I liked that, too. My enthusiasm is somewhat dampened by the fact that the whole tea thing was a huge Snapple advertisement, but there are worse ways of establishing product placement than tying together elements and countries in an episode with an appropriate historical and cultural reference.
I wish they hadn’t told us that the tea would be part of the later challenge. Keep us in the dark like the racers so we’re all thinking, “Well that was pointless. Why didn’t they just go straight to the airport?”
And another one of those Unofficial Amazing Race Rules: If you’re handed an object instead of a bright yellow clue envelope, inspect the object carefully, including opening it up! Didn’t that same thing throw off a couple teams a season or two ago? They got a metal tube (something to do with bullets, I think), and had to open it and find a small scroll of paper. I seem to remember at least two or three teams not realizing it had to be opened.
For all the negativity he generates, at least Ron is generally competent [unlike Luke]. On the one hand it may kill them later, but on the other hand Christina’s dealing with it over the whole trip, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse.
Somehow Mallory’s got me warming up to her. They’ve managed to show her more likable side, or maybe she’s just having a good time and the performance is a reflection of that.
To be pedantic, it wasn’t quite at the same time ( officially, a few years later). More seriously, the shift to Kolkata is just a normalization of spelling/transliteration, whereas the other two were done to use [what the government considered] an Indian rather than European name.
Why’d Constantinople get the works?
Those bicycle-driven school buses were great! I wonder how many kids they stuff into each one - my 10 year old commented that her own notoriously mean bus driver would probably be even nastier if she had to pedal them to school.
Interesting that the navigation task turned out to be the easier one, though it sounded like there were only one or two turns involved. It seems from this & previous Races that it’s much easier to find English speakers in an Indian city than a lot of other places. (insert Dell/Verizon/BoA customer support joke here).
Actually, Calcutta officially became Kolkata in 2001. Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, and Madras became Chennai in 1996. Cite. So I’m only 10 years behind the times.
But the duck is still Peking, right?
It’ll always be Byzantium to me.
It’s the mandatory product placement leg! Props to the cowboy for smelling the tea. Mallory shows again why I always liked her. Yes she is screechy and overexcitable sometimes but she doesn’t get stressed. She was in the bottom half in the tea task but just kept going without getting upset (Zev) or whining (Luke). Beneath all the pageant stuff she’s actually pretty tough. I was looking at the teams that have never had a meltdown in either season so far and the only ones left are the cowboys and Gary/Mallory. Meanwhile, Gary is so mellow I sometimes forget he’s on the race. I also wondered if there was a bathroom available because that was a lot of tea to drink. Also, at the beginning it looked like they weren’t showing each cup to the judge. I wonder if some drank the correct tea without knowing it. There was also a lot of place shifting between the roadblock and the detour. There was a little too much taxi luck involved this leg for my taste.
Good point you have there. OTTOMH, when the Racers are given an arbitrary item, it falls into one of three categories:
A. Nonstandard clue envelope that holds the clue (or possibly directly holds the clue envelope)
B. Required item that must be brought to another spot on the leg, usually the Pit Stop mat.
C. The Travelocity gnome, often a special case of either of the first two categories.
Something else interesting about this episode is the extent of the editing was evident as the number of cups on the Table when Luke was having his meltdown kept shifting back and forth. A few times the table was nearly empty and then more full again.
Zev also had no idea and it was and it was Jen who told Mallory that she and Flight Time had no idea so were just guessing as fast as possible.
I also wonder how much difference there was between tasting hot tea and tasting what must have been room temperature tea. And I’d have been screwed since I don’t like tea so would have tasted as little as possible and then would have had the equivalent of trying to answer “which of these cat pees tastes most similar to the cat pee you drank 24 hours ago.”
But even if all 8 teams had perfects palates and were expertly identifying the tea then it would still have been a boring episode because ultimately there was only the one spot in the leg where performance had any impact on outcome meaning there was no opportunity for recovery. And that is, to me, boring.
I suspect that the layover before this leg was longer than usual. (Makes sense coming after a double leg.) Everyone looked well-rested, and a bit more brushed and combed than usual
I liked that too; kind of a theme to the episode. If the product placement is something we have to sit through in order to keep the Race profitable and on the air, I can live with that.
Maybe they’ll keep this going and the racers will be off to Frankfurt next. (Birthplace of Karl Schwarzschild, early theorist of black holes.)
I noticed something like that, too, but I figured it was just the camera angles. From one end of the table, it looked like only a few dozen cups were remaining at the far end. In the next shot, there were clearly at least a hundred. I think it may have just been a really, reaaalllllly long table.
Christina’s also coming back to the U.S. and marrying Azaria and getting away from her father. Having a half mill to do that with would be sweet. She’s got her eyes on the prize.
The problem is that Azaria was kind of a controlling asshole too–not as bad as Ron: not nearly! IMO some of that was just smack-talk with his sister, but there was some “I’m in charge” bullshit that clearly went beyond big brother/little sister crap. So…Christina’s gonna end up marrying a very watered down version of her father.
And she is hawt. When something good happens, she gets super-wahoo about it, her eyes light up and her nipples stand out. I swear, it’s like watching her climax repeatedly. I’m sure enjoying this season of The Race!
Someone, probably Jet, said, as they were entering the crowd at Kolkata airport, “Holy cow!” For me, that was the best unintentional laugh line of the night.
Oh, this is too funny. Air New Zealand inflight instruction video with Richard Simmons. It’s cheesy, but fun, and there’s a TAR-related surprise somewhere in the middle…