:smack:
I lost track of the state and got hyperfocused on the “coalminer” part…
That was a fun episode. We laughed and laughed and laughed at the ox. He wasn’t broken, he was just perfect! 
And I’m really starting to love Mary; the way she shut David up once when he just looked like he wanted to say something was hilarious! As was her stage whisper over meeting gay people. Like she said, she’s a 30-year-old baby dropped in the world, and clearly she’s loving it!
The bickering couple can leave any time now, thank you. Why do they insist on casting couples who do nothing but fight all. the. time? :dubious:
And Peter and Sarah can go, too, once he’s finished his overnight recharging. Man, he is an ass. A mechanical one, but an ass nevertheless. I love the mental list that Sarah has started on him. You just know that when they get to Sequesterville/cross the finish line, she’s going to let him have it with both barrels. She might even succeed in crashing his programming if she’s lucky!
I got the impression that all the teams were close enough that there was genuine concern that one setback could kill the whole leg. As it turned out, the cheerleaders had the biggest setback, getting bad directions. And I wonder how long she was out there shooting arrows; it looked like a looong time had passed, judging by the sky going from mostly light to pitch black!
Not just one, but two! There was the college-aged guy they found but there was another late middle-aged guy who pointed another team the right road, but didn’t get in the car with them. Very odd indeed.
Lots of fun reaction shots from the locals tonight. And a team I didn’t care about got eliminated, so good episode all around.
I like that the pitstops are closer this season (so far).
Mary reminds me of my mom.
My husband watched his first full episode of the Race with me last night. (He had to – I was TiVo’ing TAR on one tuner, and he was TiVo’ing The Simpsons on the other, so he couldn’t turn on football … MUWAHAHA!) Anyway, he didn’t say much last night, but when we were driving into work this morning, he asked me two questions about last night’s show, which I will repeat for you here, verbatim:
I curse AT&T with my dying breath. I just switched phone companies and they’re taking forever to get my new modem out to me so I have no internet access at home and by the time I get to work all the good things about the ep have been said already!
Best ep of the Race in a long time. Better than anything for at least the last two seasons. The only thing that could have made it better would have been if the last two teams finished in the opposite order. The single moms really annoy me.
I want the Bickersons to be Philiminated next but until then I’m rechristening the woman “Heavy Flo.” Whiniest woman since Flo and she’s getting such an early start on it.
I want Team Ironleg to be last in a NEL because I’m morbidly curious as to whether Phil will confiscate all of the modular feet except the one she happened to be wearing. Until then I’m looking forward to seing grappling hook foot, rocket launcher foot and Super Kung Fu Grip foot.
This is something I had not thought about. Now I’m curious, too. BTW, did you notice how on Sarah’s replacement foot-like foot, the toenails were painted? Maybe it’s just me, but I found that sort of creepy, and I don’t know why. And I wonder: when she repaints the other foot, does she change the polish on the prosthetic one?
One comment among many…
Are you all watching the same race I am? Mary is annoying. (I missed the first five minutes last night, is that when rockle’s “second best moment in the history of ever” took place? And how did the teams get from China to Mongolia anyway?) In the first episode, when driving to the airport, David said something like “Hon, I could use some directions here.” And she snapped back with “Well, what do you expect me to do about it?” Then there was an interview clip of her saying how she wouldn’t take any crap from him. He hasn’t given her any! Everybody seems to see her as the feisty, independent type, but I just think she’s flying off the handle.
Exactly what is this mental list she’s supposed to be making? Peter is a little too “rah-rah, find your power, you’re a champion just for trying” for me, but is she complaining that he’s too supportive? She was coming apart during the detour, and all he was trying to do was to calm her down and get her re-focused. All it did was win the leg for them. I’m on his side for this episode.
I laughed out loud several times during last night’s episode. The folks who couldn’t ride horses were hysterical! (Memo to all future Racers: Add horseback riding to your list of required skills!) The Mongolian Oxlike creatures were hysterical, especial Peter and Sarah’s! That had me about falling out of my La-Z-Boy!
Re: thinking you’re out of the race when you confront a setback. I think it’s normal to think you’re doomed. You really don’t know where the other racers are (especially the ones who drive right past you when you’ve got a flat tire). There’s a high level of anxiety. You have no idea what tasks lie ahead. Therefore, you freak! We just had an abundance of freaking last night.
The single moms are the most annoying team. . . even more annoying than the bickering daters. It boggles my mind that there are men who will put up with that kind of mouth from any woman! And the single moms’ mouths are probably a clear reason why they’re both single. Just sayin’. . .
I don’t think it’s the support itself; it’s kind of the tone he takes with her. Like, he’s being supportive begrudingly, and not genuinely. I’m reading it as sort of, “Come on, you can do this, so why aren’t you?” It’s kind of condescending, which is something that really irks me. I also find her to be very shrieky and twitchy, but I can kind of understand it – I mean, she’s the one with the artificial leg, and she’s mastered the physical challenges that go with it, and now she wants to try to something a little more mental, and I don’t think that the same kind of coaching applies. There was also a time, during the yak portion of the Detour, when she was getting upset, but he kept telling her not to get upset, which was just making her get more upset, because I kind of think she was trying to hold it together, and she strikes me as one of those people who handles things her own way and doesn’t want people drawing all kinds of attention to it. If that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t. So, yeah, I don’t like him, but I don’t hate him … I just don’t think they’re a good match.
But, see, she wasn’t “coming apart” – she was trying to tell him that she was crying because she was frustrated and mad, not because she was giving up, and that she had no need to stop and calm down and get refocused because it wasn’t interfering with her performance. A lot of women end up getting teary when we get mad or frustrated, but that doesn’t mean it interferes with our performance, it just makes us madder and makes us do better. She was trying to get that through to Peter, but apparently his programming doesn’t allow for input from unauthorized sources, of which she was on.
Of which she was one. Aargh.
That’s how I saw it, too. He was ignoring her statements and, to me, coming off as a completely condescending ass.
He treats her like a child, not as an equal.
That’s what I meant when I said “coming apart”. I never thought she was giving up.
I think it was affecting her performance. I get frustrated and mad, too, and it makes me that much more determined to plow ahead with what I’m doing. Peter kept his head and made the smart decision to switch tasks again and go back to yurt dismantling.
To me, it’s not so much his tone or attitude, but that he talks like a Dr.Phil-bot instead of a human being. He can’t just say “c’mon, let’s go, you can do it”…it has to be “find your power” or some such nonsense.
Russian army jeeps come equipped with cranks??! I don’t know if that’s really good planning, or just really bad electrical systems. (What was the last American car made with a crank?)
I have to agree with Robot Arm, Mary is so intent on not taking crap from her husband, that she seems to be not doing much of anything but whining. I have a lot of family from down in KY coal country, that couple is pretty much exactly what I expected, with the exception of David not knowing how to shoot a bow. From everything I have understood about my family in that region, you might as well write this into the standard elementary school curriculum.
My wife and I are also sensing that condascending encouragement from Peter, he seems more intent on pointing out the missing leg than she does. I hate all of the rah rah BS that comes out of his mouth everytime they are trying to do something. A dark part of me wanted him to be trampled by the Mongolian ox.
A very good ep overall, dangerous challenges, some good lines, and an annoying team getting Philiminated. Unfortunately, there just are not many teams to like so far this season.
When Peter and Sarah switched tasks, I asked Papa T., “Have you seen Sarah make even one decision for that team?” And he thought for a moment and said, “I sure haven’t seen one.”
So Peter ignored what Sarah was trying to tell him, misinterpreted her actions as interfering with her performance in spite of her words of one syllable to the contrary (“I’ve gotten teary during races before – I don’t need to stop,” or words to that effect), and then made a unilateral decision that they should switch tasks. Oh, and he was also the one having her perform like a trained money to try to get money.
You know, I don’t like her for no reason I can put my finger on, but if anything is going to kill this team’s performance, it’s going to be his condescending steamrolling right over her and treating her like a child, not her insistance that she’s fully aware of what’s going on with herself and has made the (adult) decision that it’s not going to affect her performance. She has a right to make that assertion; if he treated her like an adult, he’d listen to her and at least give her a chance to show she’s right. But he seems to feel she’s incapable of thinking or feeling for herself.
A trained monkey. :smack: Gah. I cannot type today, apparently.
Mongolian, which is written with the Cyrillic Alphabet. Link
Win.
I’ll hold off on the FullMetal Alchemist references as noone will get them, but I will say that Peter and Sarah really could have used a pikka bird.
The race is hardcore this year. I’m loving it.