don’t diss BB, one of life’s guilty shameful pleasures!
Zut, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you! No leg of the race if official until it’s been rated. 
You know, I really don’t think they were trying this time. What is the point of setting up a ‘split bunching point’ IMMEDIATELY in front of a full-on bunching point???
And now that the last of the rugrats are gone, I expect to see some challenging or at least scary stunts. I mean, go to a gas station and ask for Earl? Go to a music store and ask for whoever-it-was? We had bigger challenges in our scavenger hunt last week.
The tasks are set well in advance. Since there’s no way for the producers to know which teams will be in each leg there’s no way to tailor the tasks to become more challenging based on the children being eliminated.
No point at all…except to create false tension with the racers and viewers. You may have noticed that those charter buses were scheduled so there was NO WAY POSSIBLE for any team to break out ahead (or fall impossibly behind); they were all guaranteed to bunch up at “the dullest volcano ever.”
It sorta makes sense, from a production standpoint. They don’t want any team to get too far ahead or fall too far behind – it raises hell with logistics and security, so it’s easier to keep everyone more or less together. (Remember season 1, where two teams fell more than 24 hours behind the lead pack? That’s probably where they learned their lesson.) Granted, they don’t quite have this bunching thing down, and I doubt they ever will…but it’s something we gotta learn to live with.
Also, I noticed that the departure times for this episode were very screwy…all the teams left between 8:30 and 9:45 p.m., which couldn’t possibly be exactly 12 hours after arrival. (They started on the boats at 7 a.m., no way did all those Roadblocks/Detours/Fast Forwards get finished in less than 2 hours!) You may have noticed that Phil did not mention last week’s arrival time for each team, but what’s the point, when they’re just running to another bunching point with buses that won’t leave until late the next morning??
To mess with the racers’ minds.
I mean, yes, they are trying to have a race, but they are also trying to get some good television moments each week. A lot of stuff in the race is clearly designed to push the racers to a point of mental and/or emotional exhaustion.
For instance, in the actual round-the-world races, they almost always fly west-to-east, because that screws with your sense of time more.
You also have to consider that the whole race is planned in advance. Certain things they have control over (can move chartered bus time), certain things they don’t (can’t do park thing at night.). They could have moved the buses and made them wait at the other end, but that wouldn’t have changed anything, so why bother?