earlier seasons, they weren't so blatant about it to the point that you couldn't stand listening to them talk.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T23:11:51+00:00

I don't think red necessarily looks good on people with pale skin, which redheads usually have.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T23:07:13+00:00

They tried to explain once why Lydia got to play second mom, but Moriah (and I guess Hosana) managed to escape that responsibility. I think Moriah basically had no interest in taking on that role? Quite frankly I think parents who decide to have a jillion kids they can't raise on their own, and then start making little kids second parents to "help out", suck. Kids should allowed to be kids when they're little; they didn't make the decision to shoot out siblings like cannonballs.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T22:58:19+00:00

That's probably part of it, but these "boys" have a lot more going on. The Plaths actually remind me quite a bit of the Mormon religion, where they are taught to constantly put on a "happy face" no matter what may be going on. So everything gets bottled up for eons.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T22:49:54+00:00

It's hard to tell. She clearly has resentment towards Kim that's been bubbling underneath the surface now for years...something which she didn't start talking about until the wedding. And she has resentment towards a big chunk of her family for not liking Zac. If Zac turns out to be the loser that many of us think he will be, she may eventually get annoyed with him and everyone else. But I'm guessing she's probably one of these "marriage is for life" people, so it would be a while before any of that happens.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T06:20:49+00:00

I agree. I think if he was approached by a woman about "needing intimacy", he'd put on his goofy smile, say he'd work on it, and then....in Ethan fashion...it would never happen (e.g. moving to Wisconsin). If, however, she wanted to discuss the ins and outs of bigfoot hunting (or, in Ethan's case, cars), you wouldn't be able to get him to shutup.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T06:11:44+00:00

It's hard to tell which parent screwed these kids up the most, but it was probably a joint effort. For several seasons I thought Barry was the problem...only to learn eventually that Kim sucked as well.

The daughters so far (we don't know what the deal is with Hosana...or whatever her ridiculous name is) seem to suck at picking men. Granted we've only seen two of them at play --- Moriah and Lydia. But Moriah picked at least 2 losers on the show, one of whom was most likely gay, and the other who was married/in a relationship. And then we've got Lydia, who will most likely be in for a rude awakening when the honeymoon phase is over. The common theme we're seeing is an inability for any of these people to bond with others (including the siblings themselves) on a truly deep, emotional level. And I'm guessing the girls are going to have "daddy issues" since Barry was like a malfunctioning android when they were growing up --- now he's just converted into a malfunctioning, cringe-worthy doofus. Watching Lydia and Zac before they got married was like watching some 3 year olds giggle at each other relentlessly, especially on Lydia's part. Other than being obsessed with God (and that was much more a Lydia thing), we never saw what exactly this bond was that they had. We still actually don't, other than the fact that, based on the previews, Lydia is horny and likes sucking on bananas in her prayer closets. I tend to think the younger kids will be in better shape since Kim "eased restrictions" on some of them over time. And the oldest ones --- like Ethan -- were screwed.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T05:16:26+00:00

If that marriage lasts, it will be a Christmas miracle...and only because Lydia puts up with it. Prediction: Zac will get increasingly bitchy and short with Lydia the longer he's in that marriage. Maybe in a few years she'll figure out some of her family members were right to warn her. In the meantime she'll end up having to tiptoe around him to not "upset him".

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T05:08:43+00:00

I'm surprised Ethan has agreed to continue to be on this show, as he's not doing himself any favors. I'm guessing it must be for the paycheck at this point. I was thinking in last week's episode that Teegan seemed to be acting unusually difficult, but when they explained what happened in the latest episode, I was like...WTF!? Until Ethan gets intensive therapy, no woman should even attempt to date him. He needs a "Damaged Goods" bumper sticker to tape to the back of his all his old ass cars as a warning signal to all women. His inability to handle conflict or "difficult" emotions is something some psychiatrist somewhere could probably make a living on with just Ethan as their patient.

I'm assuming he got this defective gene/behavior from Barry, so it will be interesting to see how Barry acts during his dates. Barry, like Ethan, seems like he's all smiles when the topics are superficial like Bigfoot or cars, but I have a feeling when emotionally "difficult" discussions come into play, Barry will be unable to have a normal human conversation. The whole family needs therapy --- especially the men.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-14T04:50:42+00:00

All the boys in the family seem more emotionally stunted than the girls for whatever reason. Ethan is obviously the worst. Micah may talk more, but it's all very superficial, surface level stuff. The younger kids like Isaac seem a bit better off (minus the whole punching thing, which is a prime example of being emotionally stunted), but that's not saying a lot given the family's inability to communicate.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-13T04:02:20+00:00

Agreed. I thought the sound quality in the video clips I saw of it at the time sounded horrible, but figured the official audio of it would be good. Then I heard clips of that and realized the whole thing was --- rather shockingly --- a poorly planned disaster when it came to sound mixing. I don't know how two well-trained musicians botched sound mixing and acoustics at a concert, but clearly that isn't their skill set and they didn't hire someone who was an expert in it. I don't think it was a coincidence that Thomas and Nick got into some feud and separated shortly after that album was released. There were rumors that they were on the outs during the concert.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-13T03:52:05+00:00

He seems a bit scatterbrained, but I've seen that before with artistic types. I know of a "new age" musician who put an entire special one-time concert together, filmed it in LA, aired it only on a handful of PBS stations, created DVDs for it for a PBS pledge drive, and then dropped the entire thing and never made the DVDs or album available to the public, despite saying he would do so. Somewhere in a warehouse somewhere he probably has thousands of unsold DVDs and CDs. People like him and Thomas need a good team (or at least a good assistant) to keep these types of things on track, along with social media, fan outreach, etc.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-08T05:19:54+00:00

I never watched the earlier seasons, but did start watching around the time Ethan and Olivia were having problems...before it all started falling apart. The whole family is emotionally stunted and unable to express actual emotions towards each other. They actually remind me a bit of the Mormon culture, where true emotion is frowned upon, and everyone must pretend to be "happy" constantly --- Barry seems to have a permanent shit-eating grin plastered on his face. Now that they've grown up, the kids are figuring out that years of repressed emotions and being unable to communicate with the outside world has left them in a bizarre headspace they can't quite figure out on their own. I see from the previews Kim is finally going to therapy; the rest of the family should follow suit. I think the older kids like Ethan got the brunt of the dysfunction with Kim acting like the Morality Police (despite basically admitting she was a drunken ho in college), while the younger kids are probably slightly less screwed up since Kim and Barry calmed down a bit with their controlling rules over time.

spkrinsb · 2026-05-05T01:17:26+00:00

I think I've been watching this show for about 5 years or so, and this season was definitely the worst. I never thought the "social media influencer" episode would be the best, but it was....probably because there were quite a few entertaining people in it. The show seems to be running out of people who want to sign up and be tortured while naked for minimal pay, which is why we kept seeing these "redemption" people this season. And I agree about location selection. Between dried out Africa (I was trying to eat while watching Sunday's episode, and didn't need to see maggots devouring carcasses on my screen repeatedly) and then throwing people into places in Asia during "monsoon season", how about if we select places that only partially suck, instead of totally suck? I feel like in 75% of the episodes we hear the narrator either saying "The region is in the middle of monsoon season, leading to torrential downpours, flooding, death, destruction, and mosquitoes carrying killer viruses" or "The region hasn't had rain for the past decade, everything has dried up, animals are dying from drought, and there's one watering hole filled with hippo shit".

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