I disagree, because I think the way it works right now makes for a more interesting U-Turn strategy. Right now, when a team uses the first U-Turn slot, the target team is rarey eliminated, because the target team will immediately U-Turn a second team, so they won’t be eliminated. That means teams using the first part of a double U-Turn to knock someone else out of the Race rarely actually accomplish their goal. That should affect the strategy of using the U-Turn. The fact that a lot of teams haven’t actually figured that out is kind of amusing.
I think nearly all of the hockey brother’s misfortunes stem from getting shitty taxi drivers. As I recall, they were dead last for a good chunk of last week’s episode because their driver got lost, but they wound up making up time on the Detour and Roadblock to come in seventh (of nine).
To be fair to Chuck, he’s kind of running the race all by himself - the point of having a teammate is to have someone to help, particularly when you’re getting frazzled. Whatever Wynona’s doing, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “helping.”
Yeah - the propaganda was so obviously propaganda, when you’re used to much subtler commercial advertisements, that it’s hard to take it seriously. If anything, showing it should make people happy that we Western imperialists have much more believable propaganda. Like television shows where people travel the world and occasionally note how lucky they are to be living in America.
That’s true. For some reason, when I had my amused reaction to that statement, I hadn’t been remembering their performance accurately. I stand corrected.
That’s also true, but I suppose part of my feeling about this is the general “why go on the Race if you don’t want to go on the Race” feeling. Like someone said about the OB/GYN brothers a few weeks ago, there are plenty of people who *really really *want to go on TAR. Yes, it makes for far more interesting TV to have an out-of-shape woman who calls the Race “torturous”, but it also kind of sucks. There were times last night when I found Wynona relatively funny, but overall, she’s someone who doesn’t seem to have made one single effort to be prepared for the race, other than packing her fanny pack. And Chuck probably did that, too.
Seems like they would have to understand what was being said before it would even remotely have any effect. Or is it subliminal? Who is so simple that a lyric like “Socialism, you’re getting better every day” is going to affect them?
The B52 Memorial site is complicated. Which sadly puts it beyond the reach of a large chunk of US tv viewers.
I was surprised at the beginning of the episode that most of the teams did not know that John & Jessica had been eliminated on the previous leg. So, other than Phil telling them where they finished when they hit the mat, they are not informed of the results of the leg? I guess I always just assumed that the producers would keep all the teams up-to-date at the end of the leg (or beginning of the next one).
I don’t quite remember when I noticed that they stopped doing that. There was much more of an emphasis on the Pitstop and teams being allowed to “eat, aleep and mingle” in the early seasons. There were some really great scenes with teams getting involved in the cultural life of the places they visited and getting to know one another. Now it seems that they don’t have much interaction at all in between legs.
This only happened because Joey & Meghan got to the W-Turn before someone else from Pam & Winnie’s alliance had a chance to use the second slot on Mona & Beth.
I disagree that teams haven’t figured out the use of the W-Turn – it’s not that hard to figure out. The majority alliance was trying to get both Joey & Meghan and Mona & Beth whammied.
In a previous season, there was one target left, so the majority alliance agreed to whammy that target first and use the second slot on the leaders, thereby preventing the target from using it on a downstream team. Seems like they were able to figure it out pretty easily back then, too.
I cracked up when Max said they eat pho all the time, and now he’d be able to say “This pho is OK, but not nearly as good as the pho I had in Hanoi.” He was so thrilled to find yet another way to be an asshole.
They said pretty clearly in the opening that his Orthopedic surgeon recommended surgery within 7 days (this wait time pretty typical for orthopedic injuries to allow some of the initial swelling to go down; makes the surgery easier for the surgeon). So I guess they figured they had a few days, why not go balls out and try to win a couple of legs to get the juicy prizes. Low and behold they did!
I wonder about the timing of David & Connor’s mat scene. I know that Phil is often barely ahead of the Amazing Racers themselves. He still has to go to each location and film the explanation of each task. Then he has to get to the Pit Stop to wait for the racers to trickle in. With Fast Forwards and Express Passes, it’s often a close thing. It appeared that David & Connor bypassed all that and went straight to the Philimination mat.
I thought that was more the case for the very isolated locations, where there may only be one useful flight per day, so he can’t leave any earlier than the racers. But playing around on travelocity, it looks like there are plenty of Bali->Hanoi flights per day, so he probably could have dashed out right after “Oy Vey”.
Alternatively, it’s quite possible that once David & Connor decided to quit, they just completely staged & scheduled their Mat scene around Phil’s schedule. It easily could have been filmed after everyone else checked in.
The whole reason they changed it to a double U Turn (and it was a good reason, if they have to have U Turns at all) was when it was only one team being U Turned, they usually lost which takes the drama out of it. Allowing two teams teams to be U Turned keeps it a race and letting a team who has been U Turned do it to someone else, facilitates that.
Right at the beginning, when Pam & Winnie and Max & Katie were camping out at the hotel. They switched to a post-leg confessional with P&W, and they said now that they’ve hung out with Max & Katie for a while, they won’t make fun of them anymore, and immediately started to make fun of them - “Wow Max, your tan is totally cool.”
Re: last week’s discussion of the little critter that Caroline (or Jen- the shorter one) used to keep in her bra, which evidently died of loneliness- I remember thinking at the time, and it was reflected in the Dope discussion, that perhaps the tall one made that joke implying that the shorter one had small breasts, or something. So I made a point last night of checking out the theory, and was not disappointed. Girl’s got some rack.
I don’t think Wynonna is useless weight, in fact, in this episode she routinely had good ideas that Chuck didn’t listen to. She wanted to take the chickens, look for the temple near the market, etc. If Chuck had paid more attention to her ideas, the challenges would have gone quicker and smoother.
