“Light” makes sense with the “dawn’s early light” printed on the map. “Stars” also makes sense because of the focus on all the stars throughout the Hunt as seen in the little “it’s been right in front of you” montage. I was also thinking “Glory” as in “Old Glory” but that seems kind of an outside possibility.
I wonder why “Geniuses” got a message directing them to the printing press and Air Force didn’t? That doesn’t seem quite fair somehow.
I think that they’ve been listening to us complain, and they’ve stopped showing everyone getting the same clues every time. Of course, now they’re only showing random assorted bits and pieces of the clues, out of order, which is approximately as helpful.
Is anybody else hoping that we’ll get just one glimpse of Max Headroom in the finale? A real, live, standing-in-front-of-the-contestants shot? I wonder how much he gets paid for that job. I bet he’s not even wearing pants when he records the clues.
I think Team Junior Birdmen figured out the printing press on their own, with the last page of the book being, “Printed on Antique Printing Press of the L.O.C.” of course I am paraphrasing a bit. I would think that the editors left out The Junior Birdmen getting their Talking Head Motorolamessage to add suspense and make us think that they were smarter.
Good God, I definitely don’t want to see him if he’s going to show up all weird and pantless!
I’m betting “the dawn’s early light” is literal.
I imagine the spooky super-sekrit chamber the Geniuses are now in is some kind of light pipe, and when the sun rises, a beam shoots down and illuminates something-something on the walls.
So everybody has to chill until the morning, which means a nice tight bunching for the finale.
Oh, and I’m liking Otto’s “glory” for the secret word.
See, I’ve been thinking about that and the repeated clues aren’t really that different from TAR’s repeated clues. We see every TAR team get their clue at the starting mat and we usually see bits and pieces of everyone reading the Roadblocks, Detours and other clues. The key differences of course being that 1)TAR clues are often decision points so we see the decision being made, and 2) Laird pronounces everything right every time so there’s no furrin language mispronouncin’ hi-larity.
When they show the example of the mini-cryptex, it appears they are making the word ‘STARS’, so that’s probably not it, I guess.
Right, but on TAR, you don’t hear Phil say, “A Roadblock is a task that only one member can perform…” for every team that reaches the Roadblock.
I do think they probably did it this way so it would be clear to us, the home audience, when each team received the information. To me, it’s just annoying cause it’s different than TAR.
And we are never going to hear Laird Headroom say “Flotillas or Chinchillas,” let alone with a Kiwi accent. More’s the pity.
I should tell you that I can’t even hear the word “chinchilla” without cracking up, now. And it’s all your fault.
TAR snob.
Maybe Genworth Financial will drop out and the next season will be sponsored by a company that makes fur coats for yachtsmen.
Keep your fingers crossed.
It’s not that it’s different, it’s that it has us questioning it’s fairness because it’s so badly edited.
With TAR, we might not hear every team read every part of the clue - but, we “know” that the clues were pre-printed before the teams got there, the teams got the clues random, and we assume that every team is getting the exact same information as soon as they locate the clue. There, we may wonder about producer interference when one team miraculously gets to the airport in the nick of time - but the clues seem evenly matched … it doesn’t seem like they’re helping one team over another.
With TH…we’ve seen different teams get different clues (eiffel tower/statue of liberty/wash the streets thing, the Browns in the swamp, etc.) at different times. There’s the appearance that Max’s comments are edited in after the fact. The rings have happened at different times, the clues that we hear have different information…it seems like they may be helping certain teams find certain clues at certain times, plus there’s no apparent reason why so that I can make it “ok” in my head. (I can see why you’d want to keep all the teams on the same continent rather than have one team stuck in Asia for two days while the others finish the race. But why did they seem to tell the Geniuses about the press but make the Air Force figure it out? Shouldn’t the Geniuses be penalized (natural consequences) for not taking the time to read the book?)
For all of you watching TH as a hold-over until the next TAR, here is some good news!
(I already started a thread.)
We’ve seen this in TAR as well, notably S1 when Team Guido got the clue that the Race was over and when Phil came out to eliminate the hay bale girls and the pizza boys at Roadblocks. In the instances you mention the TH producers were forced by circumstances to give altered clues (to the Browns because of the injury/task switching and to the Paris teams because they discovered the map early). The second instance, though, points to what I’ve considered a flaw in the game, that teams don’t have to solve all the clues to advance. That bugged me back when Team Firetwins didn’t have to solve the refraction puzzle back in the mine and it bugged me in Paris. Why shouldn’t the teams have had to go to the SoL replica just because they figured out the map clue early? So if some team had sat and spun their cryptex in the B&B the night before and stumbled upon the five-letter word, would they have been allowed to skip the Library of Congress and the ship and whatever?
Who knows.
And if it were edited better, we wouldn’t be asking. (They taped it in advance - they had time to fix that in post-production.)
I missed TAR1. The first season I watched was the hay bale girls & the way that was put together, it came across as every other team had finished and finished several hours earlier. They were not just last, they were last and still had a task or two to do after they finally found the clue. It was edited in such a way that letting them stop seemed like an act of mercy to a team that had already failed. The sequence they presented might not have been the actual sequence, who knows when Phil cut them off, but it worked after editing.
TH makes it look like they might be helping someone finish more quickly because they’re not as competent as the other teams.
I get the feeling that this should be better than it is. Some shows just flat out suck. This didn’t, it just took a few really bad steps - really, really bad steps.
I think of that post often, as well. But I gotta ask, do you hear the word “chinchilla” often?
Yup.
On average, once a month or so. My friends and I have a tendency to substitute random words when we can’t find the word we’re looking for, and chinchilla is a favorite of mine.
And it’s just fun to say. 
And don’t forget there’s a song about everything.