User blog comment:TDFanatic52/Character Analysis- Mal/@comment-31556666-20170222131847

I kind of.... agree with this?

Don't get me wrong, I don't completely think the same way. All of Mal's "strategy" that you mention was completely impulsive by him eg breaking things, which is definitively a wannabe rookie villain mistake. However, these people's minds WERE messed with without their belongings. Regardless I'm not told whether or not I'm supposed to chalk this up to Mal, the reason being that there's no differentiation between him messing with people's heads, or just doing terrible things because they're terrible. Like for example, there's that one time in Moon Madness when he tries killing his own teammate. In fact, speaking of teammates that's all Mal goes after for all of the pre-merge. Okay there was that one small time he sabotaged the villains in Food Fright but I'm pretty sure that was completely by accident considering him just popping up for 3 seconds to wreck a machine. Other than that, he went after his own team's heads, his own team's minds, and his own team's precious bodies. It didn't work with ROTI Scott, and it definitely won't work now. In fact, I'd say Scott was way better at portraying this because they at least made it clear that was his strategy, and he also went against the other team a couple times, and even when he was costing challenges he was still thinking of someone to blame it on.

So overall I sort of agree with this blog but the season did a terrible way of portraying that side to him, and in answer to the question, I would say I hate Mal's strategy