TAR 11/24: "Part It Like The Red Sea"

Cafe Society
21

I’m glad everyone else had similar reactions to the awful sanctimonious bullshit being spouted by Travis and Nicole. Why do they keep casting these smug, holier-than-thou halfwits? Leo and Jamal are racing thoughtfully, if somewhat loudly, and are much more entertaining.

I am somewhat torn about the tasks on this leg. I didn’t like that so many tasks relied on captive animals. I have spent lots of time in Indonesia (I annoy my husband by translating all the signage) and love and respect the people and culture. But, as with other poorer nations, captive animals there do not neccesarily have long and comfortable lives. This is a hot-button issue for me, and I feel like the producers could have maybe found a broader range of tasks, and featured less of the casual cruelty I observed. Yes, cruelty. It’s cruel to chain up an elephant. It’s cruel to keep birds in tiny cages and make them sing. It’s cruel to force rams to fight for sport. And dismissing any of these practices as “cultural” diminishes responsibility.

Sorry, quite worked up there. Let’s be nice to animals!

22

Taxi Assessment:

Stuck in the Desert and Officially Detained - or, Philiminated with extreme prejudice.
Hoskote & Naina and Rowan & Shane and Chester & Ephraim and Brandon & Adam and Tim & Danny and Nicky & Kim - Already eliminated.
Ally & Ashley (down from “Flat Tire”) - Ally & Ashley again finish far in the back, and this time they wind up eliminated. They actually led the rest of the teams for one brief shining moment at the train station, but some clue-reading trouble and a little bad luck with a recalcitrant taxi driver, and they immediately drop to last place. That’s kind of too bad, but far from unexpected: the remaining four teams (Leo & Jamal, Tim & Marie, Jason & Amy, and Travis & Nicole) have all beaten Ally & Ashley for six episodes running. When you’re losing that consistently, it’s unlikely you’ll start winning any time soon.

Flat Tire - or, not likely to get anywhere soon.
No one.

Stopping for Gas - or, not broken-down, exactly, but not a good sign.
No one.

“Rapido! Por Favor?” - or, making meaningless ineffectual comments from the back seat, but in no immediate danger.
Leo & Jamal (holding steady) - A good episode for Leo & Jamal and a first place to boot. Although they in part benefitted from mistakes by other teams and traffic tie-ups that delayed others, they still performed well at both the Detour and the Roadblock.
Tim & Marie (holding steady) - Tim & Marie caught up awfully quickly for the second train to be an hour behind, and I suspect that the actual lag between train 1 and train 2 was more like 30 minutes. In any case, Tim & Marie kept ahead of Jason & Amy, then passed Ally & Ashley at the Detour and Travis & Nicole at the Roadblock. With none of their usual running-in-circles, they easily slipped into second place.

In the Passing Lane - or, ahead of the pack, but not quite comfortably.
Jason & Amy (holding steady) - Missing the first train wound up hurting Jason & Amy far less than it could have - even though they lost the head-to-head race with Tim & Marie, the delay was short enough that Jason & Amy could capitalize on poor performance by other teams and easily avoid the risk of Philimination.

Cruisin’ with Earl - or, drivin’ on the shoulder, takin’ shortcuts, and generally kickin’ butt.
Travis & Nicole (holding steady) - This was probably the worst leg so far for Travis & Nicole, and it was all due to a single task that Nicole simply could not do on her own. Travis & Nicole were lucky that Amy was nice enough to stop and show Nicole how to put together her instrument, because Nicole looked completely befuddled by the whole thing. (And this episode reminds me: What are the rules of covering communication between the active and non-active team members? Non-active team members are always shown shouting encouragement [or, sometimes, “encouragement”] and suggestions, but Travis, who had some actual knowledge to impart, never seemed to try communicating with Nicole.) Hopefully they can put this leg behind them and start fresh next week - their basic Racing skills still look good (note they were in first place or close to it all the way up to the Roadblack), and it was really only the one task that hurt them.

23

Yes, it’s perfectly legal to copy other teams’ work, just the same as it’s perfectly legal to use the U-Turn and to lie to other teams. It’s just…unseemly, I guess, to chase someone from another team who’s actively hiding his musical contraption, in the same way it’s kind of unseemly to lie to other teams for no particular reason. Double points for being sanctimonious about the one but doing the other. Log, speck, eye, remove, that kind of thing.

I wonder…Nicole (and Travis) have a pretty wide skill set, but once she’s out of her comfort zone, Nicole seems to just get completely confused. It’s likenew timuli are hard to process or somehing.

A few seasons ago, some team made a comment in a similar situation about the secision being driven not by strategy, but by who you want to hang around with for the rest of the Race. Part of the charm of TAR is the decisions that are made that are not purely strategic - choosing a Detour option based on how cool it sounds ather than how fast it is, or example - and teams that have become friends tend to help each other out, strtegy be damned.

24

See, I never get that attitude. You’re playing a game. With a million dollar prize. Anything you do WITHIN the rules is perfectly moral and seemly, IMHO. Telling something that’s not true to an opponent in a game is no more a lie than the quarterback faking a handoff before throwing a pass is. Do Nicole and Travis never bluff at poker? If you asked one of them flat out if they were a werewolf, would they be forced to answer “Yes” ? Though I agree about the sanctimonious comment.

25

I realize that it wasn’t technically against the rules to run up and look at the finished instrument to get some idea how it fit together, but since they did the judging and testing of the instruments far away from where they were constructed, I think the idea was to discourage close examination. It was the preaching and moral snobbery that disappointed me.

The Afganimals are okay. At first I thought their behavior was just having fun and being outgoing, but with every episode, it seems like they are really going overboard with it. I no longer think it is just having fun and playing to the camera - I think they just always have to be the center of attention. So much of their antics scream “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!”

But I admit I miss the baseball wives team. They played nicely, had a good attitude - and were quite nice on the eyes as well - especially Kim.

26

It’s interesting watching teams and individuals approach challenges.

I’ve been very impressed with the doctors throughout the race. Nicole OWNED that ‘grab the flags from the raft’ challenge by leaping into the air and landing on moving raft and then she completely fell apart putting together a few pieces of musical wood.

Clearly, she has some sort of mental block when it comes to putting things together in a specific way. And she has that super-annoying physical tick of sucking on her bottom lip when she’s stressed.

Anyway, I still think they’re the team to beat.

I want to close by noting what an amazing person Amy is. She really does fulfill the beauty queen resume. Beautiful? Check. Smart? Check (she had the viking car code figured out ahead of time). Kindness? Check (Nicole would have been sunk without her help). And I love how she wanted to be badass to Pinky (“She’s going to see Providence Amy!”), but couldn’t pull it off (they could have u-turned them last week, but didn’t).

27

Big YMMV here: I do not find them even mildly entertaining. They are jack asses, plain and simple.

28

I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying, bit a few points:

  1. This is a game, with only one eventual winner, but that doesn’t mean that all team interactions are antagonistic. There are plenty of times that teams work together, temporarily, for mutual benefit. With that in mind, it doesn’t do a team any good to take actions that make them appear untrustworthy or abrasive to other teams - not because the actions are inherently immoral or unseemly or unsportsmanlike, but because appearing unsportsmanlike to other teams makes a temporary alliance less likely, which is a strategic disadvantage.

  2. This is a game, but there’s plenty of blurring between game-time competition and real-life downtime, unlike poker or football, where there are clear divisions between what’s in-game and what’s not. You might say that all team interactions in TAR are part of the game, and you’d have a point, but people going through a strenuous time together like to hang out and bond, and being all competitive all the time is tiresome.

  3. There’s also a sportsmanship issue. For example, to me, there’s a difference between a QB faking a handoff and a soccer player flopping to draw a penalty on the opposing player. As a TAR example from many seasons ago, Boston Rob did a thing where he convinced a bunch of other teams to sit out a Roadblock with him and all take the penalty for not completing it. There were some viewers who thought that was unsportsmanlike, but I disagree - it was a perfectly fine manipulation of the rules, and if you don’t like it, then advocate for a rule change; moreover, the other teams agreed with Rob of their own free will. Later (or maybe earlier) Rob came up with the idea of paying a bus driver to keep one door of the bus closed and open the other, giving him (Rob) and some other teams a head start. Still within the rules, but IMO something of a dick move, and something other teams should be perfectly within their rights to be peeved about.

All that being said, it is a game for a million bucks, and I’d probably be doing whatever it took to win, too.

29

While I agree with you in principle, I think in the specific case of the rams, there was no forcing involved. That’s what those guys wanted to do.

30

IIRC, what people objected to more with the second example was that he convinced other teams to pay off the bus driver and he kept some of the money for himself. Again, no rule against it, but an even more dickish move.

31

Sure, rams have an instinct to butt other rams for dominance and to win mates. But I still don’t think humans should exploit that instinct for entertainment.

32

See, I think this was the problem – it wasn’t just tall to short. I think it was tall to short, except for the sixth and seventh note, which were switched.

I think Nicole had two problems: she couldn’t figure out how the stand was assembled, and she thought it WAS just tall to short, when really it was about the notes. Travis referenced this briefly when he got frustrated and commented “Listen! Listen to the notes! It’s not just the length!”

I’m pretty sure that the non-participating team member is allowed to yell out encouragement, but not anything instructive. Or else they would have been done much more quickly. We’ve seen this a lot: one team member is screwing up, missing something obvious, and the other team member is pulling out his hair, turning to the camera, and saying “he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t realize you have to milk the yak first, THEN dance with the goth chick.” But the bystander just yells out more encouragement instead of the key piece of information.

The most interesting part of that task to me was the fact that when they felt they had a lot of extra time, they decided to “invest” this time by letting Nicole do the task. To me, that’s a statement that they’re “saving” Travis for later tasks, which implies that they both agree that Travis is a stronger player in every respect. Which is a hell of a concession by any spouse.

33

There were some cringy moments from every team left in the game during this episode but it’s clear that the editors have decided it’s time we lost any positive feelings for Travis.

During the fish trap building task I didn’t really like his attitude but he seemed to get over it quickly so I put it down to killer fatigue but this episode was just horrid.

Tonight was just…wrong. He was yelling at her before she even got into the area for the music task, and the mat talk was just brutal. When Jason suggested Amy help Nicole the desperation level was off the charts. Amy clearly intended to just give her a couple of tips and then go but she obviously felt she couldn’t leave her in that state until there was a risk i.e, the ice girls showing up. It just seemed that the more angry he got the more frozen and unable to think she was. Definitely not the signs of a healthy relationship.

So tally for the night -
Jason made the crass little comment in the taxi about Indonesians but I think what he was really asking was if the country was more asian or indian. I do think he’s a little obnoxious but I get the feeling it’s more ignorance than hate.

Amy is taking a lot of flack for basically doing the task for Nicole but Jason sent her back there and I understand her having issues leaving until she had to. The decision that she made cost her nothing in terms of placement and although I doubt Mr. & Mrs. Holier than thou will pay them back it’s a shot in the karma pool.

Travis - enough said. If he and Nicole work for the same hospital I’m heading for a different ER even if it’s an extra 30 mins travel time. Nicole is breaking down. If it’s not in response to his expected reaction she’s definitely suffering from killer fatigue and it’s a bad case. I wouldn’t put her on any tasks that require thought.

Tim & Marie - she was slightly less obnoxious than normal. Apparently she likes animals more than people, the moment with the elephant was cute. Tim is reaching his breaking point. He’s being shown standing up to her more and more.

Afganimals. Hyper and crazy as always and please please stop picking up and hugging random people. Getting willing kisses by begging is bad enough but picking up and swinging around a child just because he was drafted to hand you a clue isn’t really cool.

Ice girls - I’m surprised they lasted so long but I was slightly amused that production thought their relationship breakdown was the one worthy of comment.

34

You’re right, it wasn’t cheating, but it was poor sportsmanship, without the benefit of being creative or cunning.

35

No frigging shit! “Oh, we aren’t u-turning them because we don’t like them or want to get an advantage over them, we are merely rendering Godly justice upon them for lying to us!”. Sanctimonious fuckers.

36

When the cab driver wouldn’t let them (whoever it was) take the stalks of sugarcane in his car, am I the only one who thought “break them in half”? I doubt the elephants would mind.

Marie is a vile little hosebeast, isn’t she?

37

She’s the type of woman who, if she ultimately doesn’t find a male to browbeat into submission, will constantly cry about being alone when she’s older. Sadder still, she won’t realize that it’s because of her behavior.

Breaking the sugar cane probably didn’t occur to any of them. Besides, I think it’d warrant a machete…?

38

So, any idea who was the Greeter? He looked like someone who might be a locally famous clown or children’s television host, and seemed an odd choice to represent Indonesia.

39

Remember that Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch for ages. I’m guessing the greeter “character” was someone from that side of Indonesian culture.

40

He didn’t look like a clown :confused: so much as a turn-of-the-century (presumably) Dutch [del]nerd[/del] bookworm scientist/engineer/clerk type. The pitstop was at an observatory, so I presumed he was supposed to represent or evoke a 1900-ish astronomer.