Haven’t seen a thread yet, so I’m placemarking it. No commentary from me until everyone gets to see it first-run…
I lied. I do have a comment. I’m starting to get annoyed at the Sunday night time slot, mostly because of delay from the football games. I hope they move the damn thing back to Tuesdays for the next one.
Except that it’s doing well enough in the Sunday time slot that CBS has already this week greenlighted TAR 11. So we may be stuck with football delays for a while.
And look on the bright side: This way, when football causes the whole evening’s lineup to run behind schedule, it actually keeps people on that channel rather than switching to something else in the middle of a show.
True enough. I’m a creature of habit, though, and the uncertainty of just WHEN on Sunday night it’s going to air grates on me a little.
I would have missed the second half if I hadn’t fired up TAR on my Tivo right about 30 minutes after it normally ends. When I noticed that instead of TAR, I was getting 60 Minutes, I flipped to live TV to see what I could salvage of TAR (thank god for Tivo’s 30 minute buffer!). Grrrr! The first thing I saw was the losing team’s farewell interview. Anyway, I got to watch the whole episode, but I knew the whole time which team would come in last.
I’m not wild about the Sunday time slot either. I’ve taken to setting my DVR to record from 7:00 to 8:30, just in case.
Yay for the *wins! I knew they had potential. And its always nice to see “beta” males win.
Mary still cracks me up.
Aww, I was kinda liking Duke & Lauren. But where the heck did all their money go? Everyone else seemed to have plenty.
Did TPTB create the no begging rule just for this leg or will that be a permanent rule? I hope its permanent, I always hated to see the racers beg.
I have a question. During the roadblock, only one person can do the task right? So why were the girls (blonde models) both selling the flowers?
Kind of a boring leg, but next week looks to be more exciting.
I think we’re far enough down the page that we can talk about it now.
From Ulan Bataar to Hanoi. The *wins’ show of respect for what the American POWs went through kicked them up several notches in my estimation (not that they were too far down in the first place). Tom & Terry did it too, but only when they thought they were the only people to find the clues yet.
The queens bugged tonight. They fly by the open ticket agent, then get upset when the Queens slip into the place they completely blew off. Listen up, boys…they did not “cut in line”. You abandoned the line.
I love Mary. I know I’ve said that for every episode so far, but it’s true. She’s just so full of JOY to be experiencing the whole race that I can’t help but love her.
Hate Peter. HAAAAAAAATE! WTF was that at the end, with him a good 30 feet ahead of his supposed “girlfriend” while she struggles to keep her footing in a frikkin’ rice paddy? All the while, obliviously telling her how stupendous she is, as if verbal encouragement makes up for not even noticing or apparently caring just how bad a time she’s having navigating this swamp. Pick her up! Piggyback her the 50 yards or so to the mat! You’re 6’3", young and decently muscled. I don’t think you’re going to throw out your back.
Hated to see Duke and Lauren go. God, they got an Evil Fern, didn’t they? Did she stiff them the whole cab fare or did she actually pay any of her part? Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Fern’s fault they lost. They got lost on the way to the Detour and that did them in.
Oh, almost forgot…boys? Yeah, you two, Coco Peru and Miss Bunny…READ YOUR CLUE! I wish they’d have given you an hour penalty so Duke and Lauren could still be on…
I agree, I don’t like the boys much and I did like Duke and Lauren. I hate that you never know how much time exactly has lapsed when they do bring in the last time…because we don’t know if it was close or not to that 30 minute mark. And how does a 30 minute penalty really make it fair? What if that ride they got gave them more than a 30 minute advantage?
I think one of the girls was just holding and counting the money, running piglet cheese. It’s hard to tell; they look so much alike, I can’t keep track of who’s doing what.
That was a crazy modern hotel out in the middle of nowhere in Ulanbaatar, wasn’t it? More than a little unexpected architecture-wise.
I agreed with the girls that since Tom & Terry passed by the travel agent, it was their right to step up and get served. Tom & Terry made too many mistakes this episode through inattention; it doesn’t bode well for them going much farther.
Man, could Peter be a bigger ass? Why couldn’t he get tired to the back of Colin’s ox and get towed around a paddy, or pushed off a bungee jump without the cord attached? I am greatly looking forward to Sarah putting the smackdown on him. Which you know she will, especially after crawling across the paddy to get to the mat while he blithely ignored her. That shot is going to haunt his life, and deservedly so!
I was sorry to see Duke and Lauren go. They’d made up for all their earlier problems – the anti-Fern, the lack of money for a cab (and I LOVED the no-begging rule – it’s about frigging time!) – but that one wrong turn in the village did them in. The teams were so close together, getting lost like that was all it took.
They’re doing a great job this season of letting the bunching be entirely natural – primarily travel plans – and then making the different detour options similar enough in terms of time involved that one team can’t go into a leg leading and just breeze through ahead of the pack. Plus they’re taking little steps to keep the teams on their toes – the deliberate confusion over Thrifty Parking/Thrifty Rent-a-Car in the opening leg, a surprise mid-leg elimination, no money for this leg coupled with a no-begging rule, the necessity to keep track of safety equipment (the Mongolian riding helmets) and safety rules (no motorbiking in Vietnam) – all kinds of little things that really penalize a team for failing to read their clues thoroughly and pay attention to what they’re doing. Coupling all that with immediate grueling travel and going counter-rotationally around the world makes it so hard for the racers, it’s a really well-designed race this time – I’m loving it!
And I wasn’t alone in yelling out, “I’m PACKIN’ it!” when they got to the detour, was I? 
I’m also sorry to see Duke and Lauren go. I was hoping Tom and Terry would get a longer penalty, and D&L would get in before the time was up. I was sure they were going to get a 60-minute penalty. i was surprised it was so short.
Tom and Terry were especially grating last night, starting with the line-cutting accusations.
Peter was a complete ass. As jayjay said, I thought he should have picked Sarah up and carried her to the mat. She’s made so many comments about her knee not working correctly, you’d think he’d realize she can’t run like she normally does.
I don’t mind the Sunday time slot, but I am annoyed by the football delays. I like the whole “Race-Case-Trace” lineup, so, yeah, I’m one of those people who just stays on the same channel all night. I did doze off halfway through Without A Trace, so I have to go back and watch it again.
Damn, hit ‘submit’ too soon.
I’m not getting all the Mary-love. She bugs me.
David was talking about going to Vietnam, and seeing where his father had been, and she just snapped at him to go faster. She comes across as a huge nag.
The first team to not accept the motorbike offers (the model boys, I believe) was told it was about a kilometer. So they saved about ten minutes. If they had saved an hour, I’m sure the penalty would have been longer. Or at least, I like to think it would have.
I thought Duke and Lauren were going to make it much further. I didn’t necessarily like them that much, but I thought they were good racers, until the they picked the wrong guide.
It was the *wins, I think, because Phil did the explanatory voice-over about the no motorcycle rule after they turned down the offer, and they usually splice that in at the first instance of the activity in question.
I wholeheartedly agree. She seems a nasty piece of work, to me. A nag and a real backseat driver, in the literal and figurative sense of the word. As in the flaming arrow task, when she almost immediately piped up about how she should have done the task. She also seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of her foot injury.
She may love seeing all sorts of new stuff, but she seems like a shit to the one person she is familiar with.
I have a feeling, since this is the first time I recall that all the teams have started with zero dollars in a middle leg (they’ve started with, like, a dollar on final legs before), that the no begging rule was specific to this leg. I hate the begging nonsense too, both because it’s boring to watch and because it has yet ever to work as a penalty. If they’re going to do the possession stripping thing I’d much rather when it came to the start of the next leg that teams got, say, 50% of what the other teams got and they were prohibited from begging.
Overall everyone had a pretty good leg, including Duke and Lauren. They were behind because of the money issue and they could never make up the time they lost having to walk to the flower shop. The anti-Fern didn’t really hurt them timewise since everyone got bunched at the next destination but if she’d have kicked in half the fare and D&L could’ve ridden even partway to the flower shop then they’d have passed T&T in the penalty box. I was so hoping this was a NEL but I thought I heard Phil say the last team “will” be eliminated.
The moment of silence thing at the Hanoi Hilton just struck me as odd. I understood what they were doing of course but it came off on-screen like a couple of the teams were saying little prayers to John McCain’s flight suit. Weird.
With the amount of screen time being given to Mary’s ankle I’m expecting that it will play a role in an upcoming leg. My VCR cut off before the previews of next week so I’m in the dark.
Loved David’s coal snobbery. “Ours is hard, theirs is mud.” Hee.
As I recall, the previews pretty much revolved around how Peter is a big huge quitter. Quitter, quitter, quitter!
Even though it wasn’t really the same thing, it sort of tickled me to see a coal-related Detour. Can you imagine David & Mary passing up any coal-related option? That so plays to their strengths.
Okay, Mary’s voice? She sounds exactly like my MIL. I HATE my MIL.
I keep trying to look beyond that. Everyone in the world who sounds like my MIL can’t be evil, right? Can’t try to make people eat chili from paper plates and can’t line bathmats up to form paths along the carpet that you’re not allowed to stray from, right?
Serious MIL-related flashbacks may have caused me to black out a few times during the episode.
I agree. She seems to be nice to strangers, but kinda rotten to her husband.
And I’m not getting all the hate for Peter. He talks like he learned English from a Tony Robbins “Personal Power” informercial, which is annoying, but I think his heart is in the right place. Last week, folks were raggin’ on him for telling Sarah what to do and being too patronizing. This week, it’s for leaving her alone. Make up your minds, people.
(Looking up TAR on wikipedia just now, and there’s a link to Sarah’s own website, including a page called “Leg Collection”. Now, that’s just cool.)
I also thought the Beauty Queens were looking at a penalty for both of them selling flowers. If anybody hears some info on this, post it here please.
We’re three legs into the race, don’t we usually have some snarky nicknames for the teams by now?
I thought one was selling, one was holding money. But hell, I can’t tell them apart.
I think we all have private snarky nicknames, but it’s been expressly and repeatedly requested that we not do it this time around.
I had yelled at several teams (who, of course, could hear me through the television) for not taking a moment and even looking at the exhibit … but I hadn’t thought about it as Flight Suit Worship. That is a little weird, but no weirder than Scientology. 