The Amazing Race - Premiere Episode (7/6/04)

Cafe Society
41

Random thoughts:

  1. Mirna sucks. A lot. Think of a giant sucking thing and realize she could make that look like child’s play. I reserve the right to change my mind, but at this point she has to go for 2 consecutive shows without whining, whimpering, moaning, or pulling the woe is me routine. She (and any other contestant) will be immediately dead to me as soon as the phrase “I want to quit” is uttered.

  2. The contestant pool is clearly full of look before you leap types. The clue says across the street, people! Perhaps the prudent course of action would be to physically go across the street at some point.

  3. No editing makes me happier than the editing when a frantic contestant says “Where’s the route marker? It’s probably right under our noses.” as the camera then slowly pans to the route marker that is mere moments from jumping up and smothering that person. My theory is that if I were to be on the show, I would search for a marker for 2 seconds, utter a statement like the above, and then just watch the cameraman for where he pans.

  4. I like that Allison is on this show. It gives me great joy to know that at some point I am likely to see her covered in cow feces, eating a live fish, scared due to poor surrounding conditions, or sleep deprived. Bonus points if all happen at the same time. Plus, this race tends to not be lost by the brawn portion of a team. The brains (and mistakes therein) tend to cost teams the game. Hence, it is pretty likely that any major mistakes they make will be her fault in glaringly obvious ways.

42

They may well be when all is said and done, but in this leg they were decidedly not great, in fact, they pretty much screwed up or were in last at every step of the leg. The only thing that saved their butts was the fact that they hit on the roulette which was a lot quicker than the zip line.

43

OK, that was just creepy. Even before the explanation of what it represented.

And Mirna was my early favorite for Most Annoying, based on her meat-carrying performance – until she got the Roulette detour. “Shut up! It’s a SIGN!” Cracked me up.

44

The official website says next Tuesday is the episode. I guess Tuesday will be it for this one…but I have heard that in the Fall we’ll head into ANOTHER Amazing Race that’ll happen on Saturdays.

As to the Fast Forward…this is taken from the official AR website:

There was no Roadblock on this leg.
No Team used the Fast Forward on this leg. (underline is mine)
Alison & Donny were first to find the Yield on this leg, but they elected not to use it.

Ah-HA! It sounds like there was a FF and it wasn’t shown.

45

It’s not quite 20/37(54%) because they could only play 5 numbers at a time which changes things, but its still nearly 50%.(and quick calculating now with help of MS calulator) 5 bets for four rounds, is 32[sup]4[/sup]/37[sup]4[/sup] = 56 percent or so missing all 4 times) so 44% chance for one team to win, and only 3.7% for all four teams to win.

46

This was my first ever episode, and I really enjoyed it.

My reactions:

Dennis/Erika: I liked him and really disliked her. Or maybe I really disliked the other blond woman with the tall, dark, handsome boyfriend. I couldn’t tell them apart.

Alison/Donny: If she’s the one with “That’s what a ferry is” then she’s bitchy. Funny but bitchy.

Marshall/Lance: I was amused by their reaction to the tropics. Sounds like me. But I think these guys are going to be really annoying.

Charla/Mirna: Mirna didn’t bother me as much as she probably should have. She made me laugh, both with her and at her. My husband hated everything about her.

Bob/Joyce: Someone somewhere complained because Bob turned to Joyce in the boat and said “We got here first!” I thought he was surprised and pleased by their performance, rather than smug or weird. Like a lot of the teams, I liked him and didn’t like her.

Chip/Kim: Loved them. I don’t know that they can win, but when they said they spent 23 hours out of every day together and run a business together I thought that they would probably have the stuff to make a team work.

Jim/Marsha: Jim rocks. Marsha, I’m not so sure. But Jim rocks.

Linda/Karen: The shirts don’t bother me, and I like unlikely heros, so go, girls, go!

Kami/Karli: Nasty. The way one of them shouldered Mirna aside was just cold and rude. These two are my least favorite so far.

Colin/Christie: It amuses me when anyone describes themselves in superlatives, of whatever sort. “I’m the most intense person evah!” is just silly.

Brandon/Nicole: Gak. I hope the Lord leads you to a smack upside the head, Brandon. Oh, and Nicole has scary eyes. Scarrrry.

47

One thing about Chip and Kim is that they seem way overloaded. Their backpacks are huge. They might have to start ditching stuff if they get a long hike leg.

48

In fairness, he also apologized for it, said that he regretted it, and acknowledged that his actions were irresponsible and caused them to lose time. That was pretty classy in my book.

49

Looks like they figured out that Tara/Wil and Flo/Zach teams are who draw the viewers, so they’re loaded with 'em this time. I can’t keep 'em straight and don’t want to, either. Brandon/Nicole, though, is a Wil/Flo team, a.k.a. “Dead Meat”. No gays, though, maybe they’re becoming overexposed on TV now.

The physically-limited teams just never make the Final Four, unfortunately - the Moms, the old couple, the Cosbys, the Daddy-Daughter Dance, they’re all doomed. So is Charla, who’d have been great if she weren’t saddled with her full-size cousin.

What a damn random place to start, and damn random challenges! No imagination in any of them, nothing really derived from the scenery or the people of the country, not even that meat-hauling thing. And they had to spend the first night all together in an Army surplus mess tent? Let’s hope for better things to come, especially including making all the Wils and Flos eat a lot of disgusting crap.

50

I understand that quite many people are put off by an open display of traditional Christian customs, but the way I remember it, that wasn’t his rationale. He said that they needed to save their money for a taxi down the road since they had been told that the port was within walking distance.

51

I noticed that, too. Why is that, do you suppose? What’s so hard about “across the street”? :smiley:

52

Side question: what are route markers? Are they physical tokens of some kind that are in the clue box?

53

I believe the route markers are those little boxes where you get the clues. They’re usually marked with a yellow and white flag.

54

Thanks for laugh! I sent this along to my sister who watched AR last night so that she could laugh as well.

Already she’s pretty much confirmed what I thought about her before. Then I wondered why on earth anyone would stay in a relationship with her. Having now seen Donny in action, so to speak, a lot is explained.

\

55

Is it required that they visit those? The blond guy at the end of the leg told a couple of them that they were missing their route markers. I took that to mean that there was something they had to go back and fetch. If so, and the players knew that, why did a couple of teams mosey on up to the roulette table without having visited their route markers? I can see maybe how they might miss the markers per se, but how could they miss the fact that they had to find it before playing roulette? I’m confused.

56

I was struck by “the hand” too. Aesthetically interesting way to warn swimmers. It also reminded me of Ozymandias (but then I have an odd brain that likes to link things together).

57

So were they! The race is set up to cause these kind of mistakes if teams aren’t thinking carefully. I’m pretty sure “Route Markers” are always boxes with envelopes marked by flags. The clue clearly said route marker across the street from the hotel, they just saw the flag at the hotel itself and then stumbled upon the chips challenge basically by accident. The two teams didn’t realize the significance that there was no route marker box anywhere in the casino. That’s all part of the fun of the show.

58

BWAHAHAHA! Best line of the thread! :stuck_out_tongue:

Can someone give me a one or two sentence overview of it? I mean, from the interminable previews, you have to be either a hardbody or a geek to get on it and you have to be really stooooopid (based on the Gilligan-with-braindamage looking guy that was on all the previews). But what do you have to do to win?

Lib It’s like playing touch-tag. Doesn’t matter if you know what the next challenge is, you have to physically get the envelope with the clue (and I think both people have to be within X distance of it) before you can continue. I suppose you could do the game and then get the clue, but you take a terrible risk of missing something. If you don’t get the clue but do the challenge you have to go back and get it or (if you’re a continent away or something) you take a time penalty equal to going back and getting it. If you skip the clue AND challenge you get huge, ugly time penalties (or get sent back, depending).

Fenris

PS: I thought the hand statue was kewl.

59

A Route Marker is the post with the Race Flag and Clue Box. They are basically checkpoints like you would find in a road rally. The Race goes from Route Marker to Route Marker (and the last Route Marker on each Leg is the Pit Stop).

When a team gets to the Route Marker they open the Clue Box and get the envelope containing the instructions for the next Leg.

In this case, the two teams simply stumbled across one part of the Detour. They never actually visited the Route Marker. So, like a rally driver who misses a checkpoint, they had to go back and “check in” at the Route Marker. They just had to visit it (and take the envelope from the Clue Box which proves that they were there).

As for how they missed it before playing roulette, I think both teams commented that something seemed odd but apparently not odd enough for them to question what they were doing. Note that Allison & Donnie also found the casino first but realized that they hadn’t found the Clue Box yet and went back off in search of it.

60

They have to get the clues from each box (route marker). How they missed them is because they completely missed those boxes, headed for the hotel and happened upon the roulette tables by finding the flag in the door of the casino. They didn’t know they had a choice between the roulette or the zip lines.

Of course if they’d thought about it they would’ve KNOWN they’d missed something because the clue they had said nothing about roulette, just across the street from the blue and white hotel. But of course it’s not the place of the camera-person or anyone else to tell them they missed it until they get to the end of the first leg.

So they completely skipped one of the markers, which they were able to do because they happened to stumble onto the next part of the race, but they weren’t allowed to finish because they skipped it.

It’s like an orienteering game on a larger scale. You may reach the end but if you skipped steps you have to go back and find what you’d missed.