Once it was clear that they were in the final three, he should have renegotiated the agreement on the plane to Alaska. 50-50 or he doesn’t leave the airport.
Unlike the “Hello/Goodbye” flag task, there was a lot of extra information on the totem poles - specifically the coloring of the decorations and the broken letters, which would make it easier to separate the pieces into the correct groups, and assemble each pole. So it was possible to just treat it as an assembly puzzle, and then you’d just have to get the words in the right order.
My 9 year old was exactly the same way! Blinking back tears when the Afghanimals were eliminated. She said she didn’t even mind that she had to go bed, because she didn’t care who won now. My 11 year old wound up rooting for Jason & Amy just out of geographical proximity.
I don’t think their flight had an extra leg. All 4 teams were on the same flight to Singapore. Then Leo & Jamal talked their way onto the booked earlier flight through Bangkok, while everyone else flew through Hong Kong. So different routing, but same number of stops.
I wonder if the choice of pilots had anything to do with the flour drop task. If the plane comes in on the exact same approach each time, it should have been straightforward to zero in on the target - keep your head in the exact same spot (rest it on the doorway as a reference), line up the target with a piece of the plane, and drop at a given point. If your previous drop was too far, drop one second sooner on this run, etc. But if the pilot wasn’t maintaining the same speed & altitude on each run, then each attempt would just come down to luck.
In the past, there have been double Roadblocks on the final leg, and I think the teams were expecting that would be the case here. Someone - I think it was Marie - said something to the effect of “OK, I’m choosing to do this one.” The way she said it made it sound like they were divvying up the responsibility, and she thought Tim would then do the next one. At least a few times, the very final Roadblock has been the memory task (which this season was not a Roadblock), so there may have been some strategy in figuring out who would do the flour drop and who would do the expected memory task. It’s also possible that there was a second Roadblock task that was boring and not shown.
Do you really think, based on her performance in other solo tasks, that she was capable of that kind of analysis? If she did not have someone else in the plane explaining step-by-step exactly how to do it, and showing her, she had no shot of figuring out what to do on her own.
If the task presented her with her own shoes with the laces undone and the clue read “tie your shoes” she’d run around yelling “tie then to WHAT? Tie them to this dog’s tail? Tie them on this flagpole? To this car’s windshield wipers? Someone help me!!!”
I agree with Muldoonthief. It had to do with more than skill how else can we explain that it only took two shots for jen and 12 for Marie and 20 for Nicole?
Pilot flying had to have a considerable impact to miss a target like that so many times.
Which is just like getting an idiot taxi driver.
How about this for a possible future stunt casting pairing… Amazing Race 20’s Vanessa (of the not really Dating Divorcees team) is now dating the NBA’s Tim Duncan. 
Not really. Taxi drivers are just picked up on the street, and it’s up to the Racer to decide if there’s is a dud and get another one. But you’d expect that when the TAR producers provide experts for the Racers, they put some effort into making sure all experts are of similar skill level and have been briefed as to exactly how much assistance they’re supposed to provide in the task. There’s never been any indication that Racers are free to switch experts if they think theirs is a dud.
Hmmm… good point.
On many taxi drops, tho, they already have several lined up, and the camera crews ready with them, so maybe some discretion exists in pre-choosing guides, boat runners, tree climbers, drivers, pilots, etc… But not having a lot to choose from to start with.
So, they line up the 8 drivers that agreed to the terms, but maybe they aren’t the top half of who could be there.
Of course, there are the ‘chase down a random taxi’ situations, too.
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I actually think the 60/40 split was justified. Tim said Marie did all the work to get them on the race, so he wouldn’t have anything without her.
StG
I hope what happened this season doesnt catch on, teams helping each other the way they did this season.
Its one thing to provide a hint or tell where to go or how something its done but its a whole different ballgame having someone actually do the task for another team.
Was it not for that the ER docs would never finish third and who knows even the winner would’ve been different too.
I didn’t watch this season but I have a question.
Was it business as usual this season where it was all about alliances sharing answers or are they getting back to teams actually having to perform tasks themselves?
ETA: Simulpost.
How was it different this year. Every season teams will ride others’ coattails. One team won $1M doing that and only did one task on their own (Kesha & Jen)
Every season my SO and I pick teams to root for. We have a very regimented system: we can’t pick the same team, and we have to pick before the start of episode 2. When our team gets eliminated, we pick a new one before the start of the next episode. Points for your team winning a leg, and points for your team winning the whole thing. You lose points for being forced to switch teams. Point values are nebulous and determined mostly by how we feel at the end.
At the end of episode 1, I picked Travis and Nicole. My SO picked Chester and Ephraim. After the Portugal Incident, she switched to the Beards, who, I thought, were an excellent choice. They won the next leg, but were also next to be eliminated. From there she switched to Jason and Amy, who had just finished 2nd for the third time in a row. And who, as we now know, would go on to win the season.
So from the start, I was rooting for Travis and Nicole, and thought they were both extremely strong racers. I was shocked therefore when Nicole started imploding in the last 3-4 episodes, and Travis started turning into such a jerk.
I also don’t know whether I or my SO won this season: I picked a top-3 team from the start that also won three legs, but ultimately lost the season. Whereas my SO picked the winning team (who also won a leg after she picked them), and her teams won legs 2 (Ephraim & Chester) and 4 (Beards); but she had to switch teams twice.
Back at the snake-eating task, when Amy was talking about how hard it would be for her, she was self-depracating and determined. That was the first time I felt anything positive for her. I also noticed then that she’s cute when she smiles, which means I hadn’t seen her smile in the first six or seven episodes.
Here’s my theory: She consciously positioned herself and Jason as the bickering couple in order to get cast. They kept it up for the first half of the race for whatever reason (standing out in the crowd, not wanting to bait-and-switch the producers, annoying the other teams, whatever), but dropped it completely toward the end.
And yeah, I’d have taken 40-60 as well. Hell, I’d have done it for free. I know I’m not going to win, so why not?
We had a “weather advisory” graphic that was placed right over the graphic that showed the number of attempts, so I had no idea how many attempts each racer took. 20 for Nicole? That’s believable.
Who was it, Jason? who asked the taxi driver in Juneau “Do you speak English?” That was fucking hilarious.
I cracked when Pinky mimed pushing Tim off the boat in Alaska … that was cute. She grew on me in the end.
I honestly think my news station on Sunday accidentally announced the winners before the show!!!
All I heard were “the amazing race winners …Matt and Amy were in a parade today in their hometown…” I was like What??? I swear it is on tonight.
Yeah, they had been in so many different language areas, I had to think twice about that myself!
Someone had a taxi driver that spoke almost no English at all. One of the Asian countries. And I think it was a pre-arranged taxi, too, not a grab one off the road.
Do the contestants have any clues of what countries they might be in before the race? That way, they could bone up on some simple phrases. Kind of like how every contestant should learn how to drive a stick or how to swim.
“All my life.” - yes, that was Jason.
I also like the three Japanese cabbies who refused to split up, at least until they got to the park.
We laughed at that , too. For the rest of his life the first thing he’ll be asking a taxi driver is if he speaks English. LOL!
Ooops. Yeah, you’re right; there wasn’t an extra leg to the flight. I misread the flight graphic last night. Still, I think teams should generally stick together, but Leo & Jamal had a legitimate strategic reason for seperating fro mthe pack in this instance.
In the case of the robot assembly task, I think Amy and Nicole started out working together on the theory that with two sets of muscles they could build the two robots quicker than if they worked seperately. That may or may not have actually been the case (certainly Amy was pulling away at the end working by herself), but that’s pretty good strategic thinking when the objective is to not come in last.
Later in the robot task (and in the musical instrument task) where Amy shows Nicole how to complete it, that was more of a pure gift. And that doesn’t really bother me: people are people, Amy likes Nicole and Travis more than the other two teams, and she gave them a leg up. Although I generally like TAR’s arrangement where teams are expected to be self-reliant, they do have shared experiences and real friendships. And the possibility of inter-team assistance tends to penalize people who are inter-team dicks, so I like that too.