Episode 9 starts with everyone but Julia/MK disliking Caleb and feeling bad for Priya since Caleb seemed to be playing with her feelings. Which he kind of was for a bit, but whatever. Caleb tries to explain the situation, but Priya won't hear it. The challenge begins, and it's to find the largest object on the island. Shenanigans happen and Caleb drags one of Chris' yachts, Priya rolls in a boulder, Wayne takes the confessional stall, Raj hauls in a massive fridge, Julia cuts down a tree, MK steals Chef's car (why it's on an island is anyone's guess) and Damien finds a large, wooly sheep. Then the real challenge starts, which is to fit the objects in a small hole for each camper barely larger than a mail slot. So they gotta break shit down and fit them in one piece at a time. Everyone struggles, especially Wayne since the outhouse is made of petrified wood from all the teenage farts in there, according to Chef. Caleb starts tearing the yacht apart with his muscles, which gets Priya hot and bothered. Kind of seems her romance for Caleb is more lust. Long story short, Caleb somehow manages to tear a yacht apart faster than other campers can get their objects in pieces (some lose pieces and that disqualifies them) and wins immunity. Poor Damien even sheared his sheep and it just wasn't enough. MK and Julia knows they're one of the ones that'll be voted out, and MK starts making up a bunch of lies about Julia...but ends up eliminated. Julia told everyone that she and MK had a "non-smacktalking pact" so people picked up that MK was full of shit. No kiss or ship confirmed as MK leaves, though the two hug, so I'm sure idiot zoomers will think they're dykes anyway. Caleb/Priya gets to stick around more, and Priya gets to make it to the double digit episodes when she shouldn't.
Episode 10 starts with more Priya/Caleb drama, with Julia trying to manipulate them by telling them to ignore each other. Caleb also tries to explain the situation to Priya and confess before Julia interferes, but he can't spit it out. The challenge starts and it's a memorization challenge, with a large board digitally showing the faces of those eliminated so far. The campers have to memorize the board and pick a slot with the designated contestant on little tablets and if they get it wrong, they get punished in a fashion matching the chosen eliminated contestant. Julia has basically photographic memory because "vengeful people never forget" which I thought was funny. This is a pretty slapstick-heavy episode with some amusing punishments. Damien gets crushed by a giant skull dressed up like Scary Girl, Axel's punishment involves a giant fist and foot slamming into the losers, and Ripper's of course is just a giant fart. Priya and Caleb ignore each other at first, but Caleb confesses his love for Priya and the two makeup and kiss, working together to try and take down Julia. The other contestants get too injured to participate, including poor Damien getting carried away by a swarm of bees. Julia manages to win as she, Caleb, and Priya wrestle things out, and the way the tablets are pressed as a result lets Julia win. In a twist, she gets immunity, and can choose someone else to also be immune. She picks Caleb in exchange for him voting how she sees fit, which enrages Priya. Damien is voted off, and tries to use the Immunity Idol, but someone swiped it (offscreen) and he gets sent home.
Episode 11 starts with, you guessed it, more Priya/Caleb drama. I'm so fucking sick of these two, holy shit. It just goes on and on. First they were all lovey-dovey and now it's just Priya mad at Caleb and Caleb being sorry, and Priya forgiving Caleb, then Caleb messes up somehow and Priya gets mad at him again and it's exhausting. Priya's now mad at Caleb for taking the immunity from Julia, even acknowledging it was the most strategic move, but is still angry with him. Challenge starts and worst Ridonculous Race character MacArthur cameos with five search dogs that will hunt down a specific contestant. When they're dragged back to the starting point three times, they're out, and the last one standing gets immunity. Not much happens of note. Campers run from the dogs and hide, the dogs have supercapable abilities that let them find the campers, they get dragged back. Julia jumps in garbage to mask her scent for a bit, Raj ditches his clothes like an idiot, and there's more Caleb/Priya drama (God forbid anyone else gets character growth of some kind) since Caleb reveals he has to vote for whoever Julia tells him to. Even though the immunity from the last challenge is gone now, so nothing is binding him. Julia manages to win immunity, barely being dragged back last from Priya. Raj is eliminated since Priya can't bear to make Caleb leave even though she's mad at him. The second time he was the obvious pick to be sent home, but he somehow got saved from a non-immunity situation. Wayne's bummed to see Raj leave, but he takes it better than I expected.
Episode 12 starts with, say it with me, more Priya/Caleb stuff. Can you fucking believe Priya is still in the game after winning last season? It's fucking baffling. Anyway, Priya convinces Caleb to just, like, not do what Julia says. And Caleb is trying to listen because he's just so honest. Rolling my eyes. Julia also buddies up to Wayne since Raj is gone to manipulate him, which naturally works since Wayne is literally a retard. A loveable character, but a retard. The challenge starts and it's a fear-based one, the fears asked for in the paperwork the contestants signed (which you'd think they'd be smart enough to lie about) and it's done with each camper hooking straps the others are wearing so they're craned into small areas with their fears. Caleb instantly goes for Priya, basically because Julia told him to and he's torn on keeping his word and just taking Julia down. To just lift off the fears...Priya is thunder/lightning, Caleb is snakes and clowns, so his is a snake dressed as a clown, Wayne's is Raj playing for the other team (represented as a bear wearing a Raj mask for some reason) as well as their team's mascot. Julia's is anti-aging cream since she feels she'll be young and beautiful forever and is freaked out about needing the cream. Out of the giant room filled with the cream pops out the Tennis Rivals from Ridonculous Race which I liked. I believe the idea was whoever hooked the most contestants got immunity, which results in Caleb being the winner. They all vote off Julia, but it's revealed she stole Damien's Immunity Idol offscreen, and she voted for Priya, sending her home. Fucking nuts that the canon winner of the last season made it to the second-to-last episode of this one.
Final episode pretty much just starts with the challenge. Everyone that was eliminated gets to return to help participate, with them choosing whose team they want to be on. Millie, Priya, Damien, Emma, and Nichelle are on Caleb's team, almost all of them explicitly because they don't want Julia to win. On a more wholesome note, it cuts to Wayne's team of Raj, Bowie, Axel, Ripper, Chase, and Zee who are cheering Wayne's team and psyching him up, seeming to really want him to win which I enjoyed. And, naturally, Julia only has MK. Turns out these large teams are a detriment at first, as the three finalists have to transport their team via cart up a mountain to the second part of the challenge. Julia's situation is easy, and she gets in the lead with Caleb not far behind. Wayne is distracted by "traps" placed on the trail such as pizza and ice cream until Bowie goes "coch mode" and gets his ass in gear. Second part of the final race is a tightrope bit with a group of dangerous creatures like a bear, a gator, and a raptor in the water below. The finalists have to get across while the other teams can shoot at them with t-shirt cannons. As Julia gets their first, Scary Girl comes out of nowhere and shoots her off, with Scary Girl back to her normal self (and notably absent from the episode until this point) since she the showrunners said she didn't get to be on any teams. MK just wrestles the cannon away and Scary Girl basically does nothing for the rest of the finale except scare the animals away when she falls down below. Caleb gets there next as he and Julia have troubles getting across thanks to the t-shirt projectiles. Until Julia falls and gets most of her hair ripped out by the raptor, now sporting an ugly mullet. She goes berserk and sprints back up and leaps on Caleb's back as he crosses, and leaps to the other side as he gets knocked down. Wayne arrives last, and Caleb manages to get to the other side, with Wayne trying to polevault to the other side, but gets sprung up high into the sky. The final part of the race has the finalists donn flying squirrel outfits and fly to the Dock of Shame to win. Caleb and Julia fight in midair and drop to the ground, sprinting to the exit. Wayne (offscreen) landed by the flying squirrel suits and flies to the finish line, dive-bombing like a meteor and crashlands on the target at the last moment, winning the season. Presumably, it's like last season, and he is the winner. Especially since, unlike last time, it was neck-and-neck between three contestants rather than two, so there'd have to be three versions of the episode. The season gets a quick wrap-up, ending on a dull note as Chris just goes "Well, hopefully more pain will come last season!" and it ends.
Now I'll just ramble about each character now that the two seasons are done. Though one of the producers said he really wants the same cast once again, which I'd really dread. It's clear that even two times was too many without shaking up the roster, especially with these shortened seasons.
Scary Girl - Still somehow one of my favorites. A very one-dimensional character, but she still amused me the most, and I was bummed she only made it one episode into the second season. Didn't even get the revenge she promised. If they end up reusing this cast, I'm sure the writers will see her popularity and give her more screentime. The "trying to be normal" thing probably could've stretched farther, but oh well.
Chase - He still felt like a big nothing in the second season, which makes sense since he got eliminated second, and I find his Jake/Logan Paul characteristics fucking obnoxious, so I don't care for him at all.
Millie - Didn't like her in the last season, but I admit I liked her almost sociopathic logic of letting Damien get horribly injured for the sake of winning. I almost kind of wanted that to be a running gag. But she had no real arc to go through this time around, so she had to get the boot early.
Emma - Without Chase, there's just so little to her. She barely interacted with anyone else, but even when Chase got eliminated, she had zero reaction and never acknowledged it. She also just felt like a placeholder this season.
Nichelle - I know it's redundant, but she also felt like a big nothing. This season she had basically zero interactions with anyone and about ten lines, most of them just bragging about how badass she is now. Her elimination was total bullshit, and I really don't get the point of not just booting her first.
Bowie - Honestly, not as obnoxious as I expected "the first openly gay character" in the series to be. I still don't like him for being an overly fruity fag, but he could've been way worse. Especially since Terry McGurrin, who grooms his own kids and loves to talk to minors on Twitter all day, was behind this season and has a fetish for introducing LGBT stuff into Total Drama.
Axel - Literally just Shawn and Eva fused together, but she lost her entire zombie schtick in the second season, spending half of it sucking face with Ripper. I'd love it if she made it farther without the forced romance that literally spawned from a poem about farts.
Ripper - Still my most hated character in the reboot. Not much to stay about him aside from being a fat ugly walking fart joke. At least Owen was actually somewhat charming and was a nice guy. Ripper is just fucking obnoxious.
Zee - I find him charming, even though he's the stereotypical "totally not a stoner, but is totally also a stoner" idiot character. He's pretty amusing, and I don't think I could hate him if I tried. A shame he basically filled in the roll of World Tour Tyler in the second season of the reboot, keeping a romance-related secret and being booted very soon after he spilled the beans.
MK - Very obnoxious, mainly in her deep, gravely-ass voice. Almost all her dialogue is just sarcastic one-liners and she got old fast. Her partnership with Julia was kind of annoying too. It was mainly one of them plotting something or giving a zinger and then patting each other's backs in the confessional. I'll never see her and Julia as dykes no matter how desperate Twitter and Reddit try to push it.
Damein - I liked him more this season. He's still a pussy, but he dropped the "I just wanna go home!" subplot with the most obvious conclusion. I actually thought he'd make it to the finals, but alas. A shame he didn't get to interact more with other characters.
Raj - Wayne, but gay. Not much to say about him that can't be said about Wayne. His role as comic relief went totally unchanged between seasons, so not a lot to say. At least he and Wayne didn't get double-eliminated again. Honestly, I dislike injury-related eliminations. The way injuries work in the series is so inconsistent and situational, like characters can have a plane land on them and be mostly okay. But then in another instance someone is hit in the head with a crate of oranges and is out for the rest of the episode.
Priya - Literally Zoey 2.0. A generic "nice girl" character that manages to be in every episode of two seasons in a row. And also she won one of the seasons. I'm so baffled she is the single canon winner of the first season and then made it to the second-to-last episode of the second season. What the fuck were the writers thinking? Her and Caleb's romance fucking consumed the second half of the second season and it was so damn painful, I was so happy to see her go. Too little too late, on the other hand.
Caleb - Again, hate the romance these two have. And Caleb oddly gets away pretty easy when other guy characters got punished way more for romance-related blunders. He's pretty dull and basically has no interesting relationships with anyone, just a dull-ass romance with Priya. They kept going back and forther over and over and over again on fighting and getting back together and it was so damn grating...
Julia - While she also appeared in every episode of both seasons, she never won, so I'm a bit more forgiving. I noticed in the second season a lot of her biggest moments seemed to happen offscreen. She somehow wrote up an entire Hollywood contract for Nichelle offscreen. She convinced everyone to vote for Bowie offscreen. She ratted MK out offscreen. She found the Immunity Idol offscreen. And it seems the IQ of the other characters shrivel up when she's around, and there's really no reason she should've made it so far the second time around.
Wayne - Really did not expect him to win, but I'll take about anyone over Caleb, so I'm happy. He's still not much of a character aside from being a retard, and he really only one out of luck, but I still like him. He can be pretty funny at times, and he's too nice for me to manage to dislike him.
Really hope they either give things the All-Star treatment with mixed generations of contestants next time. Owen looked and acted exactly the same in his cameo, so I don't think it'd be an issue to do that with other old contestants. I really don't think this cast can work three times in a row with no changes, even adding one or two newbies in just wouldn't be enough, especially with these 13-episode seasons. It'd mean multiple double-eliminations, after all. So I hope they either give us 26 episode seasons again, or just bring in a new caste. Terry McGurrin seems desperate to bring this exact caste back, so we'll just have to see...