‘The Real World Seattle: Bad Blood’ episode 8 review: Who left the show — and why?
After a week off, “The Real World Seattle: Bad Blood” returned to MTV with a new episode, and this is one that clearly played up the drama after some calmer weeks in and around the house.
More “Bad Blood” – Earlier on in the episode, we briefly revisited the conflict between Theo and Kassius, which is something that is probably going to surface again by the end of the season. What came out of this eventually was seeing a conversation between Kassius and Will, two guys who are different from the mold in that the both guys are fathers, and therefore are looking at the experience differently. They don’t want to spend the money with crazy excursions, which was interesting to us since we assumed that production paid for a lot of that. Still, we like seeing a side of reality here on a show that often feels over-the-top and less real with each passing season.
Mike’s “radio show” goes south – We knew that this “joke” idea was going to go south the moment that we heard him drop the n-word in front of the camera. Well, things just went from bad to worse here given how he later made a racial comments about Jordan, the same person that he was getting a lil’ showmantic with for most of the season. Why do that? More than that, why in the world is MTV continuing to cast people who are okay with doing this sort of stuff? They’ve had Mike on one of their shows before! This isn’t even the same situation as with Jenna, someone who was plucked out of nowhere for “Go Big or Go Home” and ended up being one of the most-loathed cast members in the history of the franchise. (In terms of what they said and how they reacted, it’s very different and we’ll have more on that later.)
After Mike’s comment to Jordan and being called out for them, he wanted to leave the house, feeling like he was going to be edited as a racist for his comments, which he tried to explain away by saying that they were more commonplace where he comes from.
We assumed that eventually, someone was going to talk Mike out of leaving. Theo tried to. Yet, the moment still happened, and it’s probably his TV experience that caused him to think this way. He started to clearly feel like the edit on the show was going to turn against him, so he decided to apologize profusely for what he said and bail before it got any worse for him. Of course, it would’ve been better to never say what he did, and we’re not going to be mad that beyond this episode, hopefully these racist comments will be gone from the dialogue since having a season about this sort of ugliness would be very depressing.
The aftermath – Of course, there was some more conversation tonight about what happened with Mike. In particular, Jordan was especially emotional given that he barely gave her much of a reason why he departed. Kassius in particular livid over the comments, and this spawned some greater conflict between him and Theo after he determined that Theo was being too kind to a guy like Mike given what happened. We can’t speak on this, and nor would we want to since we can’t pur ourselves in these shoes. It’s just another unfortunate consequence of Mike leaving.
The other side – For those of you who were feeling distressed (understandably so) by much of what took place on the episode so far, the ending offered up hope for the other side. Many of the housemates attended a protest for Black Lives Matter, which led to Kassius making a speech about some of the stereotypes he has faced. Theo was supportive of him in the moment, and this offered a chance for the two to mend some fences.
It was interesting to have an episode this week about race-related issues end with a protest about combating them, but in some interesting ways it totally worked to give the episode a wide array of different perspectives and to end with more of a message of unity and trying to make the world a better place. One other difference between this season and last is that while Mike said some terrible things, there was an apparent understanding that what he did was wrong. We didn’t get that last season, and hopefully he views this show as a learning experience. Episode Grade: B.
Want to see some other news right now when it comes to “The Real World”? Then just be sure to head over to the link here right now! (Photo: MTV.)