Only one team (the goat farmers) picked the egg task. The teachers only did it because they were U-turned. And while the goat farmers did come in last in their bunch, we don’t know if they were seconds, minutes, or hours behind.
I thought/hoped the lion task would be “memorize the dance, then perform it for a judge, and if you get it wrong, do it over”, which would have made the egg task much more attractive. Maybe they’re scared of another Mark & Bopper situation. But “follow the guy around, and half-ass the dance moves that he tells you”, is right up there with “ride a moped next to a cow” level of tasks.
Best moment is still “My ox is broken!” way back in season five.
Compared to the first seasons, the pace of the race (at least the editing thereof) is much tighter. Airport bunching undoubtedly contributes to this. Each time there’s a flight, there it becomes a whole new race from the airport to the Philelimination mat. This makes for better drama than what happened, say, in season one where Team Guido on the last leg was a full twenty-four hours behind the two leading teams.
The clues could be quite cryptic in the first few seasons. Most infamously in season one, a clue required the teams to go to a certain hotel in Agra. The teams, however, were in New Delhi. The clue simply named the hotel but didn’t say that it was in Agra. To figure it out, a team must have noticed that the clue-giver took the yellow envelope from a model of the Taj Mahal; then, of course, the team must have recognized that it was the Taj Mahal and moreover known that the Taj Mahal was in Agra and not in New Delhi. One team couldn’t make all these connections, leading to their EPIC breakdown.
In later seasons (I want to say around the time of the Family Edition), the producers overcorrected and simply told contestants to go there and do this. I’m glad to see the return of these cryptic clues, like simply giving the contestants a postage stamp in the hopes that they’ll figure it out.
I remember once they were handed a postcard of the Petronas Towers and teams had to figure out they needed to fly to Malaysia. Or when they got the photo in Cambodia and they needed to recognize that it was Jackie Kennedy–and so many teams could not and had to ask a local.
Clues like that make it more of a mental challenge and not just physical all the time.