Lazy Link Post 3: This Time It's Personal!

As has been mentioned in the past, I've been recapping seasons of the Amazing Race over at Mightygodking.com. Now that the newest season is in the books, here's a linkroll of the episodes in order:

"I Should've Been a Boy Scout"
"You Look Like Gollum"
"Bros Being Jocks"
"Get It Trending"
"We're Only Doing Freaky Stuff Today"
"Let the Good Times Roll"
"Welcome to Bloody Fingers 101"
"I Have a Wedgie and a Half"
"Salt That Sand!"
"Monkey Dance!"
"That's Money, Honey!"
"The Only First That Matters"

Not sure when we'll see TAR 29--it's been renewed, but not yet scheduled--but I plan to blog that one as well!

Lazy Link Post 2.0!

Technically, I'm jumping the gun on this slightly--the finale of Season 27 of 'The Amazing Race' doesn't air until Friday, so there's still one more episode to recap before I can put this one to bed. But it's close enough that I can update this post on Saturday, so let's post a linkroll of the new season of the Amazing Race!

"A Little Too Much Beefcake"
"Get in There and Think Like a Dog"
"Where My Dogs At?"
"Good Old Fashioned Spit in the Face"
"King of the Jungle"
"My Tongue Doesn't Even Twist That Way"
"Full Speed Ahead, Captain!"
"Krakow, I'm Gonna Get You"
"It's Always the Quiet Ones"
"Bring the Fun, Baby!"
"It's Not Easy Beating Green"
"We Got a Chance, Baby!"

And that will put another season in the books. Season 28 has already been confirmed, and I'm looking forward to it!

Lazy Link Post!

Over on MightyGodKing.com, a blog that I'm slowly running into the ground by guest-posting for, I've been doing weekly recaps of each season of the Amazing Race. Currently Season Twenty-Seven is ongoing, but I already completed a full run of Season Twenty-Six that it occurred to me might be something people here are interested in reading as well. So here's a link-post to the full recaps of Amazing Race Season Twenty-Six! (The "blind date" season--oh, not interested anymore? Well, it's here anyway.)

"Great Way to Start a Relationship"
"I Got the Smartest Dude"
"#MurphysLaw"
"The Great Amazing Nasty Race"
"Get In That Lederhosen, Baby"
"Smells Like a Million Bucks"
"Back in Business/Moment of Truth"
"Can I Get a Hot Tub?"
"Fruits of Our Labor"
"In It To Win It"
"Monster Truck Heroes"

I'll be doing a similar link-post for Season Twenty-Seven once it's concluded. Until then, enjoy my recappy goodness!

A Bit of Race Catch-Up

We're now quite a way into the current season of the Amazing Race (Season 25, for those keeping track) and I have to say, this is one of my favorite seasons since I first started watching the Race. Amazingly enough, there are at least four teams I'm actively rooting for, out of the six remaining, and even the two teams I wouldn't mind overmuch seeing off (married dentists Misti and Jim, and dating wrestlers Brooke and Robbie) are entirely tolerable. Jim's only bad habit is his desire to let everyone know how awesome he is at the Race...oh yes and his wife who is definitely a person who exists in his immediate vicinity...but he's not a jerk to Misti, which puts him head and shoulders over the usual fillers of the "hypercompetitive Alpha-male jackass" slot in the program. And Brooke and Robbie, the fillers of the "nice but waaaaaay too intense" slot, at least are managing to be cheerful and funny for the most part, even if it's clear that Brooke's coping mechanism is to blither and moan about how impossible whatever the current challenge is.

And Adam and Bethany are adorable--he's so obviously besotted with her, and she is knocking it out of the park with each challenge. I don't want to say, "She's doing amazingly for someone with only one arm," because that would imply that she's not just doing amazingly well in general, but her success is all the more impressive when you remember that she is doing everything all the other competitors are doing just as well as they are, one-handed. I know she's incredibly evangelical in real life, but as long as she doesn't use it as an excuse for intolerance or bigotry (and based on what we've seen of her interactions with Tim and TeJay, it doesn't seem that she is) I'm happy to see them go as far as they can.

Tim and TeJay are an adorable couple, by the way; it takes a lot of courage to come out to your family, and to do it on national television is even more impressive. They do bicker a little, which is something I generally don't have much patience for, but it's pretty clear by now that it's just their mode of communication and they're very much in love. They could definitely win this and I'd be happy.

The cyclists, Kym and Alli, started off a bit too hyper for me but quickly grew in my affections. They're having a lot of fun, they're kind to each other and to the other Racers (apart from a little bit of drawing on dusty windshields) and they're competent and no-nonsense. That's exactly the kind of team I root for. No drama, just race hard and enjoy the experience.

And although I suspect they're not going to be in the final three, my favorite team is unquestionably Amy and Maya. They're both so freaking adorable that I want to invite them over for tabletop gaming just to watch them smile, they're both smart and competent (but with a recurring navigation problem that I think is going to bite them in the butt), and they're both smart and patient and low-drama to boot! The challenge where Maya made goat butter using her knowledge of food chemistry was just a stand-up-and-cheer moment, and I'm Team Wonka for as long as they're on the show. (And I'll root for them to come back in an All-Stars season, too.)

So yes, this is so far as close to a perfect season of the Race as I think I'm ever going to get. And even though I think we're heading towards an unfortunate Finish Line full of perfect teeth, I'm still digging the heck out of the current season. That's pretty good for twenty-five and counting.

Thoughts on the Recent Amazing Race Season

It looks like we had another Amazing Race. This was another "All-Star" season, where they brought back fan favorites from previous seasons to give them another shot at the race around the world for a million dollars. This season actually had plenty of sympathetic teams, two of which actually made it to the finals. So that part was nice (even if I wish they'd stop bringing back Jet and Cord, the homophobic cowboys).

I liked the mix of teams, for the most part, and I liked that most of them played the race smart and avoided a lot of drama. The obvious exception was Brendon and Rachel, who did pretty well on the former but not on the latter. They were much better than last time, when they seemed to be a sort of Zach-and-Flo minus the competency, but even so, Rachel's insistence that they were racing on behalf of her tragically empty womb grated. (No, seriously. She'd made a deal with Brendon that if they won, he had to impregnate her. Because that isn't creepy.)

Actually, more needs to be said about that. It's creepy, but it's not just creepy that Rachel made that deal. It's creepy...creepier, in fact...that Brendon agreed to it. Because you could see it in his face every time she talked about it, which was a lot--he doesn't want kids right now. He may not want kids ever. But he really doesn't want to have that conversation with Rachel. So he's putting up practical obstacles in her way so that he doesn't have to discuss the emotional divide between them on the subject, which is really unfair to her and clearly driving her towards big dramatic gestures in an effort to get those practical obstacles out of the way (and if there's one thing you don't want to do, it's to encourage Rachel's tendency to dramatic gestures).

Other than that, I thought their "heel" elements were overplayed by the series. Eventual winners Dave and Connor made a huge hairy deal out of the fact that the Brenchels U-Turned them, which...um, RACE? Competitive competition in which each team tries to come in first? I understand not being happy, but seriously, people. This is like getting pissy with your friends when they hit you with a "SORRY" card.

All that aside, I thought there were some good challenges this season; the bamboo raft-building exercise made for some great television, and the drink-mixing detour was fascinatingly brutal. And I think that every team should have to go through Rome and participate in remote-control chariot races. (And they should also have to race bunnies in the Netherlands, but that's another story.) Even so, it felt like a lot of the legs lacked tension, probably due to the foregone conclusion of Margie and Luke's elimination falling right between two non-elimination legs. (Mallory and Bopper's leg felt a bit like a foregone conclusion, too, but that at least had some tension to it.)

The lack of tension extended a bit to the finish line--not that skydiving to the mat wasn't AWESOME, but I was really good with either Dave and Connor or Caroline and Jennifer winning, and Brendon and Rachel were clearly out of the running for first no matter how they Amazing Edited things. So it didn't pack as much oomph. Still, the finish was great because the finish to the Amazing Race is almost always great. Seeing all the teams gather together and share the joy of having experienced the Race, win or lose, is something you don't get in Survivor or Big Brother. It's what'll definitely bring me back for another season.

But please no cowboys next time?

Re-Spooning

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. Been feeling all kinds of sick, and just as I felt like I was starting to get it together, my workplace took away Google Chrome, leaving me with a greatly diminished set of posting options. I'm posting this from a Kindle, and we'll see how that goes. On the other hand, there appear to be nine more new Doctor Who episodes out there since I last posted, so that's awesome...even if it does mean Ian Levine will be even more insufferable about his insider fan status.

Speaking of cult TV, I have been watching the Agents of SHIELD series, and liking it. I am not unaware of the complaints about the series, and don't entirely disagree--Ward is a stiff, and I'm not loving the chemistry he has with Skye. But as with so many series out there, I feel like people are complaining not because the show is bad, but because it doesn't seem to be building a huge, overarching metastory that they can invest their emotions into speculating about. But I am actually a fan of episodic these days, primarily after being disappointed by series like Heroes, so I'm not disappointed that it's not being something it wasn't trying to be. (I still feel like this was the cause of a lot of the fan backlash against Dollhouse.)

Oh, and the Amazing Race is happening again. For fans of train wrecks, I guarantee you that you will not find a better train wreck than Tim and Marie. These two are already divorced, meaning that the bickering has already reached nuclear proportions, and they lucked into the double Express Pass in the first round, leading to some of the most hilariously inept attempts at manipulation EVER. At one point, she tells a team who she thinks has a lead on good tickets, "You know I have the Express Pass." My current working theory is that she thinks it works like Wonder Woman's magic lasso, forcing other racers to tell the truth. I'm torn between despising her sense of entitlement and not wanting the shitshow to end.

I know, talking about TV ain't exactly Shakespeare. I'm easing my way back, OK? Next time I might even be up to complaining about comics.

Relationship Advice for Max and Katie of Amazing Race 22

For those of you who don't watch 'The Amazing Race', one of the teams is actually a pair of newlyweds named Max and Katie. The Race is serving as their honeymoon as well as a chance at a million bucks, which would be kind of sweet except for the fact that they're this season's token "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" team. (For those of you who don't watch 'The Amazing Race', this is a phrase that at least one team breaks out in their introductory video every season. It is code for, "The guy on this team is a hyper-competitive douchebag with anger management issues, who will take it out on his partner. The woman is passive-aggressive and prone to emotional collapse at the slightest difficulty. Both of them will take every opportunity to snipe at other teams, claiming it's because the other teams are their opponents when in fact you begin to suspect pretty quickly that they're like this to everybody.")

Obviously, I am no expert on the Race. I've never run, and it would be foolish to give them racing advice...especially because the episodes don't air live and the outcome is predetermined, even if not known. But I have been in a successful relationship for a long time, so I figure that even if I can't give racing tips, I can give marriage tips.

1. The phrase "You're the albatross around our neck here", while entertaining, does not foster a sense of partnership and trust that is so necessary to a good relationship. Alternatives might include, "Good job, honey, I think you'll get it next time," or "Try a little bit of acceleration into the turn next time." Alternatives probably should not include, "You're killing us," or "Who'd have thought it, I'm better at this than you are."

2. Long drives in unfamiliar territory can be stressful on any couple. Try to avoid blaming each other for wrong turns. Try especially hard to avoid blaming the driver when he asks you point-blank, "Do you want me to turn around?" and you respond with, "No, I just have a feeling that we're going the wrong way."

3. An important part of any relationship is knowing your partner's strengths and weaknesses. It is not, however, wise to announce your partner's weaknesses directly to the camera on national television. (Especially when it's not exactly like you're strong in that area yourself, Max. I don't know that either one of you is going to be winning any likability contests, frankly.)

Those are just a few tips--I look forward to giving more as the Race goes on!

...well, strictly speaking I look forward to giving one more and then watching these two bickering twits get Philiminated, but if not I'm sure they'll at least provide me with a few more cheap jokes.

Amazing Race 19, Week Five

And after a second non-elimination leg this season (although arguably, the first one didn't really count as it was immediately followed up by a double-elimination leg) we take the short trip from Phuket to Bangkok. (Which does not make me feel quite as "twelve" as Phuket did, mainly because there are fewer ways to amusingly mispronounce it.) But first, there's some more Phuking to do. The teams set off by taxi to a place that gives elephant rides. Guess what they're doing?

Andy and Tommy, in first, get to the elephant ride, to the Road Block (where one partner has to dive into a pond and look for a package wrapped in burlap), through the Road Block, and back to their taxis all without apparently even seeing another Racer. In fact, they make it to the second Road Block (this leg's twist--each Racer has to do a separate Road Block instead of just one) before all the Racers have set out. Needless to say, this does not bode well for the Doublemint Twins.

The second Road Block is actually quite vicious, despite every team's anticipating it and trying to minimize it. The teams are first told they have to disassemble a Spirit House (a little model of a home with some tiny figurines present) and bring it to get the next clue...and only then told that one of them has to reassemble it, with no model or reference points beyond their own memory and the other models assembled a long taxi ride back the other direction. Andy and Tommy suspect it, but their memory isn't as good as they think it is, and they have to leave the Buddhist temple to get a second look. (And not, as might be suggested by their dialogue throughout the episode, because they are deeply offended by the temerity of foreigners to worship a god other than the One True Christ. Sorry, but evangelicals of any stripe rub me the wrong way.)

Jennifer is a lot nicer when she assembles her Spirit House, and she's also bright enough to borrow their cab driver's cell phone to snap a few pictures of the completed work for reference. I'll admit to some grudging respect for that, even if her brother and her bring out the worst in each other. The other teams show up, one by one, and separate themselves out into "smart enough to take notes" and "about to take an extra taxi ride." (Zac and Lawrence come the closest we've seen this whole race to bickering, as Zac repeatedly mentions that notes would be a good idea and Lawrence brushes him off, only to turn around and suggest that it's not his fault that Zac can't remember where everything goes.)

Meanwhile, several hours after the first team and a full hour after the closest team to them, Liz and Marie set off...and promptly hit a Speed Bump. Which they treat as the best experience of the entire Race, and quite possibly their whole lives to date. They get to shovel elephant manure (which they're actually happy about, so great is their love of pachyderms) and then wash an elephant...and yeah, I might be hardened and cynical, but it is hard to remain cynical in the face of twins cooing over an elephant and talking to it like it was their kitten. Definitely one of the high points of the Race so far.

After that, everyone jumps into buses to go to Bangkok. There is much drama over who gets on which bus and how much they have to spend on taxis, but at this point I will spare you some of the angst and cut to the chase: Nobody's stupid mistakes come back to haunt them because Liz and Marie are way behind, out of money, and relying on the kindness of strangers to limp to the Pit Stop. And they get eliminated. Which is a bit of a shame, as there are teams I liked less, but I wasn't enamored enough of the Doublemint Twins to get upset at their exit. And now there are seven, as we head to Malawi!

Amazing Race 19, Week Four

Yes, I'm aware that I am significantly behind in my Race recaps. I don't know whether or not I'll be able to catch up, but I thought it over and decided that I would rather have the entire Race three weeks late than have it abruptly cut out midway through. After all, these entries have ages to be there after they cease being relevant as live events, but failure to finish is forever. So with that in mind, let's recap Week Four!

We begin in Jogjakarta again, with the teams heading to Phuket, Thailand. The Race dwells on this for a long time, making a fairly big deal out of the lead two teams' mistakes (they didn't spend enough time researching flights at the airport and wound up an hour behind everyone else instead of maintaining their lead...) But since it turned out that there was a huge Hours of Operation stopping point, the sequence is only really relevant for Lawrence's statement that he "couldn't remember" if he'd ever been to Thailand (either he's a very well-traveled man, or a really ambitious partier) and some really amusing mispronunciations of "Phuket". Yes, I am sometimes mentally twelve years old. Your point?

Frankly, I know that there's a lot of complaints about "bunching" on the Amazing Race, and generally I disagree with them. I think that winning a leg should be enough of a competitive advantage that teams want it, but making it insurmountable takes a lot of the excitement out of the Race. So I'm fine with bunching, in moderation. That said, this was a bunching point that happened after the show had tried to make a lot of drama out of who was going to get to Phuket first, and red herrings in a reality show are a little more obnoxious than usual.

Still, they made up for it with an excellent Detour. One choice involved making an artificial coral reef and placing it in a lagoon, which was difficult but could be completed quickly if the team worked together and knew their way around boats and water, and the other involved setting up beach chairs and umbrellas according to a display set up elsewhere on the beach, which was time-consuming but rewarded patience and attention to detail.

Only three teams, Liz/Marie, Cindy/Ernie and Lawrence/Zac, went straight for the beach chairs. As it turned out, there was a fairly brutal sting to this one; a strong wind sent their umbrellas blowing all over the place. Advantage: Coral! ...um, except that it's also hard to paddle in a strong wind, too. Oh, and there's a strong current to go with that strong wind, which practically disintegrates several teams' coral frames. By the time it's over, only two teams (Andy/Tommy and Jennifer/Justin) have managed to actually succeed in placing their coral; everyone else has moved over to the other leg.

Advantage: Liz/Marie, Cindy/Ernie and Lawrence/Zac! Well, except that Liz and Marie turn out to be really, really bad at sticking beach umbrellas into the ground so they'll stay. Despite getting to the challenge first, they are passed by every single team one after another until they're left to scream at each other, all alone. When the going gets tough, the tough bicker at each other and fail!

From there, the episode loses a certain amount of tension through no fault of the leg design. The teams have to do some actual navigating to get to the Road Block, which is a fairly well done rock climbing challenge (they actually make it about the climbing, not rappeling or using a mechanical climber, so athletic teams have a chance to gain time.) They then have to navigate to the Pit Stop as well, with an actual map! There's quite a bit of excitement over who will wind up in which position...with the unfortunate and clear understanding that the Doublemint Twins will be dead last.

And so they are...but lucky for them, elimination is staved off for at least one more week by Phil and his non-elimination wizardry. They get to move on from Phuket to Bangkok and try to make up some of the ground they lost. (I gotta say, even without the benefit of a couple of weeks of hindsight, it seemed unlikely.)

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week Three

And so, after last week's Double Elimination, we are once again at the Episode 3-appropriate nine teams, all of whom are in Indonesia with only an hour or so separating the first place team from the one that barely squeaked by last time. And since they're not leaving Indonesia for this round, there will be no airport bunching, so that hour-long head start is going to matter a lot.

But not at the beginning, right? Because they start off with a bicycle ride through the streets of Jogjakarta, which is almost certainly just going to be a simple time-waster filled with local color, cute scenes of Andy and Tommy popping wheelies, and no chance for anyone to gain or lose spots going into the Detour...right?

Oh. Guess not. Looks like Ernie lost a pedal on his bike and by the time it was fixed, they dropped all the way to eighth. Well, that should put a little urgency into things.

And sure enough, it did. Not for Andy/Tommy and Laurence/Zac, who had a strong lead going into the Detour and made almost no mistakes as they went through the motions of feeding and watering a sheep(note the "almost", there; Andy and Tommy didn't fill up their grass bag all the way the first time, which gave Laurence and Zac a chance to catch up, while Laurence and Zac didn't read their clue all the way through and used extra buckets to fill the water trough faster, which will be significant later on.)

But the other teams had to move like crazy to get through the Detour. Lisa/Kaylani and the Doublemint Twins both decided to plant rice seedlings, while everyone else loaded themselves up with a pair of sheep and ran for it. They came out of the Detour in a very close pack...and then Marcus and Amani got there. This was kind of a theme of the episode, right up until the very end.

But before that end, there was a Road Block to get through, and this was the "brutal counting challenge" I mentioned last week. One member of each team had to climb to the top of an absolutely gorgeous Buddhist temple and walk around it counting statues of the Buddha...and recognizing, from the minimal hints given in the actual clue, that you had to not just count the statues but recognize that each one had a distinct hand position and you had to mimic that position when giving the count to the judges. The total number of statues was 69, but you actually had to give the judge a count of "17, 17, 17 and 18" while doing hand gestures. (No, not like that! Respectful and reverent hand gestures that the Buddha would make!)

Tommy and Laurence decided to work together, on the grounds that they got there at about the same time and get along well and are both nice guys and it's easier to do with two people counting. Have I mentioned how much more I enjoy the Race when it's got intelligent, competent, nice teams doing sensible things instead of starting pointless drama? They got the right answer on the first try, but it took them one more go before they figured out that they had to do the gestures. They sprinted off at the same time...but Andy and Tommy had to go pay their cabbie first, because they told him to wait. This was a) unbelievably significant for later, and b) why Laurence and Zac got to the mat first.

Only to get the Dreaded However from Phil. In this case, Phil finally mentioned that they misread their clue and incurred a 15-minute penalty. Not bad, but it was the difference between a comfortable second place and a trip to Dubai. (Andy and Tommy, by the way, were very sweet and apologetic to the other team when they checked in first.)

This left seven teams struggling to avoid last place. In theory, despite straggling in just as Andy and Tommy were leaving, Marcus and Amani should have had a huge advantage because Tommy just straight up told them the answer. Unfortunately, by this point in the Race, Marcus and Amani were already tired and frazzled enough that they just straight up forgot what Tommy told them by the time they got to the clue box, leaving them in the same boat as everyone else.

What followed was shot after shot of people wandering around, trying to figure out which statues they should be counting, how many there were, and how to report them to the judges. Numbers like 423, 201, and 68 got tossed around, but ultimately the teams had to pool their resources and work in groups to figure it out. Bill didn't join in, but he also figured it out on his own and got out of there before the other six teams. The Ernie/Marie/Jeremy/Justin axis figured it out not long afterwards, and bringing up the rear (but not by much) was Lisa and Marcus. After a pretty well-designed leg with clever challenges that actually force the Racers to think, it was still very close coming towards the Pit Stop.

Which is where that taxi thing came into play. Amani/Marcus and the Silence gained a huge lead in the final run to the Pit Stop because (ironically enough) their taxi drivers were so lousy that they figured they'd be better off getting a whole new driver if they had to go anywhere else. (In the case of the Silence, their taxi actually broke down about a half-mile from the Road Block and they had to hoof it.) Everyone else lost ground to one degree or another, which was why Bill got out of the Road Block in third but he and Cathi came in 7th, and why the Doublemint Twins dropped from the middle of the pack down to 8th, and why Lisa and Kaylani got eliminated.

All around, an exciting, close episode, and I'm looking forward to next week's Thailand leg!

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week Two

After a non-elimination leg last week, this week gives us the ominous Double Elimination on the Amazing Race. They spelled it out last week for the losing couple, and this week they make it clear to everyone; coming in 10th is just as bad as coming in 11th. This ups the stress level a little for everyone as they head to Indonesia, and we get plenty of reaction shots of people whimpering and panicking and generally saying, "Wow, this sucks!" (Maybe these people are a little under-ambitious, given how many of them seem to be worried about not coming in 9th.)

There's a lot of airport bickering, which is genuinely unfortunate; Justin and Jennifer have the kind of sibling relationship generally described in a Eugene O'Neill play, and we're stuck watching it. We get a long, brutally whiny sequence between the two of them, and then they blessedly go off to sulk at each other while we fly to Jogjakarta!

After that, we get what looks like a genuinely terrifying taxi ride to the Road Block (seriously, there are countries where you take your life in your hands when you get into a moving vehicle, and Indonesia looks like one of them. The taxi drivers looked like the only laws they obeyed were the laws of physics, and then only reluctantly.) Bill and Cathi, last week's last-place finishers, got a cute little Speed Bump where they had to untangle some climbing ropes, and then everyone went spelunking. (Personally, I think "spelunking" is a better term for throwing heavy rocks into deep bodies of water. Spelunk! Spelunk!)

The Road Block was decent enough--the Racers had to rappel down into a hollow lava tube, retrieve a ceremonial mask and dagger, and return--but it's really not the sort of thing that gave the later Racers a chance to catch up or the early Racers a chance to fall behind. It was more or less just a straightforward, "What order did you get here?" challenge. But the Detour...

Okay, the Detour wasn't that exciting either. It was a split between one of the Race's fairly blah "try to get money out of strangers" challenges, which I've never been a big fan of (something to do with the fact that people from an affluent nation who are also trying to win obscene sums of money are also begging for cash from people who probably can't spare it)...and another "try to get money out of strangers" challenge. Meaning that no matter which Detour they chose, we had to see people doing stuff nobody wanted to try to wheedle change out of strangers who had better uses for the money. If I wanted to see that, I'd go to New York. (Rimshot.)

But after the Detour, that's when the Race went from the mediocre to the absolutely sublime. Because when the Racers collected their cash, they had to go to an orphanage and turn it in to get their next clue. That's awesome in and of itself. The Race has done a few things like this lately, where the Racers actually have to do something constructive and decent for the people of the country they're in, and I can't approve enough. And what happened next was even better.

You see, there was a little sign next to the grateful orphans who all cheered and clapped at the friendly Americans handing them money. And what it said was, in essence, "Don't stop with the money you collected on the Detour; give all the cash in your possession to the orphanage before you leave." The orphans still gave the clue that led to the Pit Stop, mind you. You could still leave without reading the sign and you would know where to go. But when you got to the Pit Stop, Phil would (and did, several times) tell you to go back and give until it hurts.

And so, the actual question of who would get eliminated was determined not by luck or even physical skill, but by attention to detail and careful reading skills. Several of my favorite teams became even bigger favorites by stopping to read the sign like any good team should, and I got a little bit of a schadenfreude charge out of seeing a couple of my less-favorite teams get the "However" from Phil. (When Lisa and Kaylani showed up, Phil reversed it by saying, "You got here tenth...however...a whole bunch of other teams failed to read the sign you read, so you came in 3rd." The response, "I hate you so much right now.")

In the end, irritatingly gimmicky Survivor survivors Ethan and Jenna came in 10th, and adorable but out of their depth gay couple Ron and Bill came in 11th. Both are now gone, and short of seeing Justin and Jennifer get the boot, there's really not a whole lot that could improve my mood. Most of the remaining teams are nice, lots of them are interesting, and there's a lot of people I can root for here. I'm looking forward to this Sunday's episode!

(Which, from the looks of things, will involve an utterly brutal counting challenge. I always love these!)

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week One

Oh, hey--the Amazing Race started again! Sorry, I really did mean to say something about this earlier, but there was a lot of blogging to do, and then there was a season finale to Doctor Who that was a lot of fun, and before I knew it the second episode had already aired. So let's at least try to catch up with events in the first leg so that we can get around to recapping the second leg before the third leg airs, okay?

Said first leg begins in California, in a very picturesque Buddhist temple near LA. We are introduced to the eleven teams...and since this is a big chunk of the episode as well as just generally important, since they're our "cast" this season, let's take a long look at them. In no particular order...

Laurence and Zac: This is already a favorite team of mine, as well as probably a favorite to win. The kid has already circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat; needless to say, "killer fatigue" is not going to be one of his big issues. The dad seems active enough to overcome his age differences, and they both seem relentlessly polite, quiet and nice. These are the kind of low-drama, high-competence teams favored in our household.

Ernie and Cindy: Oh, look. A dating team, one of whom describes themselves as a "control freak" and talks in self-deprecating terms about how they fight but love each other. Toss those on the pile with the rest, will you? Admittedly, they don't seem to be as spectacularly train-wrecky as some of the "bickering couples" we've seen on the Race, and I give Cindy major points for saying thank you to people in Chinese on this leg. But nothing has convinced me yet that they are going to be enjoyable to watch. They seem competent enough, though, and I suspect they'll be around for a while.

Jeremy and Sandy: Technically speaking, they are on the Race. All the evidence seems to suggest it. Their names are on the credits, they are listed in the Wikipedia entry for the season, the CBS website lists them as being in the show. However, I must admit I have no memory of them. Neither good nor bad. Their appearances made literally no impression on me. If the Silence were running the Amazing Race, this is what they would be like. (Minus the electrocutions, of course.)

Justin and Jennifer: Hate hate hate die die die shutupshutupshutupshutup! But enough about their dialogue for the entire first episode, what do I think of these two? (Rimshot.) Seriously, they cannot exit the Race fast enough for my tastes. They are whiny, they are in perpetual bicker mode from Second One, and they actually act, in interviews, as though this is endearing behavior. Elimination is too good for them.

Ethan and Jenna: This season's token "stunt couple", they are both winners of Survivor and he is also a cancer survivor to boot! Presumably, they also are searching the world for the hook-handed man who kidnapped their infant daughter to induct her into their ninja clan, unknowing that she is actually the last heir to Narnia. Oh, and despite all that they're still remarkably boring.

Andy and Tommy: Apart from the fact that I keep expecting the bearded one to break into "The Rainbow Connection" at any second, these two actually seem like nice guys. They also seem like they're dumb as posts, the pair of them, but appearances can be deceptive...and athleticism and a positive attitude can carry you past a lot of challenges in this series.

Kaylani and Lisa: Why is it, whenever there are two women on this show that start right out by telling everyone how they're not stupid and lots of people think they're stupid but they're really a lot smarter than they look and sound, that it immediately makes them come off as dumb? I wish I knew, and I'm worried that it might be me. In any event, they are this season's Pretty Women Who Will Show Everyone That Pretty Women Are Competent. (They are not off to a great start in this episode, but more on that later.)

Liz and Marie: Unfortunately for them, they have already been nicknamed the Doublemint Twins in our household and they don't seem likely to be able to do anything to shake that nickname. They also don't seem likely to last very long; they're young, they don't seem to have a whole lot of reserves of patience, and they don't have the life experience to teach them how to deal with stress.

Bill and Cathi: They seem nice. Boy do they seem nice. They seem like they would instantly make friends with all the other Racers, the kind of friendships that last well beyond the Race. Even years later, I see them as the type that are still sending out Christmas cards to Liz and Marie and cooing over Jeremy and Sandy's baby (who may be named Melody and may not be theirs)...and all those connections will be forged on the strength of about three episodes, because that's how long I give them.

Amani and Marcus: This season's Overcompetitive Guy and Supportive Wife, Marcus seems to at least be one of the nice Overcompetitive Guys who runs around and makes grunting noises, as opposed to one of the Overcompetitive Guys who trash-talks everyone else and pouts whenever anything goes wrong. Still better in small doses, though.

Ron and Bill: They seem like the "sweet gay couple" version of Bill and Cathi. Really nice, very friendly, definitely the kind of people you can root for...but you can just tell after about five minutes that they're going to go out early. Very, very sweet though.

So after all these characters are introduced, they all begin racing! The first challenge is to find an umbrella with letters on it that complete a word puzzle involving the teams' first destination. I like the idea, but unfortunately it's yet another Race puzzle with a brute force solution, and most of the teams simply sprint back and forth between Phil and the umbrella stand until they find the one they're looking for. The last team, Kaylani and Lisa, add injury to injury by getting a Hazard for being in last. (Hate this. Bad Race design to penalize the team that's already furthest behind. But given that Kaylani and Lisa manage to screw themselves far worse than the Race designers could even dream of, heck with it.)

Which is what happens next, as Kaylani and Lisa lose one of their passports at the first gas station. Much drama ensues--and for the record, this does not feel like a "bickering team" thing to me. This feels like, "We are completely and totally FUBARed and we haven't even hit the first airport and I am very upset." I think that anyone who thinks they would handle this well hasn't gone through it.

Luckily, a random stranger finds the passport, discovers from Twitter that the women with camera crews following them around are probably on the Amazing Race, and drives it to the airport on their behalf. I am not saying they wouldn't do this for the 62-year-old couple, but it probably didn't hurt that they were astonishingly beautiful women.

From there, we all just skip to the chase and get to Taiwan, where there's a beautifully designed puzzle that tests everyone's mental abilities. No brute force solutions, just a simple case of listening and repeating a key phrase. This is the kind of simple, yet sublime challenge that I love about the Race when it happens.

...of course, Bill and Cathi are four hours behind everyone else because they can't find the clue that leads them to the Road Block, but that too is part of the Race. They wander around for ages while everyone else does the challenge (and the subsequent relatively simple Dragon Boat race afterwards), nothing but Amazing Editing ever suggests that they even come close to seeing another team, and honestly, they are the luckiest recipients of a non-elimination leg ever.

And next week, which is now last week, we get a double-elimination leg to make up for the non-elimination leg! I wholeheartedly approve. Talk to you about it before Week Three!

Amazing Race Round-Up, Finale

Technically, it's the last two episodes crammed together in a not-at-all-blatantly obvious fashion, no siree! Much like Riding With Death and the Master Ninja series, CBS has seamlessly blended these two episodes into a two-hour extravaganza so brilliantly that you can't even see the join! (I suspect it was somewhere around the Pit Stop at the halfway point, but that could just be crazy talk.)

In any event, at the start of the first epis...er, first half of the episode, the four remaining teams (Flight Time/Big Easy, Zev/Justin, Gary/Mallory, Jen/Kisha) are still in Switzerland. They all head to the airport to get their flights to Rio de Janeiro, and the Globetrotters luck into a flight that seems like it will give them (and Zev/Justin, who were tagging along with them) a seven hour head start over the other two teams. This good fortune lasts until Mallory asks Flight Time, "Did you find anything better?", at which point his eyes widen like he's just seen an oncoming train, his mouth hangs open for a long moment, and he finally says, "Um, no! We were looking to see what y'all got!" Unsurprisingly, his devastating poker face fails to fool Mallory's razor-keen intellect, and soon all four teams are booked on the same flight.

Once they get to Rio, a little taxi roulette and a trolley schedule give the other three teams a half-hour lead over the Globetrotters, which is pretty much entirely eaten up for Zev and Justin when they choose Zev to do a dancing challenge. I'm not going to say he has the worst rhythm of anyone ever on the Race, because I know better, but his lack of dancing skills combined with his social disorder lead him to a) get through the challenge very slowly, and b) slap one of his instructors on the ass, which made me wish she'd have returned the favor on the back of his head. Mallory and Jen cruise through the challenge looking like they had a lot of fun, though.

Then everyone gets fifteen minutes of body waxing. For some, this meant they came out perfectly smooth. For Zev and Justin, it just meant that the waxers managed to get the first couple of layers of fur off. (The timer elapsed before they could get the machetes and flamethrowers to really slash and burn.) After that, three of the teams did the drink-mixing half of the Detour, while Zev and Justin basically said, "Nah, we don't want to be in the Final Three anyway!" and went to go sell bikinis on a beach. Because nothing works like having two white guys, one of whom has a social disorder, wander up and say to random bikini-wearing women, "Hi! Take that off and pay us money to model one of ours!" Needless to say, the first half ends with Zev and Justin getting eliminated. Honestly, they only had one or two genuinely bad legs this time around, but when they were the 10th and 11th, that was all that mattered.

The second epis...er, half...begins with the teams heading back to Miami for the final leg of the Race. There's a lot of chatting, recapping (pffh...recapping...like anyone could make that interesting...) and general catching-up to get people excited for the final trek to the Finish Line...and then Gary and Mallory get a genuinely incompetent taxi driver and don't even see another racer until the last challenge. So this is pretty much a two-team race, here. (For the record, I agree with everybody else who said, "Gary and Mallory should have realized how bad their driver was very early on and ditched him for another instead of sticking with him until it was too late to make up the time." But hindsight is 20/20.)

The other two teams face two Road Blocks in a row (one of those little "gotchas" I appreciate, because it means that teams who strategize all the way through the Race to make sure that their strongest Racer gets the last Road Block wind up having to put their weaker half in for the very last one) and a challenge that was annoying due to wind and weather and the need to be super-attentive to detail. No Detour, though. Come to think of it, there wasn't one last season, either. Maybe they just want to make sure everyone has to do the exact same challenges for the final leg. (That also seems to be the motivation for the obvious bunching for the final leg.)

Then finally, in one of the nastiest final tasks I can remember, they have a seven-mile bike ride to the Finish Line. It's close--the Globetrotters actually have Jen and Kisha in sight as they trek across Seven-Mile Bridge--but in the end, Jen and Kisha become the second all-female team to win the Amazing Race. (Which should, by the way, shut everyone up who claimed that Nat and Kat won by beating a "weak field of Racers"; Jen and Kisha beat several teams that finished in the Final Three on previous Races, and were one of only two all-female teams this time out. And frankly, I think if this Final Three had been put on Nat and Kat's race along with them, they would still have beaten out all five of the other teams. But that's unprovable.)

And that's it for another season of the Amazing Race! As always, I'm looking forward to the next one.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-10

Famous director Akira Kurosawa once directed a film called "Rashomon", based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa about the death of a samurai. The film makes an important point about the ambiguity of memory; even the most seemingly clear-cut situations can never be truly known, and all our attempts to bring order out of chaos by assembling events into a narrative are doomed from the beginning.

This will be important later. But for now, we start off in Switzerland, with our five teams setting out to a helipad for some good old-fashioned "hours of operation" bunching. Once that's out of the way, we start off with a Detour that involves trekking out into the trackless wastes of the Swiss Alps to rescue stranded tourists. (Or, more accurately, involves tourists trekking out to rescue actors/mannequins.) One option, Search, involves finding a buried mannequin and digging them up, while the other one, Rescue, involves one Racer lowering the other into a crevasse to "rescue" a probably very bored Swiss person.

Three teams (Kent/Vyxsin, Jen/Kisha, Flight Time/Big Easy) do Rescue. It's fairly easy, despite the editors' valiant attempts to recut Kent's whining into some sort of an actual crisis. It should be noted here that this is pretty much the point where killer fatigue and the arduous nature of the Race combine to boost Kent's natural whininess to intolerable levels. He's been getting gradually worse all season long, but this is the episode where it all goes off the rails and he hits "Perfect Storm" levels of general obnoxious whinging. He can't even put on his own hood when it gets windy.

The other two teams (Zev/Justin, Gary/Mallory) do Search...which proves to be longer and more difficult, to the point where I started to wonder if Zev and Justin weren't going to need to be rescued while they searched. Both teams managed to save their mannequin, though...if you don't count the tiny, insignificant fact that they broke him in half while "saving" him. This puts them at a major disadvantage when they get to the Road Block.

Which is another Travelocity-themed challenge (we usually get about one per season.) This time, they have to make a giant painted chocolate Roaming Gnome, using two molds that each team has one of their Racers paint, freeze, fill with chocolate, freeze again by putting in a snowbank, then split open to reveal the creepy misshapen parody of a human being within. Once they've done all that, they get a clue and a non-chocolate gnome, which they then take on foot to the Pit Stop.

This is where the Rashomon stuff comes in. Because the molds aren't labeled, the shelves in the freezers aren't labeled, and everyone is working at a frantic pace to get their gnomes painted. And one of the Racers, Flight Time, looks up at one point to find that what he thought was his gnome-half is actually Vyxsin's. Or, from his point of view, what Vyxsin thinks is her half is actually his. There ensues what could be the most confusing sequence in Race history; even the audience isn't clear on what happened to which gnome, at least judging by the Television Without Pity forum. All we know is that neither Flight Time nor Vyxsin got a penalty, so whatever happened, neither one took work that didn't belong to them. It seems pretty clear that Vyxsin put her work on the bottom shelf precisely so that she would know which one was hers, too. Beyond that, the universe simply does not allow us to know what happened. Narrative fractures and decoheres, and all we can be sure of is that both Big Easy and Kent were being whiny dicks to each other in accusing each other's teammates of theft.

We can also be clear that Kent and Vyxsin didn't read their clue carefully enough, because they took a taxi to the Pit Stop. (Still managing to arrive in third, impressively. Apparently some of the other teams are good runners.) Despite the fact that he was holding the clue when they got into the taxi, and that Vyxsin said repeatedly that something wasn't right about the situation when they passed other teams that were on foot, Kent insists for the entire half-hour that this is all Vyxsin's fault for not reading the clue carefully enough and that she's dragging him down with her negative attitude. That's right--the man who literally had to be carried through a Detour like a six-month-old is telling the woman who dragged his ass along that she's holding him back. This marks the official point where everyone in the world started rooting for their elimination simply so that Vyxsin could tell him to fuck off and never see him again.

And everyone got their wish. The half-hour penalty elapses, giving Gary and Mallory and Zev and Justin time to get to the Pit Stop while Kent is still explaining that he's being positive by blaming everything on his teammate. They're eliminated, and next week it looks like the last four teams go off to Brazil, then the last three teams go to the Florida Keys in a double-sized season finale!

Which will, of course, be broken up into two normal-sized episodes for subsequent syndication. But c'est la vie!

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-9

Last time, we had six teams left on the Amazing Race. This time, we have...still six, because of a timely non-elimination leg that saved Gary and Mallory. Everyone seems pretty aware that they're not going to get that lucky again--I (and presumably all the Racers at this point) expect that it's going to be the last NEL of this Race, which is good because we've had three episodes where nobody got eliminated and I want blood. Blood! BLOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

With that in mind, the six remaining teams left Austria and headed to Lichtenstein, home of the undead sorcerer...no, wait. There are no actual liches in Lichtenstein, are there? Dang. Just when you think they've found the coolest location for the Race...oh well. They head to the tiny little postage-stamp country of Lichtenstein for the next leg. How small? Well, let's find out! All six teams must measure the western border of Lichtenstein as their Road Block, riding motorized bicycles and measuring the distance on their odometers. Correctly navigate the 22 km course, you get the next clue. Screw up, and you go 22 km back to start and then 22 km back to the end and guess again.

As you can imagine, getting this one wrong is Very Bad. And it's around here where we say to ourselves, "What's the one problem that otherwise super-competent team Jet and Cord have had this season? Oh, right. Navigation." Sure enough, as we watch everyone navigate the course, we see Jet getting lost somewhere in the tiny country of Lichtenstein. And although he can't get too lost in a country that's actually smaller than some Oklahoma ranches, this is one case where precision pays.

"Ah," you say, "but what about the other teams? Surely someone is going to help him out by screwing up just as bad?" This is where the bit that left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth comes in...Zev and Justin, who get it right, pass on the information to the Globetrotters (specifically Flight Time, if I recall correctly) who then lets Gary know. So of the six teams, only three got it right the first time (Vyxsin and Kisha both did it without help, although Kisha had her guess confirmed before submitting it), but only one had to do the course over. This seems a trifle unfair to me. There's no rule against it, there's nothing that says that other teams can't do a little kingmaking by getting rid of a team that's been almost supernaturally good at breezing through Detours and Road Blocks, but it still leaves me with some uncomfortable "what ifs" in a show that doesn't normally have them.

But the Cowboys made a good effort at catching up. They might have hit the Detour well after everybody else (probably an hour or so behind, given that it was a roughly 10-mile course and the Velosolex they used, while capable of high speeds, was probably being ridden at about 20 mph for safety's sake)...but man, did they catch up fast. The Detour was a choice between delivering luggage and eating an entire pot of cheese fondue, and they knuckled down and ran luggage around town like nobody's business.

Unfortunately, everyone had an hour's head start. Zev and Justin took the cheese (they were the only one, hence the old saying, "the cheese stands alone") and muscled through it in about an hour, with only one bout of vomiting. (Also legal, also leaving a bad taste in one's mouth, but for entirely different reasons.) Kent and Vyxsin did luggage and we saw again that Vyxsin is way more determined, way better suited to the physical challenges, and way less patient with her partner than her last time on the Race. At one point, she tells Kent to get on the empty luggage cart and literally drags him back to the checkpoint. That's right, after years of jokes about one partner carrying another, it's finally happened for real.

Oh, and at the end of the Detour right before the Pit Stop, there's a Double U-Turn. This is a brutal place to put a U-Turn; since it's right before the Pit Stop (not that the Racers knew, but...) anyone who gets U-Turned is pretty much left in the dust. There's nowhere left on the leg to make up the time. That's why they made it a Double-U-Turn; a single one would be like a sign saying, "Who do you want eliminated?"

Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the first four teams didn't use that U-Turn. Vyxsin and Kent couldn't, because you can only U-Turn once per race and they'd already used theirs to FUBAR the Cheerleaders, and the other three teams who got there early (Gary/Mallory, Jen/Kisha, Zev/Justin) decided that as long as they were doing okay, they weren't going to piss anyone else off by U-Turning them. Which meant that when the Globetrotters got to the checkpoint, mere minutes ahead of the Cowboys (well, at least that's how it was edited to look--they might have been further behind, but the Globetrotters did screw up the luggage task and had to deliver an extra two bags...) they knew exactly what to do. Put the game out of reach by slapping the Cowboys' picture up there.

So sure enough, the Cowboys arrived to see that they were DOA. They went back, had a nice, leisurely meal of cheese fondue, and checked in for their inevitable Philimination. Which is tough for them, since they mainly got eliminated because nobody wanted to help them the one time they needed it, but then again, maybe those people just had gay friends. (Yes, I went there.) And honestly, at this stage of the Race there are no "good" eliminations. Everyone goes out hurting.

Five teams left, next week is Switzerland, and apparently Kent gets into an argument with a guy big enough to use him as a toothpick. Good luck, Kent!

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-8

We're down to...six teams, now? Wow. It's starting to get pretty easy to keep track of people, now that we've winnowed away almost half the field. In any event, those six teams started off in India, but now need to go to Vienna, Austria, where a Ford Focus commercial is waiting for them. Jet and Cord once again decide to spot all the other teams a head-start, this time by a half-hour, as they pick a different flight in the hopes that one or more people will miss a connection and give them an advantage. Instead, they hit Austria a half-hour behind everyone. Guys? Not that I actually want you to win, given your attitude towards gay people, but you are reaching that point in the Race where those are elimination mistakes instead of charmingly doofy mistakes.

The teams all get to Vienna, where they each get a brand new Ford Focus to drive, and are instructed to use its easy touch-screen system to get the next clue. This backfires slightly on Ford, as we then get a scene of Gary mildly swearing as he tries to figure out how to make the easy touch-screen system work. But eventually he figures it out, and all the teams head to an Austrian castle!

...where they get a book, which they're instructed to deliver to a library via Ford Focus. Is it just me, or is the product placement a little bit more intrusive this season? Other than the "lifetime supply of 7-Up" from Season 16, I can't think of another time they've been this much in your face with the sponsor's stuff. (Oh, and the prize for this week is a Ford Focus for each Racer...which isn't a lifetime supply, unless the Ford Focus is an amazingly reliable car. Or an unbelievable deathtrap.)

In any event, at the library, we finally ditch the Ford Focus to do the Detour. One option is to deliver a couch from the Freud Museum to the University of Vienna (presumably without a single Freudian slip.) The other option is to eat a lot of schnitzel and baked potatoes and chocolate cake. Not one, not two, but three teams forget the cardinal rule of the Amazing Race: The better the food in the eating challenge, the nastier the catch in the challenge has to be. In this case, it's a timed eating challenge. All three teams fail, giving everyone else (in specific, the Cowboys) a chance to catch up.

Everyone delivers their couches--and surprisingly, the Goths do so amidst much bitching at each other. Their relationship this time out is very different, and a lot less supportive. (Rumor has it that they aren't actually dating anymore, just pretending to for purposes of the show. I obviously don't know, but they're not acting very much like a couple. Except in the sense that Nick and Vicki acted like a couple.) Then it's back to the Ford Focus, to go to the Road Block! (I was half-expecting the couches to be delivered via the spacious cargo room of the Ford Focus!)

Unfortunately for Gary and Mallory, who got passed by the Cowboys, the Road Block turns out to be one of those simple, mechanistic, takes-everybody-about-the-same-amount-of-time tasks. Fortunately, this turns out to be the season's first official non-elimination leg. (At least, fortunately as far as I'm concerned. I know there are people who can't stand Mallory's squealing excitement, but I think she's sweet.) And next week, we're off to Switzerland to see if they can catch up!

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-7

And after a two-week delay, we get going again! (I mean "we" as in the viewers, natch. I don't think they actually made the Racers sit down and wait for the Country Music Awards to finish. Actually, this episode was live-tweeted by Phil himself, as @PhilKeoghan, and he said it takes about 23 days for the Racers to go around the world. Um, suck it, Jules Verne?)

This time, we started with a little airport drama--Jet and Cord didn't ask the right questions at the ticket counter, and wound up on a flight an hour later than all the other teams. Ordinarily, this would be a cause for concern, except that a) I'm not really rooting for the Cowboys, because they were apparently the recipient of favorable editing their first time around that covered for their homophobic tendencies, and b) even if I were, I wouldn't be that concerned because they do have a tendency to make up whatever time they lose in navigational ineptitude by being that much better at the tasks than everyone else.

And sure enough, they made up their mistake in the Road Block (a fairly standard needle-in-a-haystack challenge where the teams had to find specific people in a crowd.) Ron, meanwhile, tanked it very seriously, coming out of the Road Block in dead last. But surely nobody else could make that many screw-ups, right?

Well, it was actually kind of close. Because while Kent and Vyxsin are by no means inept, they are not communicating and co-operating nearly as well as they did on their first run. Vyxsin has less patience with Kent (it does seem to be common knowledge that they're not dating anymore, despite what the show says) and Kent seems to have less enthusiasm for the Race. The two of them are making more mistakes, and handling their mistakes less well--that said, Vyxsin's decision to jump into the Ganges rather than continue going down the river the wrong direction was pretty gutsy.

(Oh, and there was a Detour involving buffalo manure. This was about the only interesting thing about it.)

In the end, though, Ron and Christina couldn't psychically convince the other teams to make enough mistakes to catch up after the disastrous Road Block, and they were duly eliminated. This does not break my heart. While Ron wasn't as bad as I heard he was the first time he was on the Race, he certainly wasn't that good. Unfortunately, the only thing we'll continue to see of them is their faces on the credits, which is my least favorite thing about them--Christina's smile is so fixed and wide, it looks like she's been replaced by an Auton duplicate of herself or something.

Next week, Kent and Vyxsin yell at each other some more, and Gary and Mallory eat a lot. Oh, and they're in Austria. I've always liked the European legs of the Race, so this should be fun.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-6

Okay, I lied. This is the kind of leg that must be hard for the editors to make look interesting.

On the one hand, I thought it was a very well-designed Road Block. It was a needle in a haystack challenge, but one that didn't rely purely on chance--the racers could, if they had paid attention back in China and remembered the taste, scent, and color of the tea they had drunk the previous day, solve it very quickly and easily (as Ron did. Yes, I know, Ron is not completely useless! We are all equally amazed here, including Christina.) But if they just swigged down the tea and ran for the plane, and they didn't remember what it tasted like, well...they were going to be drinking tea until they cried. Literally.

At that point, it really just came down to "Is this a NEL/double leg?" Because the Detour was not hard enough to give the last-place team a chance to catch up, and that meant that unless it was a NEL, Margie and Luke were screwed. And we found out that it wasn't a double leg pretty early on, and we haven't seen any plan NELs this season. So we spent a whole lot of time suspecting strongly that Margie and Luke were screwed.

At this point, I'm beginning to suspect that the final three will be Zev/Justin, Jet/Cord, and Gary/Mallory. All three have been running strong races leg after leg, and while it does take just one bad leg to put you out of the running (as with last season, where Gary/Mallory just got epically lost and washed out), they don't seem to be prone to that. Whereas everyone else has been kind of trying to come in "not last", it seems, which only works as a strategy for so long.

Next week, no Race, which means no Race recap. But in two weeks, more Race! And Zev apparently gets annoyed by loud noises. Oooh.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-5

So when last we left Kent and Vyxsin, they were in last place with a second leg coming up and a missing passport. Could they find their passport? Could they make up the missing time on the second half of the double leg? And who would be penalized for breaking Race rules?

As it turned out, the answers were about as anticlimactic as you can get, at least for the first two questions. Kent and Vyxsin found their fanny pack and made it to the Pit Stop, only to find that they were still racing and that the next "task" involved going to a train station where the producers had arranged for some truly spectacular bunching. And I mean truly spectacular. Even Kent and Vyxsin didn't stand a chance of missing this one.

Don't get me wrong, I think that bunching (the practice of giving teams that are behind a chance to catch up by putting everyone on the same train, plane, bus, boat, et cetera; or arranging hours of operation for the location of the next task so that everyone has to wait for the place to open in order to start the task) is necessary sometimes. If you never bunched, you'd have a situation where the really good teams would wind up with an insurmountable lead by the sixth leg or so, to the point where Phil would have to sub-contract eliminations to a second host while he went on ahead to check in the leading teams. But a double-leg is supposed to be a continuation of the previous leg, an endurance test as well as a chance for teams that are behind to make up ground. Starting every double-leg with "go to the train station/airport and wait fifteen hours" turns something that should be difficult into a glorified non-elimination leg, with the added benefit that the last team doesn't get a Speed Bump. I'm actually pretty disappointed in the way this turned out.

That said, Kent and Vyxsin did earn a thirty-minute penalty for taking the wrong flight. (The rule used to be that your penalty was equal to the time saved by taking alternate means of transport. If that had happened here, Kent and Vyxsin would have jumped forward several places due to penalty.) The producers were at least maintaining the pretense of double-legs being challenging, so instead of serving it during the meaningless Pit Stop, they were informed that it would be waiting for them at the end of the next leg.

After an inconsequential-but-adorable sequence of the teams waiting for the train (they played three-on-three, with a Globetrotter on each team and Jaime and Cara acting as cheerleaders) they moved on to the next destination, all nine at once. They then had a second detour, which was a memory challenge on one side and a lift-and-haul-heavy-things-then-assemble-them challenge on the other side. Oh, and there was a Double U-Turn (also known as "the only fair U-Turn") waiting at the other end of this one.

Surprisingly, it wasn't much of a factor. Perhaps this was because several teams got spectacularly lost between the Detour and the Road Block (the two teams that got U-Turned actually wound up in sixth and seventh, ahead of Zev/Justin and Gary/Mallory--they tried to follow Ron/Christina instead of getting directions themselves, and their cab drivers turned out not to be that good at following.) Perhaps it was because the memory challenge didn't throw many teams; I was assuming we were going to see lots of slow, sad head shakes from the guy with the clues, but most teams seemed to get it fairly quickly.

The Road Block, on the other hand, was a major challenge. It involved assembling a giant 3-D dinosaur puzzle (actual dinosaur size, in fact) and all the teams were working at it when the last team arrived. Said last team was Gary/Mallory, who promptly assessed their odds and said "Screw it, we'd rather use the Express Pass than get eliminated." It was a wise idea; even skipping the Road Block, they still wound up in second. (This is a bad sign, actually; when Gary and Mallory got eliminated last time, it was due to major problems with navigation and not any issues with the tasks. If they got lost twice on this leg, it means they haven't gotten rid of that weakness, and they don't have another Express Pass to help them recover.)

In any event, the dinosaur assembly turned out to be harder than expected, mainly because they were all working off of one picture of the finished product and half the teams didn't do a good job checking their work. When it comes to lifesize puzzles made of very big chunks of heavy wood, the last thing you want to find out is that you put the hips on backwards. Lots of teams had problems, but in the end, it was Jaime and Cara whose problems turned out to be insurmountable. They reached the Pit Stop exhausted, grumpy (Jaime actually said that "things never go our way", which is a pretty impressive statement for a team that finished second in their first race and a respectable ninth in their next attempt) and, of course, last. They were Philiminated, meaning that I'll thankfully never have to see another Jaime-tantrum again.

Next week, India, where Luke seems to be having terrible difficulties with the Road Block. Which means, given my theory on Amazing Race trailers, that they are the one team safe from elimination next week. See you then!

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-4

I suspect this one must have been a difficult one for the editors; it's always tricky when one team gets way behind the others. Do you try to use clever editing techniques in order to make it seem like the lagging team is closer than they are, or do you just go ahead and acknowledge that there's not going to be much suspense in this episode and show how far behind they really are?

In the case of Kent and Vyxsin, the team that pretty much dominated this week's episode, the situation was complicated by some major bunching that kept them at least theoretically in the race long after what should have been sheer, unmitigated disaster. Driving a full three hours in the wrong direction and missing the flight that every single one of the other teams was on should have meant doom, full stop. (Especially since the subsequent flight wasn't for five hours. You do not want to spot everyone else a five-hour lead on the Amazing Race.) But when everyone else has to wait for an 8 AM bus, suddenly some of that lead gets eaten away, and it's worth focusing on the drama of whether or not running one of the worst legs in Race history is enough to get Kent and Vyxsin eliminated.

And it was a spectacular trainwreck of a leg. Vyxsin starts by insisting the theme for the day is "Positive Mental Attitude", then proceeds to get lost, sob into the map, scream at herself, stare into space, sob at the map some more, give up, lose her passport temporarily, and then berate herself a lot more while attempting the Road Block. Kent, meanwhile, has decided that the best way to deal with a partner who's having difficulties is to stare into space and wander around like an automaton, then say to her, "Well, I was just doing what you told me to do." (In case I haven't made it obvious yet, Kent's checking out was just as bad as Vyxsin's freaking out.) Oh, and then he loses his passport for good measure.

Next to all that, everyone else's mistakes seemed like amusing larks. Ron had his bizarre food cravings (I get that he's a fan of the local cuisine and doesn't get to eat Chinese food this authentic very often, but the man was actually stopping on the way to a Detour to smell the fish frying. I think if Christina had one of those toddler leashes for him, she'd have used it.) The Globetrotters didn't know what sign of the Chinese Zodiac they were (they've never gotten bored at a Chinese restaurant?) Mallory screamed, Jen admitted that there's really no way to feel good about yourself after calling a deaf guy a bitch, and the only racers who had any real trouble were Zev and Justin, and even they were way ahead of Kent and Vyxsin by the end.

(Assuming penalties don't come into play. Kent and Vyxsin might get a penalty for not taking the mandatory flight, although to me the penalty should be the five hours they had to wait for the next flight, and Justin might get a penalty for throwing one of his charms in the grass when he found out it was a duplicate, thus making it potentially harder for Vyxsin to find hers. Oh, and Ron and Christina might get a penalty for flinging themselves out of a moving trolley and throwing rocks at a bus to get it to stop instead of going back and taking the bus all the way like the clue said. No, really. They actually did that.)

And then, of course, we find out that the end isn't the end after all. Yes, for the first time in Race history, we get two double legs! (Which has led to some speculation that there will be no non-elimination legs, only double legs. That's a pretty big advantage to the teams at the back--no Speed Bumps!) Which means that Kent and Vyxsin are saved for another week. Even better for them, next week's leg includes a Double U-Turn (the only fair kind, in my opinion--being U-Turned is such a huge disadvantage that the only way to keep it from being "automatically eliminate one team" is to make it a double-team penalty)...and frankly, given how inept Kent and Vyxsin were this week, nobody's going to see them as enough of a threat to U-Turn.