In The Challenge: USA 2, former Big Brother houseguest Alyssa Lopez may have delivered one of the most jaw-dropping lines of the season as she shut down Tori Deal.
Alyssa, who previously appeared in Season 1 of the spinoff, was teamed up with Tori by default, as Survivor’s Cassidy Clark chose them each for the Blue Team when she became a captain.
During a nominations meeting, Alyssa told Tori, “Maybe it’s not always about you” after the Ride or Dies winner suggested she had been targeted for elimination.
That line quickly went viral with fans of the show, especially those who prefer to root against Tori.
However, Alyssa found herself ousted from the game a few episodes later, and it was due to the luck of a draw from The Hopper with just one vote against her, coming randomly from Tori.
Following her elimination in Episode 5, Alyssa appeared on various podcasts, including one where she revealed she and Tori haven’t talked since they filmed USA 2 together.
Alyssa says Tori may take things on The Challenge more personally than she does
While appearing on Rob Has a Podcast, The Challenge: USA 2’s Alyssa was asked about her situation with Tori, who they said she “knocked down a peg” during a few episodes. She indicated she and Tori don’t talk outside the show.
“I don’t speak to her. We don’t speak,” Alyssa said during the interview, adding that it wasn’t “in a bad way.”
“I don’t have anything bad to say about her personally. I don’t have any ill will. It’s a game for me. It’s a part-time job for me. I clock in. I clock out. I go back to my real life,” she shared.
“I don’t take the game personally, so. It seems like she is more- this is her life, you know? So maybe she takes it a little more personally because she does it so much, but I don’t- you’re gonna have to ask her. But I’m still livin’ life.”
During the early episodes, some of the CBS stars quickly targetted MTV vets, with their sights set on Johnny Bananas and Tori as the most prominent targets to go after.
Alyssa was vocal about this, including bluntly telling Tori during their nomination meeting that maybe Jonna was the intended target rather than her. She also told castmate Bananas the reasons she didn’t like him after he became one of her teammates.
Alyssa went into elimination due to Tori’s ‘random’ vote in The Hopper
Episode 5 of The Challenge: USA 2 featured “Operation Hat Trick,” a plan devised by MTV vets Tori, Bananas, and Josh Martinez to shake things up with the CBS stars.
It involved writing six competitors’ names on small pieces of paper and putting them into a hat. From there, Tori, Josh, Bananas, Fessy, Cory, and Dusty drew a name, and that’s who they’d vote for to go into elimination.
Everyone stuck to the anonymous voting plan except for Bananas, who stirred things up with a vote for Faysal Shafaat. During the episode, Tori revealed that the name she’d drawn from the hat was Alyssa L., making for an interesting random pick.
Things got even more interesting when host TJ Lavin randomly pulled Alyssa’s yellow ball out of The Hopper at The Arena. With Cassidy and Chris Underwood already voted into elimination by the Green Team, it meant it was going to be a women’s elimination.
Cassidy ended up eliminating Alyssa in a game where they were locked inside giant metal cages. They had to use their body weight to roll their cages around The Arena, stopping them at four flag stations to retrieve all four flags.
After they’d retrieved the flags, they had to get a final checkpoint and use their flags on a lightbox to get a code. That code allowed them to unlock a combination lock on their cage so they could get out and run to press a red button first.
The footage suggested it was a close finish at The Arena. However, Cassidy won, sending her friend Alyssa home earlier than she might have anticipated.
Based on her comments after the episode aired, Alyssa viewed The Challenge: USA 2 like a game and a part-time job appearing on reality TV. However, Tori may view things differently when going on The Challenge as she trains heavily and focuses on the competition much more.
While they may not be besties or speaking with each other after USA 2, they would seem fine if they were at the same event or randomly saw each other in public. However, put them on another season of The Challenge, and things might go much differently.
The Challenge: USA 2 airs Thursdays at 10/9c and Sundays at 9/8c on CBS.