Recap / Total Drama: "Fun Fight at the O'Cake Corral"

The final 10 contestants duke it out in a three-team bake-off to create the best looking and tasting Chris-shaped cake of the lot. After duking it out on a floating island of ingredients, the contestants must use enough of their culinary skills to succeed in the face of their competition, three advantage or disadvantage themed remotes, and the appearance of a very special Total Drama Island Alumni guest judge.

Tropes

• Actually Pretty Funny: Even Chris and Owen can't help but laugh at Chef when Damien states that he'd be no help in the kitchen.
• Appeal to Flattery: Realizing that Julia is a better baker than his entire team combined, Caleb has the idea of molding their cake into a buff version of Chris. While Chef and Owen are not impressed, it works exactly as intended on Chris.
• Art Evolution: Though his appearance has mostly stayed the same otherwise, eagle eyed viewers will notice that Owen now sports his Total DramaRama color scheme, with dark green pupils and the Maple leaf on his shirt now outlined blue.
• Battle Cry: Wayne literally yells "Battle Cry!" during the brawl for ingredients right before he hits Priya with a sack of flour.
• Big "NO!": Ripper after Axel is eliminated.
• Brutal Honesty: MK admits in a confessional she is not surprised by Julia choosing to stab her own alliance partner in the back by sicing Owen on her during the challenge.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Owen returns here as a guest judge for the challenge, and is the first of the original Total Drama contestants to make a return into the new series.
  • Clucky from Pahkitew Island also apparently comes back when Wayne and Raj go to the chicken coop to get more eggs. Clucky is known to be the only chicken in the show to not have dotted eyes.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Like the last episode, it's MK who has the hardest time during the challenge. While she just has a pack of cake mix instead of the ingredients, it all goes downhill for her. Ripper and Axel constantly making out and messing with the ingredients gets on her nerves, and she forgets to grease her tins which causes her cake to get stuck. Her final result was made out of garbage which causes her team to lose.
  • Raj and Wayne don't have it much better. They have to work with the person that got Bowie voted off last episode, Julia repeatedly manhandles them for screwing up and they get attacked by chickens and a rhino.
• Call-Back:
  • Ripper's doggy swimming and acting prideful about it is a reference to the Hawaii leg in The Ridonculous Race, in which Taylor brags about her swimming skills and "achievements", but was revealed to not only be a poor diver, but also swims like a dog.
  • Julia’s bossy attitude towards Wayne and Raj in a cooking challenge calls back to Heather's behavior in "If You Can't Take The Heat" in which Heather bossed her team around and caused their loss. Unlike Heather though, Julia's behavior was more justified due to her frustration towards Wayne and Raj for not getting many things from the battle barge and squandering their initial carton of eggs, and also unlike Heather who's team lost, Julia and her team won the challenge.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Julia reveals in the confessional that her parents made her work at their bakery every summer as a kid, and continues by saying that "[she] only speak[s] to Greg and Judy through [her] lawyers now".
• Chekhov's Gun: During the initial ingredient rush, Wayne and Raj end up picking up a bow and arrows instead of ingredients. Julia later uses the weapon to sabotage Priya, Caleb, Damien, and Zee by ruining their baking soda — an act that ultimately leads to her winning the challenge.
• Cooking Duel: The challenge is a three-way bake off between Julia, Wayne and Raj, Damien, Zee, Caleb, and Priya, and MK, Ripper and Axel.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Owen is declared the first ever winner of Total Drama, making his ending from the first season of the show canon. This also makes Gwen the first official Runner-up of Total Drama chronologically speaking.
• Disowned Parent: Julia calls her parents by their first names and only communicates with them through lawyers, all for making her work at their bakery. Given her influencer career, she's evidently wealthy enough to live on her own, and given her determination, self-sufficient enough to make it work.
• Easily Forgiven: Raj and Wayne are initially not happy to be teamed up with Julia due to how she caused Bowie's elimination. However, they quickly go along with the idea when Wayne makes the comparison to a jerk from another team joining their team and treat her like one of their hockey teammates, which basically involves body checking her whenever they get too excited. Julia quickly says she thinks she would have preferred it if they hated her.
• Epic Fail: MK, Axel, and Ripper flunk the challenge by a landslide as their cake not only looked terrible but also tasted awful. It was evident that it was a failure even without the sabotage from the other two teams as Axel and Ripper spent more time flirting and goofing off than helping MK with the cake. Additionally, MK had the easiest one since her's was just cake mixture in a box instead of all the separate ingredients, and even then, she messes up big time.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Chris and Chef are both shocked to see how quickly gathering ingredients for the challenge escalated into an all-out brawl between the campers. Chris even asks where Damien got a trident from.
  • While Julia has no problem sabotaging the other players for her own benefit, she actually feels guilty when she decides to sabotage MK and sounds really upset when she says her name.
• Fan Disservice: Ripper and Axel spend the entire challenge doing this, which is eventually enough for the others to send home Axel for being the bigger serious threat between the two and just not wanting to watch them be so disgustingly affectionate with one another anymore, though Ripper ends up leaving with her anyway when he grabs onto her legs while she's being dangled from the drone and getting dragged away with her.
• Farm Boy: When Raj and Wayne go to collect eggs, Wayne reveals he and his family lived and worked on a farm before he became a hockey player and contestant on Total Drama
• Fire-Breathing Diner: Owen eats cake directly from the oven and proceeds to run into the lake while breathing fire. He has no regrets.
• Foreshadowing: In the confessional after learning the teams for the cake making will be random, Juila worries about the idea of getting the Hockey Bros after she got Bowie voted off last episode. Guess what ends up happening?
• Frying Pan of Doom: Julia repeatedly hits Caleb in the face with a frying pan during the brawl for the ingredients.
• Graceful Loser:
  • Unlike her last elimination, Axel takes her elimination quite well. Though she says in the confessional that it's no one's business how she feels about it.
  • When Chef singles her out for potential elimination, MK freely admits she whiffed the challenge and waits for the results.
• Handy Remote Control: There are three that can each be used by a single team during the challenge:
  • The red "Totally Lost" Remote gives that team the chance to ask Chef for some professional cooking and baking help or a consultation at anytime during the challenge.
  • The blue "O-Dawg" Remote gives that team the chance to send Owen over to another contestant's team's preparation station with… expected results.
  • The yellow "Kitchen Quake" Remote gives that team the chance to cause a giant table-shaking "Kitchen Quake" that will slow down both of the opposing teams if they’re not careful.
• Hidden Depths: As much as she hates how she learned it, Julia is a skilled baker, even being able to mill flour and sugar from wheat and sugarcane.
• History Repeats Itself:
  • Once again, Raj and Wayne get attacked by angry birds and the episode has a double elimination. This time the elimination is not theirs.
  • Axel's elimination being down to her and Ripper on the bottom two again.
  • For the second season in a row (and third overall, counting Revenge of the Island), a double elimination happens in Episode 7. It also includes contestants who are close to each other (whether platonically or romantically) both times.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Chef, Chris and Owen are all delighted at how good Priya, Caleb, Damien and Zee's cake tastes, only for Ripper to reveal that Priya used his armpit sweat in lieu of baking soda to make the cake rise, which grosses out Chris and Chef and causes them to vomit. Owen on the other hand is completely okay with it.
• Idiot Ball: Priya getting a "culture" from Ripper's armpit for their cake.
• Ironic Name: The bakery Julia's parents run is named "Sweet Little Julia's", though Julia is anything but sweet, which Owen even lampshades himself.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While both are major jerks, both Julia and MK have every right to be frustrated with how completely unhelpful their teammates are being, pretty much forcing them to do all the work.
• Knuckle Cracking: One of the chickens cracks its eyes right before the whole flock attacks Raj and Wayne.
• Lethal Chef: Of the three teams, only Julia’s cake is well baked. MK’s is made using garbage, while Priya’s uses Ripper’s sweat in lieu of yeast.
• The Load: Axel and Ripper are of zero help during the challenge because they're too distracted flirting with each other, much to MK's frustration. Meanwhile, in the first half of the challenge, Raj and Wayne collect weapons instead of ingredients and end up wasting their team's eggs by playing baseball with them, though they do manage to compensate this by getting more eggs and milk in the second half.
• Make-Out Kids: Ripper and Axel spend the whole time making out and acting like a cute couple instead of helping out MK which drives her nuts and leads to their double elimination.
• Mama Bear: The hens are driven into a rage when Wayne and Raj declare they're going to take their eggs.
• Moment Killer: Zee opening his soda can interrupts Caleb and Priya's kiss.
• Older Than They Look: Despite having been off of the series for 15 years according to the first seasons opening narration, which would reasonably make him at least 31 years old (or even 32 if the Time Skip between reboot's seasons is indeed one year), Owen barely looks a day older than he did when he first showed up at Camp Wawanakwa during the series' very first episode.
• Non-Gameplay Elimination: Chris decides Ripper's eliminated solely for hitching a ride on the Drone of Despair with Axel and sinking it.
• Noodle Incident: Mentioned by Chris himself. Where did Damien get a trident from?
• Prongs of Poseidon: Damien nearly spears Wayne with a trident, but hits a flour sack instead. Chris wonders where Damien even got it in the first place.
• Rhino Rampage: Wayne and Raj end up having to milk a rhinoceros of all animals they could find in the forest, which doesn't appreciate their attempts. Cue the Hockey Bros returning beat up, albeit with the rhino milk.
• Saying Too Much: Ripper revealing one of the ingredients came from his armpits prevented Priya's team from winning the challenge.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • Another error featuring the drone of despair is shown in the episode when Ripper clings onto Axel’s legs while the drone is taking her, causing the drone to fall into the lake and revealing that it can’t carry 2 people at a time. This contradicts “Severe Eggs and Pains”, in which the drone Carried Wayne and Raj at the same time upon their medical evacuation, even though both of them were on a medical stretcher at the time.
  • In the previous episode, Wayne couldn't bring himself to hit Julia thanks to her Wounded Gazelle Gambit because he didn't want to hurt a girl. This episode, he has no problem beating up Priya with a sack of flour when they're brawling on the dock.
• Shout-Out:
  • Damien tripping over the log and grabbing his leg before he finds the immunity idol may be a reference to Family Guy.
  • Wayne’s use of echoes in the canoe to annoy Julia and saying “I Am Your Partner” while carrying the canoe, parodies the “I Am Your Father” scene from Star Wars.
  • Axel yelling "This Is Drama!" then kicking Zee off the dock is a reference to the famous scene from 300.
  • The challenge itself appears to ripped straight from Nailed It!, with everyone baking the same cake sculpture using varying qualities of ingredients, people having the power to sabotage others with buttons, including one where a judge can give advice and another judge can annoy someone else. And the teams being forced to get creative when things don't work out like how they planned to make something like the intended product.
  • The scene where the contestants fight each other over the ingredients and knocking each other off the dock is a reference to both the Cornucopia Bloodbath from The Hunger Games and the gang fight from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy ("That escalated quickly!" "And where'd Damien get a trident?")
  • The scene where Axel paints Ripper in his underwear is a reference to the scene where Jack draws Rose naked in Titanic (1997) but this time the roles of the artist and model are gender inverted.
  • Ripper and Axel molding the modeling chocolate together while Ripper has his arms wrapped around Axel from behind before making out with each other is a reference to the famous pottery scene from Ghost (1990).
• Surrounded by Idiots: Both MK and Julia suffer from this when MK is stuck with Make-Out Kids Ripper and Axel who never bother to help and Julia is stuck with Raj and Wayne who fail to get any ingredients and waste their only carton of eggs in the first half of the challenge, though unlike Ripper and Axel they do manage to help Julia by getting more eggs and milk in the second half.
• Tempting Fate:
  • MK jokes that baking isn't nearly as hard as Chef is making it out to be at the start of the challenge. Naturally, she ends up having the worst time of it during the challenge, struggling to make a cake when everything from common baking mistakes like forgetting to grease her pan before she baked her cake to having to deal with Ripper and Axel's lovesick incompetence is against her. By the time the challenge is over, she's clearly come in last place since while both her cake and Caleb, Damien, Priya, and Zee's cake made the judges all inevitably throw up, the latter team were at least able to make their cake look presentable while hers was a sickly green, disgustingly melting and smushed up Chris-shaped cake with a stick in the middle of it.
  • Julia asks what would happen if she ends up paired with Raj and Wayne after she caused Bowie's elimination. Naturally, she gets paired together with them and it definitely hinders her a lot during the challenge.
• Too Powerful to Live: Priya's team votes for Axel over Ripper specifically because she was more of a threat.
• The Un-Reveal: Whatever Owen's been up to between The Ridonculous Race and the present is unknown, since he just lists off random stuff like taking a nap and returning a library book.
• Would Hit a Girl: Raj and Wayne have no problem knocking out MK and Priya with flour sacks during the brawl.
• Would Rather Suffer: After getting slammed around by the Hockey Bros' chest bumps, Julia admits that she would rather them hate her.

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