Oh, this one's just too easy:
--You mean someone on the Race doesn't know how to find their ass with both hands?
--If there are, Victoria could use some...
You try! It's fun!
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A tale of a man and his hats.
7 comments:
About. Damn. Time.
All worry about whether or not is was a non-elimination evaporated when I saw Phil's smirk right before J&V walked up the hill. He hated them, too. And now they are gone. And there are still 4 more legs.
My faves (in order):
Kris & Jon
Hayden & Aaron
Lori & Bolo
Freddy & Kendra
Adam & Rebecca (I told you they'd drop if they kept their crap up.)
You're much too positive, with your "favorites." Instead, I give you the Shit List, in order of most to least hated:
1) Adam and Rebecca. Not only for the Drama, but for taking actions designed to keep Jonathan and Victoria in the race.
2) Freddy and Kendra. Although maybe when this episode sinks in I can redeem Kendra a bit; she might have had a Very Special Episode moment there and be able to rethink her "breeding" comments and her moderately awful take on Ethiopia on the way in.
3) Lori and Bolo. I actually don't dislike them one bit, but still: dumb as posts. They didn't even take the detour that would use their strength more efficiently. They might make the Final 3 if there's a task that requires brute force that they get through better than the other teams, but I suspect it will be an all pretty people final.
4) Hayden and Aaron. Since Hayden managed to be less bitchy this week, and they're back to racing well.
5) Kris and Jon. They're the best. I nominate them for Pope and Popette.
I was amazed anyone chose to do the mud plaster. It seemed to me the roof was much faster, and this was validated by the 2nd-flight teams who made up ground. Plus we had two straw wounds, although I didn't see that coming in the comfort of my living room so I can see the fatigued racers not anticipating it.
A lot of poor orienteering this week: two Roadblockers left the church (although it was the two I'd have pegged as the least aware); Kris & Jon got pointed the wrong way to the pit stop; many donkey routes were chosen. (Geez, people, 2nd ladder, grab the hammer, then the rightmost...sorry, that's a Donkey Kong route.)
Too bad this was filmed before TAR 5 aired, as no one was able to make a self-aware "My ass is broken" comment.
How many roadblocks has Freddy done anyway? Shouldn't this one have been Kendra's? We should probably get a count posted to aid our viewing down the stretch. But not when I really ought to be in bed.
I agree this has been my least favorite season that I've watched so far. Part of it is that I don't like these teams, but the other part of it is that I just think that this race has not been designed as well. It seems like the teams get bunched 2-3 times a leg (this time at the ferry and at the charter plane which bunched into 2 groups a half-hour apart after a flight that looked to have the two groups farther apart that that). Still J&V elimination was a good sign, now if we could just get A&R, Hayden, and Kendra eliminated (I think Freedy and Aaron should team up and ditch the girls that are holding them back).
My ordering of teams from worst to first
A&R-Why the hell do they keep talking about breaking up? Aren't they broke up? They're listed as formerly dating, which sure as hell sounds broken up to me. I hope they're soon formerly racing (bad pun I know). At first I thought they were confused and thought it was them and F&K in race for last, but that doesn't hold up since they should have been able to see that they were 4 of the tags left at the yield In that case, yeilding F&K instead of J&V is inexcusable both in a racing sense and a larger sense. J&V were just as much or more of a long term threat as they had been more consistent over the whole race than F&K and it didn't matter which you yielded to prevent you from being eliminated this leg.
F&K + H&A - I can't decide which team I like better. Both of the guys have their good points and both of the girls have their bad points. They've both ran good legs and they've both come very near elimination. Freddy has done too many Roadblocks though and I'm guessing that is going to come back to haunt them.
L*B - Funny but dumb. What more is there to say. They do seem to antagonize a lot of teams but cutting line and stuff. Not sure how I feel about that.
K&J - They're winning is the only pleasing outcome.
Larry
I, too, was extremely happy to see J&V get eliminated last night. (And somehow it was especially gratifying to see that it happened because of a blunder that was entirely their own fault.) Kim, who can hardly tolerate being in the same room with the show due to its non-stop intensity and excessive number of people yelling at each other, heard me cheer from the next room and asked, "Jonathan and Victoria?" I'm still disgusted by Kendra's apparent feelings about these "yucky third world people" (Steve, what was it that made you think she might have started to come around?), but even that is a big step up from Jonathan's behavior.
It's hard for me to judge this race as a whole, since it's the first season of the show that I've watched (Steve's excitement convinced me to watch the previous season's finale.) I've been really surprised (and a bit disappointed) by how much ground the last place team seems able to make up in each leg: is there any correlation between starting and finishing order at all? And how has that changed from season to season? (How many episodes have started with all the teams reading their first clue in the middle of the night, only to learn that the first location of the day doesn't open until 11am?) Of course, I want miraculous come-from-behind victories to be possible, and the leading teams shouldn't be able to coast through the leg, but I'd like total reversals to be rare enough to be exciting (and to require some exceptionally good or bad planning or luck on someone's part).
Steuard
It was not my intent to induce marital discord, Steuard. This has been an unusually intense & yelling season by all accounts, though. Hopefully TAR 7 has better screening.
As for Kendra, it looked to me like at the end of the episode, she realized that these excessively breeding people weren't in fact going to steal her stuff or kill her when her back was turned. So it's possible she thinks of Africans as humans now. I'm just trying to give her some credit, basking as I am in a Jonathan-free glow.
The bunching, too, has been excessive this season. Although I bitched early in TAR 5 that two teams had been eliminated solely by bad airport luck (and not bad planning, even--one team just miscommunicated and ended up with business-class tickets, which is a no-no, so they had to wait for a later flight, and everyone else put at least an hour and a half on them.) It would be nice if good airport strategy could stratify the teams into two groups. But we've seen Jon and Kris almost lose out by calling ahead (though they'd have caught up to the next bunch anyway). And, for that matter, teams on the later charter overtook teams on the earlier one by choosing the proper detour. (BTW, wasn't it obvious the roof would be faster? One of the rare times I've thought that, and the detour actually halved the teams, and I was right.)
I'm glad to hear that this season's yelling has been more substantial than earlier seasons' yelling. But I think Kim would still be on edge from the non-stop intense music and scrambling to get ahead anyway. But yeah, if she kicks me out in the next couple months, I'll be sure to blame you. (I don't think you need to worry. :) )
As for the roof being faster, I've never quite known how many details the teams are given on each task (Roadblock, Detour, or whatever) before they have to choose which to do or who does it. If I had to choose between "Raise the Roof" and "Mud the Hut" without any more to go on than the names, it could be very easy to think I'd actually be _building_ a roof, rather than just carrying and lifting some pre-fab thing. But with even a vague notion of what the tasks actually were, I agree, "Raise the Roof" was an obvious cakewalk.
Steuard
If someone tells me that my options are carrying a roof and throwing some mud, I'm not sure it would be an obvious choice. While they have lots of details about the tasks (compared to almost no information on the roadblocks), they almost never see the "eqiupment" they have to use. When the tasks are introduced, we see that the roof is framed, but not covered, and that the mudding wall is much larger than a few handfuls of mud, but they probably don't see that at all. There are a number of detours where it should be obvious right off the bat which to choose (ice climbing vs. buoy searching or soup eating vs. boat inflating and rowing), but it's not always as simple to decide as it looks to us. Also, many of these people are stupid.
As far as TAR6 vs. other races, Steve's spot-on about the increase in yelling and bunching. The more I think about it, the more I think these are consequences of having less time to plan the race. TAR4 was shown in the summer of 2003 and there were no promises of a TAR5. In fact, CBS was on the verge of canceling the show when TAR won the first ever reality Emmy. Then CBS reevaluated, thinking "It's received plenty of critical praise, and it's our youngest-skewing demographic." They did a complete about-face and ordered TAR5, followed very quickly by an order for TAR6. The TAR5 route had been in the hopper for a while, but I think TAR6 was planned in less time than normal (and I've read that TAR7 was planned in even less time than that). To me, TAR6 feels less like a race around the world than it does a series of individual field trips. In TAR1, you really got the impression that teams were on their own, trying to make their way around the world. This time, it feels like they have been dropped off in different locations and told to do a couplee tasks before meeting up at the hotel. That said, it's still a billion times better than any other reality show and has a ways to fall before it's not my favorite show on TV. While I'm worried about the lack of time spent planning TAR7, I've heard that the cast is one of CBS' favorites. They blew no such smoke for TAR4 or 6; the only other time I've heard the network say "Hey, this is great" was TAR5, which was better than 4 or 6, by a large margin.
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