In their next challenge, "Know Your Enemy", the contestants are tested on their social skills and how well they've come to know one another. While walking across a gorge on a bridge separated between A and B choices, they must correctly guess an opposing team member's answers during a "Would You Rather?" segment that was held before the start of the first season or risk being dropped into a pool filled with wolverines.
Tropes:
- All for Nothing: MK's attempt to get an advantage in the challenge by posing as an intern again fails this time, as the meeting she goes to doesn't focus on the challenge but rather Chris sending the interns on an errand.
- Bait-and-Switch: After hearing Ripper's poem for her, Axel grabs him by the throat and everyone immediately assumes that she's going to kick his ass for it… only for her to pull him into a tender kiss instead.
- Big Damn Kiss: Axel, after Ripper wins her over with his poetry, pulls him into a kiss.
- Black Comedy: Before the Bait-and-Switch occurs, Chris calls the producers and asks if it's okay for them to show a live decapitation.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: MK knows that the number one rule when it comes to cheating in a competition is to not make a perfect score. For this reason she purposely gives Bowie the wrong answer at the last moment, since it would make Chris and the opposite team suspicious.
- Epic Fail: Not only does Emma completely flub up the challenge by getting half of her team sent into the wolverine pool by getting all of the questions wrong and being too proud and stubborn to admit that she isn’t a people person as she had believed, but she also fails redeem herself for her team when the last question is for Chase, the one person in the entire cast that she DOES know anything about, and her and the team's faith in her abilities have become so shaken that she gives in to Priya's pushing for her to go against her gut and ends up choosing incorrectly yet again, which causes her to be sent home that night.
- Everyone Has Standards: Despite initially being fine with going along with it for the sake of catching up to Team Rat Face, Bowie begins to feel guilty and uneasy about lying to Raj by enabling Julia and MK to cheat in challenges behind the latter's back after Raj praises him for NOT doing so.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Ripper has this upon learning that his crush Axel loves poetry. He then leaves to start writing one to confess his love for her.
- Hidden Depths: Despite her harsh survivalist exterior, personality, and interests, Axel turns out to be a huge fan of poetry, which Ripper uses to finally win her over.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Emma’s flaw as shown in this episode. It is seen when she repeatedly answers the questions about other teammates wrong and even gets the question related to Chase wrong when she assumes he would rather apologize for something he’s not sorry for than go bald, though she would have gotten it right if not for Priya's intervention. This ultimately leads to her team’s loss and her elimination from the game.
- Kick the Dog: While part of the reason MK gave Bowie the wrong answer was because Chris was getting suspicious, she admits that the main reason was because Julia really wanted to watch Bowie take a dive.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Emma believes that she can crush the "Know Your Enemy" challenge because she is, by her own description, a "people person”. However, not only does she prove herself to be anything but as the challenge goes on and she gets half of her team sent into the wolverine pool, but the only contestant she proves to even know remotely anything about is her toxic ex-boyfriend Chase, and even then she ends up losing the challenge for her team because they’ve all lost so much faith in her discernment abilities that Priya actively encourages her to go against her gut on the one time where she's actually right.
- Lying to Protect Your Feelings: Instead of telling Emma outright that she sucks at the challenge like everyone else wants her to, Priya decides to come up with an elaborate ruse to help the team win the challenge and keep Emma's confidence intact, likely to avoid hurting the latter's feelings and having the whole team turn against her if they lose since that exact same kind of thing just got her best friend, Millie, sent home in the last episode. Predictably, this all comes crashing back down on her once Emma learns the truth, and she makes things even worse for herself when she goads Emma into going against her gut for a question about her ex-boyfriend, Chase, which lands Priya in the bottom 2 with Emma for her less than impressive leadership choices during the challenge.
- Moonwalk Dance: Executed by Bowie during his good streak.
- Naked People Trapped Outside: One of the questions MK was given was whether she'd choose to go five years without texting or lose her bathing suit at a crowded wave pool. She'd rather end up naked than call people.
- Oblivious Guilt Slinging: After the Skunk Butts win the challenge, Raj compliments Bowie on how good he was during the challenge while also playing fair, unaware that Bowie actually was cheating. Needless to say, that does not help Bowie's feelings of guilt.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Axel reacts to Ripper reading her a love poem over the loudspeakers with a panicked expression and a Luminescent Blush on her face.
- Caleb also has this reaction when Priya winds up on the bottom two alongside Emma when he's trying to form an alliance with her.
- Opportunistic Bastard: Non-villainous example. Now that Millie's been eliminated, Caleb says it's only a matter of time before he can convince Priya to form an alliance with him.
- Shout-Out:
- The setup for the challenge, being two sets of panels with one side being the right answer while the other side is the wrong answer and how picking the wrong answer will result in the contestant falling, is a visual reference to the Squid Game "Stepping Stones" game. This makes it the second episode of the season to reference Squid Game in some way.
- Bowie performs some Michael Jackson-style dance moves, including moonwalking.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Since Emma spent the entirety of the last season focusing solely on Chase and rotating between loving him and hating him, she never really took any time to get to know any of the other contestants personally— even her friendship with Bowie, before she had ended it herself, was centered mainly around the two's mutual hatred of Chase most of the time. As a result, she completely flubs up the challenge when she proves that she doesn't know any of them nearly as well as she thinks she does and gets herself sent home in the end.
- Bowie's surprisingly good streak, while getting them back ahead of the Rat Faces in the challenge, also got a little too suspicious for Chris and everyone else since he suddenly started doing so good out of nowhere, forcing MK to give him the wrong answer at the last question to cover up their cheating.
- Too Much Information: When Chris asks about MK's whereabouts (as she had run off to find out the answers of the challenge), Julia tells him that MK had to leave because she has explosive diarrhea. This grosses out Chris, who tells Julia that she could have simply said that MK had to go to the restroom.
- When Life Gives You Lemons...: Rather than directly tell Emma to stop trying to help and hurting her feelings as her team wants her to, Priya decides to turn Emma's lack of knowledge about the other contestants into a strategy by tricking Emma into not seeing or hearing the correct answer, having Caleb choose the opposite of whatever Emma just said, and making Emma believe that she picked the right one so that she'll keep going. This works up until the second to last question when Zee unwittingly reveals the ruse and Emma is left understandably furious, leading her to refuse to help in the challenge anyone until Bowie catches up through MK's underhanded means and they only have one more shot left to win.
- Would Rather Suffer: One of Priya's questions is if she'd rather be genetically spliced with a warthog or have Chris as her father. She takes the former and sticks with it when Chris asks her again.
