YMMV / Fear Factor

• Awesome Music: The entire theme, which is pretty damn epic.
• Badass Decay: Favorite Winners had the 3 women (Summer, Jeanette, and Olivia) who were shown to be quite tough in their prior episodes give up on a stunt that wasn't too bad. The worst would have to be Olivia as the others at least tried, Olivia had to be dragged kicking and screaming even though she had gotten through an even worse gross-out stunt two seasons prior.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Kind of the appeal. It's not just facing your fears, it's turning those fears up to eleven, and then facing them. Like if you're afraid of bugs, consider laying in a body bag full of living insects in pitch blackness while trying to find a key.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • According to Joe Rogan, the gigantic Madagascar hissing cockroaches were a fan favorite, and they were used as part of stunts quite often, becoming a Fear Factor regular.
  • The most popular, and talked about contestant is arguably Monica Gonzales.
  • G. Gordon Liddy is very much beloved for his incredible amount of awesome moments in the season.
• Growing the Beard: Season 1 wasn't bad, but the show felt fairly generic and the stunts seemed too easy. Also, the straightforward nature of the stunts really never made the episodes that competitive until the last stunt. Season 2 saw massive improvements with both Joe and the contestants gaining more of a personality, the stunts becoming a lot more unpredictable and scary, and each stunt involving a very real chance someone will be going home. It also helps that by Season 2, Season 1 had already aired so the people coming on this time around knew exactly what they were up against and were more competitive and less willing to quit.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Season 5, Jenna Morasca and Ethan Zohn came on the show (as separate contestants) and Jenna talked about how in Fear Factor it was not about finding a husband or being the best racer. Years later, she and Ethan would go on The Amazing Race, and got eliminated in pretty rough fashion (a double elimination and didn't even check in last place), and soon after broke up.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • In Season 4, one contestant went on to win the show for his dad who was very ill, and at the very end, when Joe tells him he won, he was so happy all he could say was "We did it, dad!"
  • Also from Season 4, there was a contestant who came on the show for an unusual reason. He had fallen in love with a girl at a reggae concert two years ago, and had no luck in finding her as he only knew her first name. He was hoping to use this show to tell her that he still wants to be with her if she was still interested. He ends up winning so even if his quest to find her failed it's a safe bet he made the right decision going on the show.
  • In Season 6, Episode 2, there was a burly contestant who seemed to be one of many cocky meatheads. During the episode, he shows a softer side when he learns another contestant wants to use the money to buy a wheelchair for his brother and he reveals if he has friends in medical supplies and can get him a great deal on one even if neither of them win. This combined with his genuinely sweet efforts to win over his partner makes the eventual win a great ending.
  • In Season 6, Episode 7, the second challenge was a haircut roulette that understandably the girls were none too happy with. The first pairing were eliminated when TJ backed out of having her hair cut, and the mean Deb kept taunting her and other girl Blair about it. Blair bravely went through with the haircut, with Joe and her brother Ben reassuring her she still looked great. When Deb backed out of the haircut too, Blair and her brother Ben were automatically awarded $25,000 for being the only ones to go through with it. And the next stunt saw the previous two pairs returning (albeit competing for half the prize money since they refused to do the other stunt) and Ben and Blair still won the whole thing outright.
• Love to Hate: Gina Huerta was condescending to the point that many of her insults would be censored nowadays, however watching her fall flat on her face in the gross-out stunt twice in a row without considering everyone would use this as a chance to dish out what she did was hilarious to watch both times.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The instrumental at the start of the intro.
• Nausea Fuel: It goes without saying.
  • Special mention goes to the episode where the contestants had to eat balut (duck eggs that actually had developed duckling fetuses in them). To make it worse they had a pen full of chirping ducklings right next to them. Every single contestant was able to swallow them down. None were pleased.
  • An even more special mention goes to a challenge so bad that the network refused to air it: Drinking donkey urine and semen. Pictures of this stunt got leaked online, and NBC, who was already uncomfortable with it, pulled the episode it was in.
• Nightmare Fuel: Why do you think it's called "Fear Factor"?
  • The "Bobbing in Blood" challenge. Bobbing in a tub full of blood for rings that a contestant could only collect using their mouths. The contestants were so drenched in blood that it wouldn't have looked out of place in a Saw movie.
  • Laying in a body bag full of live bugs while trying to find a key.
  • Having needles poked through your skin, and then slowly removed. Oh, and each of the ten needles got thicker.
  • One of the scariest and most uncomfortable challenges to watch required contestants to walk across broken glass.
• Replacement Scrappy: The theme park version in Universal Studios Orlando is this to the Wild West Show, which closed down years ago. It doesn't help that the appeal of the grossout reality show has died down, making Fear Factor not just this, but a relic as well.
• The Scrappy:
  • Rob Jackson from Season 6's "Mothers & Sons" edition is possibly the most hated contestant to ever appear on Fear Factor for being a complete Jerkass to his mom in the last stunt even though he and his mom had won the first two stunts. To clarify, he was cursing and embarrassing his own mother on TV because she struggled with the stunt. Needless to say, calling comments about him online insulting would be a compliment.
  • Cecilia from the second "Best Friends" episode may not be as hated as Rob, but she receives pretty much no respect from the fans thanks to her quitting both challenges she competed in without even trying. Most fans who watched the episode agreed with Joe's assertion that she was the worst contestant in the show's history.
  • Jonathan & Victoria continued this streak from The Amazing Race. While Jonathan was the same abusive jerkass he was back in The Amazing Race, what really made them this in Fear Factor was Victoria punching Jonny Fairplay from Survivor for heckling them and then when Joe Rogan told Victoria off for doing that, Jonathan tried to physically confront him, and it took both The Miz and Fear Factor production to keep a fight from breaking out.
  • Omarosa from Reality Stars Fear Factor was this both in and out of the show. In show she was hated for her condescending and arrogant attitude, along with making personal attacks at some of the contestants. By fans, she was hated for the exact same reason.
  • Deb from the Season 6 episode involving a haircut stunt. Not only was she shamelessly rude and bitchy to the other girls, but she bragged about how she didn't mind the thought of cutting her hair for the stunt and taunted Blair while she was going through with it; all the while mocking her by saying she'll have done it for nothing when she goes through with the haircut too. And then when it was her turn...she ultimately couldn't go through with it. Many viewers found it very satisfying when Blair and Ben won the whole thing outright the next day. Many viewers also felt bad for Cain who individually could've won the episode only for her to drag him down.
• Seasonal Rot / They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: They tinkered with the format in lots of ways, but the most notorious was when they pretty much stopped eliminating people during the gross stunt and instead made it worth a prize. That isn't always true, though - in some cases the prize stunt is an adrenaline rush thing and the gross stunt is still an elimination.
• Squick: Gee, you think? The donkey urine/semen blend became the ultimate example when it grossed out NBC to the point where the episode it was attached to never aired and has been banned from being broadcast. At. All.
• That One Challenge: There were four tasks that no one was able to complete, causing the prize money to be reduced to $25,000.
  • The first was from a Season 2 episode where the contestants had to throw a ball in skee-ball and the number they got was the number of pig uteri they had to eat. They only got one minute for each uterus. Every contestant got a score of 5 or 6 and couldn't even eat one.
  • The second was from a later Season 2 episode where the contestants had to shove their faces into a plate of nightcrawlers, find five balls of pig intestines filled with coagulated blood, and eat each one within five minutes.
  • The third was from Season 3, where contestants had to log roll from one building to another, and if you fell off, you were automatically eliminated. The only contestant that came close fell off about three-quarters of the way in.
  • The fourth was a few episodes later where, after four contestants failed the first stunt, only two were left for the second stunt. This stunt was where the two contestants left had to be put in a coffin covered completely in earthworms and had three minutes to untie a monkey fist. What made this challenge so hard is that their eyes were covered too, so one contestant kept accidentally tightening the knot.
  • A special mention goes to an early season 5 episode where a stunt involved one partner driving a ramp behind a flatbed and the other partner driving up the ramp onto the flatbed. Everyone failed, and since it was the last challenge, the episode ended with no winner.
  • In a Reality Stars Fear Factor in Season 5, contestants would be in a cage flipping in and out of the water and unlock the four locks to escape the cage and then swim to a buoy for time. All the contestants quit, but the prize money was not cut in half, because it was a prize stunt.
    • A similar scenario occurred in Couples Fear Factor II Part 3. Going two at a time, the male would be blindfolded and the female would have to guide them up a ramp onto a flatbed truck and plow down a flag. Everybody failed it, but it was a prize stunt.
  • One challenge from the rebooted series played this trope in a different way. The grossout stunt for Round 2 forced players to chug a mixture of donkey urine and semen. NBC was angry with the producers creating this kind of borderline-pornographic stunt, sent the episode deep into their "Do Not Air" vaults, and may have canceled the revival over it; a few leaked images and videos of this stunt were later posted online. It no doubt was one of the hardest stunts one would have to perform.

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