*** CAUTION: This Post Contains Spoilers for Those Who Haven't Caught Up with Watching This Season So Far, Please Read with Caution Below. Videos Embedded in This Post Contain Adult Language... Parental Guidance is Suggested. ***
Whenever we begin each season of our wall-to-wall Challenge coverage, DCBLOG has devoted time, effort and resources to answering the question on the minds of our readers and the Challenge Nation fandom: "Who Are These Newbies?". But this cycle began inauspiciously on here: this site's editor in chief (me) was so caught up in Olympic fever and marking his aunt's 80th birthday that he had to push back the weekly offerings of SocialPulse -- our raw, unedited timeline of the social media episode buzz, by one week to devote time to our seasonal introduction to each & every Challenge rookie competing before kicking off episode coverage -- seventeen of them in all to begin Spies, Lies & Allies.
It's with this in mind that, for the first time in the eight years of our DCBLOG MTV coverage, a whole installment of Who Are These Newbies? will be devoted solely to one person... and that status of standing out among the rest fits the personality of the man who comes into Spies, Lies & Allies as its eighteenth rookie and its only one who made the flight here as a replacement. And considering how things have transpired this first month in Croatia, Ed Eason has put himself as early season front-runner for Rookie of the Year... and his road to becoming the most exuberant first-time competitor in this crop of newcomers is much more than just bringing the energy of a youngster to the fifth major pro sport.
Back in April, MTV substituted an entire commercial break during the season finale of the last regular Challenge season -- the back-end of the Double Agents final -- to air the debut episode of a collaborative series with Pepsi that appeared only on its YouTube channel. There, Ashley M. took part in Match Me If You Can, which brought together her with other reality alumni for lighthearted romance, seven years after she made her MTV debut on the Ex-Plosion season of The Real World -- itself a hybrid of a traditional OG season and the forthcoming reality dating show craze.
Joey was one of eight players who entered the same apartment complex on day 1, where he couldn't meet face to face with any of them, and where they had to only communicate through social media and to portray either real or modified versions of themselves. At the end of the two-week miniseries, he won $100,000 and title of winner of Season 1 of the American adaptation of the British reality competition show in January 2020... all of this two months before the program's setting -- players being sequestered in apartments and homes -- became the new normal at the pandemics outset.
Ed may be 25 years old, but once we saw him enter the Lair elimination stage where the Spies, Lies & Allies battles take place it's as if he was much younger thanks to his bubbly energy. He comes to us from the small Philadelphia suburb of Conshohocken to the north of the city, where even before he moved into the house, Ed was already well known to locals in this town of barely over 8,000 as the life of the party. Just glance over at his Instagram, and you can find that he fits that title very fine -- the frat boy who loves to have fun on Spring Break, throw holiday weekend ragers, and enjoy life in his twenties like no one else... that includes having fun on motorcycles, dirt bikes and riding in his pickup.
Playing The Circle game doesn't require nearly as much athleticism as The Challenge does despite our subject's love of working out, but strategy still plays an essential role. But him coming into the game two-thirds of the way through as the season's last replacement showed that being there from earlier is more important, and Ed was eliminated in the season's penultimate episode 11... though he did gain valuable knowledge that deceiving others and politicking can help him out in his Challenge gig. Sadly though, we couldn't find clips of his time in the apartment.
Season 2 of The Circle earlier this spring saw her son and Ed's brother Mitchell get cast into the much-anticipated sequel, following in the footsteps of another well-known reality brother duo of Cody and Paulie Calafiore of Big Brother and Challenge fame. The health insurance & real estate agent and part-time model also came in as a midseason replacement coming in at the beginning of week 2, and played the game by himself without the help of his family but sharing the same traits as his brother. Mitch, though, had the same fate as Ed in being eliminated from the game right before the finale when DeLeesa St. Agathe took the top prize.
If the probability arises that a Battle of the Bloodlines 2 would ever come up in the future, then it's a sure bet that Mitch and Ed would be a formidable team to go up against Total Madness champ Jenny West and her twin sister Lucy, among others. But for now, Ed has been relishing the chance given to him to be in this Challenge arena, and don't expect him to be a standby replacement the next time he goes on that plane for next season's activities. And by the time that rolls around, this banger will likely take over that long ride to the next destination.
- I AM DC
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