The finals are here, and the competition has us feeling real human feelings.
9:00 This is not the final episode of American Ninja Warrior. No, this is the pen-penultimate episode, the first of two building to the final showdown with Mount Midoriyama. Purists will blanch at calling the Las Vegas version "Mount Midoriyama" since the original is in Japan, a place so devoted to cultural purity they built a second Eiffel Tower right in the middle of Tokyo as a major landmark.
9:02 John Stewart is 52, and is competing in the finals. So many orthopedic surgeons are going to make their summer home mortgages off him when dads suffer horrendous injuries falling off their homemade backyard salmon ladders. Yeah, the American Ninja Warrior thing? It didn't work out. I can't hold a coffee cup now without peeing a little, but you have to follow your dreams, yanno? My wife turned it into a trellis. The morning glories look great on it.
9:04 Let's go over the stages, and how each would kill you so hard
- Piston Road. Just the Quad Steps with smaller surface area. ACL tears are totally possible here.
- Giant Wheel. Be honest: you probably can't jump far enough to even touch the edge of the giant wheel you use to swing across more mysterious cocaine-laced Las Vegas runoff water. If you did, your shoulder will come out of socket, and the contact with the wheel will put you in a perfect position to faceplant 10 feet into the edge of the crash pad like Sam Sann did last year. More on him, and his shockingly unbroken face, in a bit, but the point stands: you would die and don't think I wouldn't laugh at you while it happens.
- Silk Slider. Two curtains arranged on the end of a long pole that slides to a landing pad/raft floating in the water below. You would not be able to even hold the silky curtains long enough to get a good slide, much less land accurately on the pad. Nevertheless, this is clearly an obstacle stolen from an old Errol Flynn pirate movie, and that makes it the best obstacle Ninja Warrior has ever had. You should get bonus time for doing it with a cutlass clenched between your teeth.
- The Jumping Spider.
- Half-Pipe Attack. More pirate-y jumping off a wall with a rope, approve without reservation, would try for fun even though we know how it ends (skull fracture).
- Warped Wall. Jumping out of a half-pipe, aka "Ninja Warrior designers are height-ist bastards." Skull fracture, knee injuries, and looking tiny and frustrated and cursing your genes are all possible injuries.
- Spinning Bridge. Just running across a bunch of bouncy balls arranged like a Newton's Cradle.
- Tarzan Rope and Rope Ladder. Really just a time-burner, though you'd probably get your ankle caught in the cargo net and be stuck there like a pissed-off cicada in a spider's web.
Melanie Hunt -- (Photo by: David Becker/NBC)9:05 Karsten Williams is our first contestant tonight, and he gets a halfassed profile with his perfectly cool mom, because unlike a lot of ANW contestants nothing in his life appears to have gone wrong, and then been rectified or overcome through training for Ninja Warrior. Per the rule of inversely proportional profile length / course success, he should advance easily. Remember: the longer and more tragic the background story, the sooner said contestant will explode in a ball of flames on the second obstacle.
9:06: I AM WRONG. Karsten is no pirate and falls into the water on the Silk Slider.
9:07 Dustin McKinney is a tiny, ripped white dude from McDonough, Georgia who says the competition is a challenge for "any guy, or girl." Rednecks are getting so gender equality aware! This and his spastic pre-course breakdancing warm my heart. Dustin eats shit on the Jumping Spider face-first, but is the Most Georgia Contestant Available and deserves credit for that title.
9:10 Kevin Klein is a flag runner for the Dallas Cowboys, and yet somehow runs out of time and fails without Tony Romo in attendance. There's really something to like about the relentlessly positive ectomorphs of American Ninja Warrior, though, when they're not rooting for doomed football teams. They're personal trainers, they're the people who carry flags out onto football fields, they're the teachers flipping over the desks in their classrooms. If you lose your wallet in a volcano, they're the ones who fish it out happily for you, most likely while telling you about how to work on doing a single pullup in just 15 minutes a day. You should hate them, but even their failures are respectable. Poor Melanie Hunt falls off the Jumping Spider, but does so in a manner so coordinated I sort of feel like she should be allowed to advance: off the walls, and into a safe landing pose right into the water like a gymnast.
9:21Ninja Warrior's inverse relationship between hardship endured/obstacles completed is one of nature's least flexible rules, earlier failures be damned. Sam Sann is a Cambodian-American who grew up drinking jungle water out of puddles in the jungle while hiding from the Khmer Rouge. He did this last year.
Sann gets a luxurious, adversity-heavy pre-run profile. He will, of course, crash out on the Giant Wheel again, though this time without his face smashing into the pad and making that horrible metal-on-foam-on-human-face-collision sound.
9:30 Abel Gonzalez is the first finisher! Can we talk about how hard Matt Iseman, Akbar Gbaja-Biamila and Jenn Brown sell this? Every episode is Ragnarök, and AGB in particular is hilarious in hitting this like it's an NFL playoff game right down to the film study on technique. "You see the hands there? CLASSIC JUMPING SPIDER TECHNIQUE." I would hope that they get bigger, higher-paying jobs for their work, but I don't think you can have as much fun covering something where people enjoy hating the contestants. No one really hates anything on American Ninja Warrior; there's just varying degrees of stokedness opposed by the cold, indifferent cruelty of the course.
9:39 Andrew Lowe missed the final by a second last year, so he's basically the 2013 Alabama Crimson Tide of competitors. AGB also says "He knows a thing or two about trampoline technique," because AGB's film breakdown never stops.
9:41 Tremayne Dortch has his son's name written on him. Tremayne Dortch is DOOMED, and the inspirational cuteness of this is so painful it can only mean an imminent and painful defeat. He also rolls his stomach prior to starting like a belly dancer, if only to give you as many clues as possible to just how hard he's going to fail on this course.
9:43: Tremayne loses it on the Jumping Spider, collapses crying, and Jenn Brown actually gives him space. This is actually one of the more humane moments I've seen any sideline-type reporter have on television. You have us all feeling real emotions, ANW, even though we knew the dude with his son's name written on his chest was going to lose because THAT IS WHAT ALWAYS HAPPENS HERE.
9:48: To conserve time, they show a few unremarkable finalists who failed in a quick montage. One is a "Utah insurance executive" failing badly and pouting while slapping the water when he comes off the course. I could watch this man lose at things all day. Schedule "American Ninja Warrior: Churlish Executive" immediately, NBC, and reap the lucrative joy of those who hate their corporate overlords and want them to fail as badly as possible.
AMERICAN NINJA WARRIOR -- "Las Vegas" -- Pictured: Lance Pekus -- (Photo by: David Becker/NBC)
10:00 p.m. Lance Pekus is a cowboy who runs the course in jeans and a cowboy hat. He also appears to wax his entire body. He goes out on the Jumping Spider because his hands are greasy from all those depilatories, and because his stupid ass was trying to run the Ninja Warrior course in a pair of jeans. I was wrong about not hating on ANW: Screw this dude. Screw him and his tiny Kenny Chesney-looking ass forever.
10:02: Jo Jo Bynum is from Alabama, so he takes off his shirt and grinds seductively when he finishes. (Roll Tide.) He also is a huge baseball fan, and describes it as "a chess game." We as a nation do not know what chess is and should stop referencing it, ever.
![]()
American Ninja Warrior ![]()
![]()
American Ninja Warrior ![]()
10:23 I seriously enjoy how many women they have in this. There is nothing forced about that enjoyment whatsoever: women in ANW compete on the same course, with the same times, and increasingly with the same success. I used to climb a lot. The greatest part about the community wasn't how many women did it and did it just as well or better as men, but how effortless that dynamic came about. No one was a good "female climber" -- they were just climbers. ANW, not coincidentally, has a similar dynamic, even with the obvious storylines around Kacy Catanzaro becoming the first (but not the only) woman to qualify for the finals. It's refreshing, and not just when AGB has to be pulled off the ceiling when a woman does well.
10:34 "The kitchen's not the only place he uses his hands." Unnecessarily sexy, ANW writers. But still sexy.
10:43 Noah Kaufman wants to do it for his son. He becomes the first person to mention his children prominently to actually complete the stage, and is thus the only good parent. All the other parents in this competition are horrible and if they really loved their offspring they would have made it all the way. Take their children. Take their children NOW.
10:49 Meagan Martin gets to the Jumping Spider and
OH MY GOD AGB IS GONNA CRY MEAGAN MARTIN IS THE FIRST WOMAN TO COMPLETE THE JUMPING SPIDER.
HE JUST COMPARED HER TO MUHAMMAD ALI AND MAGIC JOHNSON AND MICHAEL JORDAN. HE WANTED HER TO FINISH OFF THE CLOCK. I AM SERIOUS AGB IS ABOUT TO SHED REAL TEARS OVER MEAGAN MARTIN'S GREATNESS. I don't know why I watch anything else.