Yeah, Tara and Joey were really being self righteous about the video gamer culture. Hey, Tara! Try to compete. It’s a million freakin dollars!
The boys got on my nerves with the Nerd punking early on. Their cockiness showed thru in every leg. But, bad taxis or other travel miscues are a part of every TAR season. Deal with it! They did fine at every task, tho, so it really was travel that Philiminated them.
Have the pros use their feet.
I don’t know enough about Street Fighter to be sure, but I did see some of the players choose different characters, and at least one of them changed characters. I get the impression the big, hulking brutes aren’t the most lethal. Would it have helped Tara to change after her opponent was blindfolded so he wouldn’t even know what character he was against?
Blindfolded and use the non-dominant hand as the fourth handicap.???
No posts about the finale, yet. Are we all in mourning?
Yeah, that was a little dull. The order they arrived at the race track never changed even once during the rest of the leg. And somehow Logan and London came in 3rd, even though they didn’t make any mistakes like Tara and Joey did.
And unsurprisingly, Brooke started screeching the very first time she tried the tire task. I was hoping she was going to melt down and refuse to run at all when Scott offered to carry her, but she managed to hold it together long enough to win. Supposedly she’s a lawyer, I can’t imagine this is going to help her get new clients.
BTW, TAR has been renewed for at least one more season.
I liked him. Her… interestingly, there were a couple of times that she came into a task later than others, breezed thru it, and got them out in front of several others. But that constant whining! It was downright Biblical in scope! Weepers, naggers. (Think Samson and his women)
Tara and Joey could get rather nasty at times. To each other and to others. Never really saw much to like.
Team LoLo should have done much better. Editing never really showed us why they lagged behind front runners in every episode. They didn’t mess up too much. Some, tho… I wonder why they were consistently behind?
Do they each get $1,000,000 or do they split it? I seem to think I heard Phil say “their share” of the $1,000,000.
I missed the first ten minutes or so. Was it just taxi luck that got Brooke & Scott to the racetrack first? I saw London (I think) changing the tire on a car, and barely making it in time. That looked like the kind of thing that should have stymied Brooke, but she must have done it before I tuned in.
I didn’t see London & Logan make any huge mistakes, but it did look like they went onto the subway after getting their postcards and having to go to the roof of city hall. All the other teams seemed to be within running distance for that. And for the memory task at Wrigley Field, London seemed to think that Logan was going to answer her over the radio, somehow. Maybe it was just little things like that adding up.
Also, I’m not sure where, but I didn’t see Brooke & Scott with their backpacks during this leg. I think the other teams all had theirs. In a leg with so much running around, that could have been the difference.
For those of you living in a big city, is it generally faster to take the subway or a taxi?
I’ve always assumed that a subway is a quicker way of getting around since it can avoid a lot of the traffic and intersections.
I can’t really fault the boys for picking the subway since it seemed like the right decision that just turned out badly (even some locals said to take the subway).
I had the same problem with last season. Having a challenge that only one team at a time can do and requires a restart when you fail guarantees separation between the teams, which is the last thing you want in the finale.
That being said, the rest of the leg was really well designed. I like having three locations to go to, since a lot of it came down into the order you grab them. (The definite right move was take the train up to the Water Tower and then work your way south.) The final challenge was also a fun twist on the usual one since it required the partners to communicate well (which for once Brooke and Scott did).
They gate-checked their bags and left them behind.
I can’t believe we got Flo’d again. I thought Brooke was going to whine all the way to the Pit Stop, but she had enough dignity left over to shut up when Scott offered to literally carry her on his back.
Team LoLo must have some abysmal luck with taxi drivers. I can’t imagine any other reason why they’d fall so far behind when all the teams started the leg in the same place at the same time.
Good analysis from just one episode. Team Prosthesis was really strong and only came in 4th because they took the subway instead of a cab. Team Drama Queen won even though they barely seemed to keep it together. Team Fun Meter was VERY fun to watch; was disappointed when they were out; just too bad that Becca didn’t do that detour.
It took Brooke 4 tries to do the tire, IIRC. The first time she did it in 52 seconds (40 required). Instead of treating it as “Ok, that’s not bad, I can do this, just practice to eliminate mistakes and get more efficient.” she went into full on whine mode.
Joey did it in 2 attempts, and London did it in 4.
There’s absolutely no right answer to this. Time of day, distance between stations, changing trains, how much walking from the station to your actual destination, all make this impossible to have a hard & fast rule.
That’s an excellent point. On the final leg they always want to do some big & spectacular task, but it seems they pretty much always require the racers doing them sequentially instead of concurrently. I guess they thought 2 untrained drivers on the track at the same time was a bad idea.
I thought the water tower was in the middle of the three, but I checked Google maps and you’re right. It definitely worked to do them north-to-south and end up near City Hall to get the next clue. Can’t say it was just luck, though; it’s a good guess to assume that the next clue will somewhere in the heart of the city. Did L&L finish at the water tower? That would explain them taking the subway.
I mostly liked the leg design. The tire changing took less than a minute; doesn’t seem like that would force too much separation. The drivers were in three different cars, but I suspect they wouldn’t want them on the track at the same time.
I wonder why only Brooke & Scott ditched their bags, and how they did it. Does the customs service get a little suspicious of unclaimed bags that are left over when a flight comes in from South Korea? Could the other teams have just ditched theirs at the race track or anywhere else on the leg?
I’m pretty sure the team splits the prize evenly.
Scott should get 900K
$999,999.50
And the remaining 50 cents split between everyone who helped Brooke finish the spoon challenge.
Just watched the finale tonight and that was my first thought: “I hope you’re going to split that million with everyone that helped you with your stupid ladle!”
Yeah, disappointed.
Yup, very anti-climatic. I like the “remember something about every leg” challenge at the end, it’s a good tradition, but everyone knows it’s coming now and so it’s rarely something a team will screw up and get passed up on. I think a better idea would be, once the teams arrive in the U.S. (and get to the first cluebox) is have a ‘hub’ system where there’s 3-4 challenges to do, and they need to complete all of them, in any order, sort of like a giant double U-Turn. Maybe do the finale leg with 4 teams instead of 3 as well, just to make it more competitive.
Scott certainly deserved the win. I wonder how many possible team members he could’ve still come out on top with, as he clearly proved he was a superfan and had the chops. Though, Brooke, as much of a complainer as she was, actually wasn’t bad at a lot of the challenges, she just talked like she was.
I gained some insight from this episode since I know Chicago and the surroundings fairly well. Chicagoland Speedway is in Joliet - not close to the city. There’s zero chance you’re catching a city cab there to get to the city, and next to zero chance you’re getting a cab to take you there from either airport. It hadn’t occurred to me before that teams catching cabs from some challenges were really catching TAR producer scheduled limos basically. It would be an $80 fare each way for the cabs to go to the speedway from the city in the first place, and then tote three people back to the city.
I’ll be looking out in future episodes for cabs being caught in unlikely areas. I wonder why they do that with “local” cabs in places it would be much more likely someone without a car would either take public transit (Metra from Joliet) or an actual limo service. Is it lip service to the large metropolitan city they’re naming in the episode?
And yes, I would have taken the Red Line to the Water Tower and hoofed it south from there. Trying to get back to an el station and wait for a train from each post card point would have taken too much time - each stopping point was what, 4-6 blocks apart.