I never noticed that before, but that’s an excellent point; with the million bux on the line, who knows what some Racer (behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car in a strange city) would pull…
For driving my preferred solution for driving is this:
TAR provides drivers in most situations rather than relying on taxis. However, the drivers are well instructed that they not go anywhere unless explicitly told to by their team. That is, the teams must do the navigating and do what is necessary to figure it out how to get where they’re going.
My one big dislike for the show is how often it just comes down to cab driver roulette. And this would avoid issues of over-exuberant driving in a rush to the finish.
“Go to Wayne Newton’s house” it not a remotely interesting challenge if every cab driver in town knows where it is.
I hate the taxi driver playing such a pivotal role in the last leg, but it is also true that you probably don’t want the teams driving. So, in this case, they are in Vegas, why are they driving at all? Make them walk or take public transit. The only problem is that the producers want the finish line isolated to protect the secret of who wins.
Good thing Mr. Las Vegas whored out his home for 10 minutes of prime-time exposure!
I have no doubt that if the final leg were drive-yourself, at least one team in a close finish would park their car/suv to “accidentally” block the driveway/entrance to the Finish Line to give themselves a five-second advantage on the close-behind second-placers.
And that’s just the MILD possibility of not-quite-kosher stuff that’s possible. Excessive and dangerous speeding is another very likely possibility, and the likelihood of wrecking that goes along with it. Remember, there’s a producer/cameraman crew in those vehicles, too…I can’t imagine they’d risk their staff, at the very least.
As a former beauty queen with a megabitch personality, one of the stupidest things that can trip out of your pie hole has got to be the sentiment that you want people to judge you based on what’s inside a person rather than superficial appearances. One can only hope the Fates were listening closely and make her wish come true.
Here’s the problem with show-hired drivers - if one of them does something even slightly favouring to another team, even if accidentally, you’ve just given the other teams license to bitch about it being rigged or fixed and have some weight behind it. Best to hire it out to independent contractors.
One of the early season finales was drive yourself (it was the one that ended in Phoenix, I think) and included a number of dangerous maneuvers, driving on the shoulder at least, as I recall.
I did think it was very sweet of Cheyne to lament hurting poor Wayne Newton’s feelings by not staying and chatting longer.
How about:
"“Proud” implies that she met or exceeded my expectations. I’m not her parent, I’m her husband/lover/boyfriend and she did wonderfully without me having to give it a stamp of approval. I expected her to be as awesome as she always is. "
I’m not usually all that concerned with so-called sexist language, but it’s kinda patronizing that Phil always asks the guy if he’s proud of the girl.
M & C totally deserved it. The other two teams were whiny gits who only got to the finals through sheer, undeserved dumb luck.
And Meghan is probably the hottest babe that has ever run the race. If not, she’s sure in the top two!
I’d like to see them use public transportation more.
If a city has a subway/bus system that can be used to get the teams from point A to point B (or a reasonable distance off) I’d like to see them have to navigate that to get around some of the major cities instead of the cab drivers all the time. Or give them amounts of money so that they can afford maybe one crucial cab ride, but the rest will need to be subways and the teams have to figure out whether to cut across the city in a cab now or save that for later.
Didn’t he actually ask Luke if he was proud of his mother in their season? I never really noticed that before, but I do think you’re right about which gender he always asks.
Sometimes he asks the young/strong member of the team if they’re proud of the old/frail member, or the non-handicapped member if they’re proud of the handicapped member (Myrna and Charla–the psycho was asked if she was ‘proud’ of the shrimp a few times despite the shrimp being A) the better racer and B) marginally more sane).
The one exception to this is the “kid running to win his parent’s love/approval” team–he asked Ron a few times if he was proud of Christina until it became obvious that Ron was insane and then the “handicapped” rule came into play and Phil started asking Christina if she was proud that Ron was trying to change from being an emotionally destructive asshole…
In an equal team (friends/lovers/partners/brother-sister/husband-wife) he always asks the guy as far as I can remember.
Even…whatshisname…remember that really weird team with the hyper-bitch and the guy who had the two little hair-horns*? The one who’s mommy still clipped his toenails at age 30 and who was scared of…well…everything? He still asked Hair-horns (adam?) if he was proud of Super-Bitch even though she was physically and mentally stronger than him in every respect. (He kept offering to lay down on railroad tracks…)
*I actually felt bad for Hair-Horns when i found out some backstory–turns out super-bitch applied with her hawt new stud. Hawt new stud may have been hawt, but he was also apparently super-boring. So super-bitch calls up Hair-Horns who she went on a couple of dates with, and promises to get back together if he goes on the race with her. You can see her leading him on in the earlier episodes and the total and utter contempt she has for him as soon as it’s too late to back out.
But it’s always just a trifle condescending.
OMG…I’d forgotten about them. Rebecca and…can’t remember. Hellboy? I think I need to make a post over at GB in your worst racers thread.
Incidentally, not sure if you know this or not, Rebecca went on to several seasons on the reality show about the lesbian gym owner. She was freaky, bitchy and inappropriate on there. WAY inappropriate. Like, make passes at her lesbian boss because it could help her at work inappropriate. Seriously.
And I didn’t know about that backstory; that’s atrociously mean on her part.
ETA: Turns out Rebecca has her own Wikipedia page. A sure sign she’s made it.
Victor, of Victor and Tammy last season, said somewhere that they started sequestering them half-way through the race.
Great final episode.
Every team had the lead at one time.
The best team won (although I definitely saw the lack of chemistry; when Cheyne picked her up, Meghan was struggling to get down).
The counting task was great for sorting out who could deal with KF and who couldn’t.
So many great moments:
-Ericka’s meltdown
-The poor couple getting married, and the pathetic “congratulations” from the teams
-Cheyne feeling bad about Wayne Newton, and Meghan saying “whatever”
and, of course, Cheyne smashing his head against the wall because he had his eyes closed.
There weren’t enough $1000 chips to do that. They had to start using $500’s and even $100’s to finally get the total up to one million.
Yeah, I know. You grab ten $1,000 chips and make a stack, then grab all the red chips you can find and make stacks the same size as the first one. Then you make a stack of twenty $500 chips, and make more stacks until you run out of that color. For the $250’s, you probably want two stacks of twenty so they don’t fall over.
$10,000 at a time, 100 times, and you’re done.