“You need to put your lives on the line to save the life of others.” – Rudy
I’ll start off where I left the recap of the previous Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test episode from Season 3, “Trust”: “Remarkably, another day of selection has gone by without any recruits leaving.”
Which means it’s been two long days (and episodes) where we’ve been at eight remaining celebrity “recruits,” half of the original 16: Golden Tate, Cam Newton, Brody Jenner, Christy Carlson Romano, Carey Hart, Alana Blanchard, Kayla Nicole and Kyla Pratt.
“Day Seven, dude,” motorcross champion Carey Hart says in the morning, which says it all in terms of how much this group has been through in a relatively short time.
It’s a drizzly Welsh morning too, we see, as Rudy Reyes from the DS (directing service) assembles the recruits on the parade square. The theme for the day is “duty,” he says. After that, each Bergen (military-style backpack) is weighed by “staff” to ensure that everyone’s pack has the equipment and water that the recruits were ordered to always have with them.
Actress Christy Carlson Romano’s Bergen is slightly light, so she’s punished by being ordered to hold a large rock over her head and then is ordered to add it to her load.
“When one fails, you all fail,” Jovon “Q” tells the recruits.
“This is insane guys, this rock is like 50 pounds,” Romano tells the recruits in a vehicle on the way to first task of the day.
The task, Narrator Guy tells us: “Recruits will undertake a simulated mission with innocent civilians in mortal danger.” In other words, it’s a hostage rescue, as Rudy explains.
“You need to put your lives on the line to save the life of others,” he adds.
“This is your golden opportunity to make a heroic rescue,” Billy says as a sweetener as he explains the details of the task.
This task has the look and feel of a real-world war zone, one that takes place in the blustery, damp environment of north Wales. It’s also chaotic by design, forcing the recruits to make split second decisions about how to rescue hostages and how to target an area for demolition upon their mistake.
We also get a lot of Billy screaming at recruits during the task things like, “What are you doing?”
I’ve talked before about how on-screen captions would be really helpful for the audience to keep track of who is doing what during these sequences, and that’s certainly true here. Between the intended chaos of the task and the show not fully explaining which recruits are participating and exactly they are proceeding during the task, it adds to the confusion in a not great way.
That being said, ex-NFL wide receiver Golden Tate and pro surfer Alana Blanchard are paired up first and fail, earning them a bonus yell from Billy.
Dusty plays a more philosophical role here, advising the recruits that, “If your mind is telling you something, you should listen to it,” with regard to the split-second decisions special forces operators must make in these situations.
Reality star Brody Jenner and Kyla Pratt accidentally “kill hostages” as well and subsequently fail.
Hart, teamed with influencer and model (and ex-girlfriend of Travis Kelce, a.k.a. the current boyfriend of Taylor Swift) Kayla Nicole, are the first team to pass the task.
Golden Tate always cracks me up a few times each episode, and does so here when he says of Carey Hart, “I want to be him when I grow up.”
Hart for his part credits his teammate, thanking Nicole for pointing out the correct hostages to rescue.
Romano and former NFL quarterback Cam Newton are the final team and quickly blunder finding the hostages that they are supposed to rescue correctly.
“That is a fail, a big fail,” Billy tells them.
“There was no verbal communication between them,” Billy then tells Dusty. “She was a headless chicken,” he adds of Romano.
So the task has a 75% failure rate, which surely will not please the DS at this late stage in the selection course. Another way to look at it is that Carey Hart, who is 48, seems like he’d fit in seamlessly in the actual special forces – and that he might even enjoy the career change.
I should also point out that Kayla Nicole was called out by DS in their private staff meeting for being “the best one out there” on that task.
Next up for “tactical questioning” after the task: Christy Carlson Romano.
“You are struggling, no two ways about it,” Billy tells her. “You were all over the place.”
Romano talks about how she’s a perfectionist and hates letting people down. She also goes deep in talking about how she had to fire her own mother as her manager when she was young, which caused a major rift in her family relationships. This led to her becoming an alcoholic.
She later got married and has now been sober for eight years. Part of the reason for her participating on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test is to honor her husband, an active marine.
I thought that DS would give her a rougher time and perhaps even ask for her armband (which would signal her leaving the show), but overall they were quite gentle and supportive of her.
Quickly, the recruits are on their way to a “remote quarry” for “a task designed to test their sense of duty to the breaking point.”
It’s the Tyrolean Traverse, which is an exceedingly difficult task that is similar to the one that Season 2’s recruits had a rough time with in the mountains of the South Island of New Zealand. Narrator Guy explains it succinctly as “a chilling highwire traverse” over a 300-foot drop.
“This task is a battle with yourself,” Dusty tells us.
There are two highwires, with Romano and Newton sent out to go first. Romano is unable to hold the wire after dropping down and get a “disastrous fail” from Billy, while Newton – leveraging his NFL-honed upper body strength – is able to hang on for the required amount of time and passes.
Jenner and Hart also pass, while Blanchard and Pratt fail, the latter of whom is told to “shut up” by Dusty for yelling from excursion before dropping for good measure. In the final pairing, Kayla Nicole quickly fails while Tate shows superior strength by holding onto the line for longer than the required time and gets a “well deserved pass” from Billy.
Later, Golden Tate quips that this is what he imagined the entire season being like as opposed to the struggles he’s had on many of the tasks.
After all of that, we learn that “the day is not over” back at base as the recruits still haven’t fully paid for not having every one of their Bergen’s weigh in at the required amount that morning. It’s nighttime now and raining, and the recruits are tasks with “bee stings,” which is a series of taxing exercises that include rolling in mud, monkey walks, burpees, and a bunch of other stuff that’s exhausting to write around, let alone endure.
When Billy asks, “Who wants to go home?” it reminds me of my collegiate rugby playing days – the closest thing I’ll ever get to actual military training in my life – when our coach (the great Coach Bosnick, R.I.P.) would bellow out things like, “This is all voluntary, gentleman!”
It was awful and it was the best at the same time.
Anyway, back to the episode.
As Pratt struggles to keep up, Q screams at her, “Winning is a conscious decision!”
For reasons that I can’t fully understand, recruits are released from the bee stings individually, and some are so exhausted that they collapse on the floor of their living quarters.
Tate is over being funny at this point, and says, “This is no way to treat people – I don’t even feel human right now.”
What’s so striking about this statement is that this guy – in addition to obviously being highly motivated and disciplined in all kinds of ways – has endured many grueling seasons of NFL training camps.
Pratt and Romano are the final two remaining on the parade ground, and when they are finally allowed to stand in position, Q tells them, “Don’t think you can take this course casually. We will pull those numbers off your arm.”
Back in the living quarters, Carey Hart is shaking from pain after injuring his hand after falling during one of the exercises. And keep in mind that this is a guy who has broken countless bones during his motorcross career. When visiting the medic, he’s told that his ankle is also super messed up.
Hart is ordered to be an involuntary withdrawal on medical grounds. Billy tells him that he’s had the “best of attitudes” in seeing him off. It really was only physical injury that would have done Hart in, and it’s sad to see him go out like this after the enormous effort that he put into the selection course.
His fellow recruits clearly care for and respect Hart, calling him “sensei” as he leaves the group.
It took three long episodes to have a recruit leave, but now that Hart is gone we’re down to seven of the original 16 remaining: Golden Tate, Cam Newton, Brody Jenner, Christy Carlson Romano, Alana Blanchard, Kayla Nicole and Kyla Pratt.
More info about Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test Season 3
TV SHOW – Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 3, Episode 7
AIRED ON – January 29th, 2025
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX/TubiTV
GENRE – Reality TV, Competition Show
CAST – Mark Billingham, Jason Fox, Rudy Reyes, Shaun Dooley, Jovon Quarles, Stephen Baldwin, Golden Tate, Cam Newton, Denise Richards, Brody Jenner, Christy Carlson Romano, Jordyn Wieber, Marion Jones Thompson, Landon Donovan, Carey Hart, Nathan Adrian, Alana Blanchard, Ali Manno, Trista Sutter, Kayla Nicole, Kyla Pratt