They did something closer to this on the first two, maybe three races: there were NO spoon-fed plane flights and everything was “you’re on your own”. The tasks were still in order (you had to do task one, decide if you wanted the fast-forward (which was on every leg and then task two before getting to the mat.)
This made for some freaking great races but
It also cost the amazing producers a fortune as people would make idiotic (and presumably costly) travel choices. The team that decided to fly from (say) Argentina to (say) South Africa by way of New York then London. It’s apparently expensive from a production standpoint when teams are all spread out and you have to keep all your tasks/pit stops/etc open for the trailing teams.
The producers have the (wrong) idea that viewers don’t like seeing a team fall hopelessly behind. They’re incorrect, but they’ve only ever allowed two teams (first and…um…fourth–Team Guido and some surfer types?) season to screw up so badly that they were in the final three but didn’t cross the finish line. Ever. Frankly, I think it’s hysterical and I’d like to see more of it but we never will.
Fast Forwards mitigated this a lot: if you fell hopelessly behind, you could decide when it was advantageous to use the FF–and it was a part of your strategy-use it too soon and you won’t have it when you need it. Use it too late and someone else might also go for it. The problem was FFs were way, WAY expensive–you had to set up one extra task on each leg–a task that no-one might use.
And it led to some terrible (boring) airport drama. Because there were no spoon-fed flights, there was an episode or two where like 4 teams were stuck in Poland(?) trying to get a flight…um…anywhere, really for like 4 days. While the other teams were merrily two countries ahead. There simply weren’t any flights to be had at all. Watching teams go slowly insane as they’re stuck in the airport might make an interesting episode of Big Brother, but it’s not really racing as such. Things got so out of hand that we saw the second-most blatant episode of producer cheating ever. One team was like 2 days ahead of the next two or three and that group was a day ahead of the people still stuck in the airport. The first task was “take a boat across this large lake/bay/sea whatever” (not pilot it, just sit in it and be shuttled). Despite the fact that the sky was a perfect clear blue, the first team was “delayed” like 18 hours because of “bad weather”. Heh–the producers didn’t even try to find a plausible lie to let the second group of teams catch up with the first team so there’d be SOME kind of race left.
Watching Brent and Caite is painful. While he’s got more drive, I’m starting to believe she’s the smart one. Did anyone notice his misread of the temple clue? “Carry giant license sticks,” indeed.
At the end, did Steve say doing TAR with his daughter was better than his World Series ring? Who is Steve, and when did he win the World Series? Or did I mishear?
Steve is a Major League coach of some sort. According to his bio, he’s with the Cleaveland Indians now, but was with the Phillies in 2008 when they were in the Series.
I don’t think Louie’s health running on the stairs was really as big a hindrance as the editors made it seem. It sounded like they just took one sound bite of him coughing/gagging and replayed it over and over. It was exactly the same each time.
Down to five teams, and IIRC, there has been no fast forwards. At least none that were shown.
I’m rooting for the cowboys, and then the detectives. I don’t like the other three teams.
Just how much faster was the Flag on Head detour vs the Steps detour? Jet/Cord were wandering aimlessly trying to find a taxi while the other teams were well on their way to the temple.
If you look at the tide for the guy who sent the luck-boat off to sea, you can see that he was barely up to his knees (and Jet/Cord just barely got his boots wet wading out). By the time the next few teams finished, it was above his knees (and they got wet up to their knees. By the time Allie/Steve were there, it looked like the water was almost shoulder high and she got soaked. So–an hour or so faster to do the flag detour, maybe with like a 4-6 hour gap between first and last?
One of the things I like about the cowboys is that they are true to their roots (cowboy hats and all) without being total idiots. Being from Oklahoma myself, I sometimes get tired of the let’s-point-and-laugh-at-the-rubes schtick. In contrast, the couple from Kentucky a couple of seasons past were sometimes painful to watch.
Also, they’ve proven that bull riders can be excellent athletes.
So you think the poor guru just had to maintain the same spot for several hours as the tide came in? I assumed he moved further out for each racer just to give them a hard time, and didn’t actually spend all that time in the water.
