What was the deal with flying to Oakland? All the SFO flights, of which there are far more, had already left by the time they got from Lanai to Honolulu?
Hawaii has so much beauty to offer, and this ep spent all its air time showing a rusted ship hulk instead. Typical of this season, though - it offered little of the sense of place that has made the show so much fun to watch before now, just the usual airport/ticketing scene (as predictable as the Morning After Tribal Council scene on Survivor), with dollops of the usual “Hurry, taxi driver!” stuff, and otherwise just a lot of bickering. The producers forgot that the show isn’t mainly about the contestants’ inner beauty, it’s mainly about the places they’re in and how they interact with it. Uchenna and Joyce "Got It’, but it didn’t seem anybody else did.
There were a whole lot of sharks in those oceans they flew over, weren’t there?
I’m with you. Last week’s leg, for example, could have taken place at a hundred air bases across the world; there was nothing uniquely Guamian about anything they did there.
Mirna didn’t use an accent in San Francisco. I half expected her to talk to cab drivers with a stereotypical gay lisp.
No, see, in her twisted brain, it makes perfect sense for her not to use an accent. She’s in America. Americans don’t have accents. Foreigners have accents, so one must speak with an accent to them. That’s logic.
I don’t know that I would call that last task “skill.” I would call it pretty evil, though. I would love to know how much information the teams had at what stages of the challenge, though. Depending on how complete the information was, gaming the combination would have been quite simple. Start at “1” and go up one for each number of the combination.
This leg was poorly constructed, again. I know that the producers don’t want teams to get spaced so far apart that there’s no drama, but designing the final leg so that nothing in the entire Race to some point ten minutes from the end matters is annoying. It would’ve been so much cheaper just to start all eleven teams at the Oakland airport since the final three’s all being on the same flight from Hawaii pretty much made it a foot- and cab-race from there. Next time around I’d like them either to skip Alaska and Hawaii completely and run the entire final leg within the continental US, out of a city with more than one flight leaving at a time.
What was up with the weird sound effect when Jeremy answered the phone? And Jeremy? Sweetie? When you’re trying to conceal your obvious gaylove for your <ahem> roommate, it’s probably not a good idea to announce on national television that you’re going to spank him repeatedly. It’s also not a good idea to have half-naked parties with dirty, filthy hippies.
With this talk about Eric being gay and that Jeremy is more than just a room mate, that bit where Phil said they could talk to their “family” makes more sense.
But they specifically walked up to the counter and asked for Oakland - that was weird. You’d think one team would try for SF or San Jose and hope to figure out a way from there to end result faster.
We started watching at about 8:55, and we made the mistake of turning the television on before we hit the Tivo button, so I got a momentary glimpse of Eric on the phone and knew who’d won. Took all the excitement out of the episode. Le sigh.
Well that was disappointing. I love the BQs and I’m sad (a) that they didn’t win and (b) that I won’t see them on TV every weekend anymore.
This final leg was better than last year’s cab-ride-to-the-finish, but not much. Why can’t we have the detour and roadblock in the same city for the final leg? When you put a 4,000 mile flight between them there’s almost no way the first task is going to affect the outcome of the race, because everyone will end up on the same flight anyway). And more taxis? Lame.
I couldn’t agree more. C&M managed to get themselves a decent lead but it was wiped out by bunching. I think bunching at this stage is inappropriate; the helicopters should have been ready to take whoever turned up first first… There should be only a few instances where there’s only one possible flight.
I thought exactly the same thing. And guess what? We were both right! The TAR editors need to become a little less predictable.
I’m honestly suprised that anyone (much less Danielle) finished that task in less than the 10 minutes allotted. With no feedback, one small wrong assumption will screw you up forever. I think a “Mastermind” style feedback would have been more appropriate.
If I were Racing, and I had to choose the code, I would assume my partner would never figure this out in 10 minutes. Rather than agonize over the choiuce, I’d choose all zeroes and start the ten-minute countdown as quickly as possible. (And if my team-mate were really clever, she/he would deduce my strategy from how quickly I made my choice).
I don’t think any race finish will ever equal Season 7’s, with Uchenna and Joyce outside the gates of the finish line and Uchenna desperately begging for cab fare, screaming “Not like this! Don’t let us lose like this!”
I was wondering the same thing, why didn’t someone choose an easy code? Who cares about the “answers”. I told my wife that if that was me I’d be doing 1234 for a code, and she asked me why! Then again when I was talking to other people they asked me why as well. I think it’s things like that that should be talked about before the race.
I don’t know…I could probably accept that a team I didn’t like won if there had been more of a chance of something interesting happening on the last leg. I mean…it really came down to who guessed quickest. I would have liked to have seen more options for someone screwing themselves up in the final leg. This was pretty much pointless. There must have been some production reason not to fly into SF airport. There’s no way that nobody would have asked about flights there.
I forget which season, but there have been a few where the teams had to find landmarks, or go on foot for a little while…pretty much anything would have been better than this final ‘task’.
Which made no difference, because that bunch point was ahead of the One Flight Into Oakland that all teams were on. I agree the choppers should have been ready to go as teams arrived but it didn’t actually end up mattering.
Re: flying into Oakland, I seem to recall a previous instance of the final destination being SF where they had to fly into Oakland. I wanna say that was season 2 with teams flying in from Alaska. Maybe SF airport doesn’t have incoming flights from Alaska or Hawaii for some odd reason? Anybody wanna research that?
Regardless, they still need to redesign the final leg scenarios. Mix it up a little. Split the partners up so that they both have to find a separate clue to locate the finish line so they don’t necessarily arrive together. Maybe a three-choice Detour where each partner has to complete one of three choices. Imagine the drama of half of two teams waiting at the finish line instead of the cheesy run-up-to-applause endings that no one believes.
I think it must have been that the first partner got the instruction to answer the questions and only then did they get the information to program the safe, and that the other partner knew nothing about the task until entering the vault. That’s the only reason for not selecting a 1234 code or somthing similar beforehand, if the team members had incomplete information. Not sure how one would have discussed this ahead of the race; “what combination should we program into the safe” seems like a pretty esoteric eventuality to anticipate.
We have a four-digit “family code” that we use any time one is required – it’s not one you can find in any obvious info like birthdays, Social Security numbers, etc., so no one would be able to figure it out – that would have been perfect for this leg. The question is, would your partner know you skipped actually doing the task and used something like our family code instead?
I was really PO’d the spoilers were right. I guess this’ll teach me to stay out of spoiler threads. Aargh.
If you use such codes, it’s best if they’re ordinal, rather than cardinal. That way, you take the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. out of whatever’s there. If it’s numbers starting with zero, then it’s 0, 1, 2, 3. If it’s letters starting with M, then it’s M, N, O, P, etc.
A quick check on travelocity finds 26 flights from Honolulu to SFO on Thursday. I’m sure some of those are codeshares, but it’s still a lot. I’m pretty sure SFO is one of the major gateways for flights from the continental US to Hawaii.
That, Otto, is an insanely interesting idea: A combination Detour and Roadblock as the final task. And to give the racers a sense of what the combination is like, have that sort of divergence on an early leg. Call it, I don’t know, an “Interchange”?
Here’s another idea: To increase drama, TAR could adopt a rule that the racers must do their own driving in the final destination city. TAR 9 ended with a taxi ride to the flag Roadblock, followed by a foot race. TAR 10 ended with… taxi rides. TAR 11 ended with the mind-game electronic combo, plus… taxi rides. I think the race is more interesting when the racers have a better chance of getting themselves lost.
On another note, I recall that the Beauty Queens had at least an hour head start on Eric & Danielle leaving the mat in Guam, and they in turn had a good lead over Charla and Mirna. Was the GPS task that difficult?
