ABC’s ‘The Quest’ episode 4 review: The coolest reality TV swordfight ever

We have to admit that around three minutes into tonight’s episode of “The Quest,” we were worried after the show did one of our least-favorite things ever: Trick us with another cliffhanger ending. We were fine with the Queen not really being said since she’s royalty and all, but no actual battle. We’d build this up all week to be the most epic thing ever! Then … it was all a stunt to make sure the paladins were ready for when the battle truly comes.

Still, at least the show was good enough the rest of the way to get us over our initial annoyance about the cliffhanger fake-out. For one, this was one of the coolest challenges to date: A sword-fight in a pit that actually felt pretty epic on a reality TV scale. This seemed at first to be very slanted towards the big guys, mostly because they had the extra weight to throw around. The fact that Lina, Adria, and Jasmine were all in the bottom three seemed to be some sort of further evidence of that.

However, this challenge produced the most epic conclusion ever we saw Leticia go into complete awesome mode and she went after both Andrew and Shondo in the final round of the challenge before winning. (Shondo also wins this episode for being the first person to say “balls” in Everealm.)

Even the challenge before the Fates was somewhat fun, since it further tested the sword skills as a delightful sort of target practice. Adria was the strongest here by a good distance, and then we were left with Lina (who was in trouble for “questioning her team,” even logically so, earlier in the episode) and Jasmine (who has spunk, but is also the smallest person in the competition).

The group decided eventually to get rid of Jasmine, which was a shame since she was one of the people who really stood out. She was almost like our female Tim, constantly full of energy at every turn.

Next week, an ogre! We’re guessing that we really are going to meet one of those next week, and since this is a Disney production and not DreamWorks, it’s probably going to be scary kind and not Shrek.

In the end, we really wish that the beginning of the episode wasn’t a letdown, since the rest of it was pretty darn awesome. This was basically like a LARP we tried to design for a few months that never came together. Despite our singular complaint, you still have many reasons to watch this show. When the lowest grade we’ve given after four episodes is a B+ (above the average we give to any other show), you’re in good shape. Grade: B+.

What did you think about this leg of “The Quest”? Share below.