If I were to go on The Amazing Race, here is a list of things I would not do:
- I would not take with me a partner who was physically incapable of running The Amazing Race.
- I would not start crying like a teenage girl who just found out that Justin Bieber is off the market at the first sign of any difficulty.
- I would not pick a Detour that was CLEARLY entirely based on luck and was infinitely more difficult than the other branch.
- I would not give up and quit the Race after (what seemed like) 20 minutes of trying a specific task.
In case you couldn't guess, we saw ALL of these things happen on Sunday's episode of The Amazing Race, and all from one particular team.
As much as I like Mike and Mel for the entertainment value they bring to the show, they were at a clear disadvantage from the very start. Mel is roughly 200 years old (further research shows that he's 71), and if there's one thing history has taught us, it's that old people have a hard time on TAR. While Mel certainly had the heart for the game, his body just couldn't keep up with the demands (in his exit interview he revealed that he'd run something like 5 miles on the first day, which is absurd for a 71-year-old who doesn't look like he's the most physically active person in the world). Mike, on the other hand, seemed to use Mel's feebleness as an excuse to give up at every turn, which was just annoying. More on that in a bit.
The teams began in Australia and were instructed to fly to Tokyo, Japan, and right away we were treated to some FASCINATING AIRPORT DRAMA! Oh man, the Cathay Pacific flight gets in 15 MINUTES EARLIER than the QANTAS flight, but it involves a LAYOVER! WHAT SHOULD WE CHOOSE?! Hey, other team, what are you choosing? I don't know! Hey, Amazing Race producers, why don't we spend goddamn 10 minutes dicking around at the airport instead of doing ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL?
As is usually the case in TAR, the flight with the layover got screwed, and ended up being delayed by an hour or so, allowing those teams that had half a brain (and realized that a direct flight is almost always going to be the better option) to get a sizable lead.
In Tokyo, the teams screamed at a hapless parking attendant (who looked like he'd rather be dead) as they retrieved their cars from a rotating parking garage (which on the one hand looked awesome, but on the other hand looked FANTASTICALLY INCONVENIENT--you can only get one car out at a time, apparently, which seems like it would result in a lot of waiting around). Teams had to drive out of Tokyo and find the Yabusame Dojo, where the Roadblock had one team member performing a Japanese ritual that involved meditating, posing with a longbow, and then shooting a target from the back of a rotating horse, which as we all know is an INCREDIBLY USEFUL SKILL.
Jet and Cord proved once again that they suck at navigating cities (although they eventually made it to the dojo), and Jaime proved that she's an idiot who can't compensate for having to drive on the left side of the road, and ended up smashing the side mirror off of a parked car. Despite their compassionate screaming in the owner's ear, the owner insisted on calling the police, and I was INCREDIBLY SATISFIED. Jaime and Cara wanted to just give the guy some money, and were pissed off when he wouldn't just sort things out with two random obnoxious Americans who didn't speak his language. Alas, even this huge delay (and the fact that whichever one of them did the Roadblock--I can't tell them apart; they're both awful--was completely incompetent and took forever) wasn't enough to eliminate them from the Race when stacked up against Mike's willingness to quit.
The Detour highlighted one of my biggest annoyances with this show: sometimes the challenges are so shockingly uneven that you can't help but wonder what the producers were thinking when they came up with it. The choices were Prayer of Purity, in which teams had to perform a cleansing ritual and then stand under a freezing cold waterfall for one minute, and Frog of Luck, where teams had to find a frog figurine smaller than a tennis ball in a giant field of mud. I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would EVER choose to hunt for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but amazingly most teams actually went for that one. I don't know if it was just easier than it looked, but it seemed obvious that the Prayer Detour was the way to go. Start to finish that one probably took 10-15 minutes, whereas you could hunt for hours in the mud pit and never find the frog. Did I mention that there were about 15 local people hurling mud at the teams as they searched through the mud? And that (according to Mel in his exit interview) it was freezing cold outside and they were dressed in basically a diaper? Yet all but two teams (the Globetrotters and Christina and her jackass father) chose the Frog of Luck. Unless you knew for a fact that every other team was within 5 minutes of you (and they definitely weren't, as a bunch of teams were either still lost in the city or stuck at the Roadblock), there was really no reason to choose a challenge based entirely in luck. It wasn't like they were replenishing the supply of frogs in the mud pit either, so if you were one of the last teams there you had to hope to find one of maybe two or three frogs left. The whole thing was very reminiscent of the haystack challenge from previous seasons (although probably not quite as terrible, as the field of haystacks was significantly bigger than the mud pit). I guess it's possible that the Prayer Detour was farther away, and that's why the majority of the teams chose the mud, but I still have a hard time believing that I'd ever pick that one out of the two.
The Prayer Detour was not without its own drama, however. The Globetrotters were the first to finish, and when they grabbed their gear they accidentally took Ron and Christina's fanny pack, which contained all of their money and their travel documents. Understandably Ron and Christina freaked out about this (although Ron freaks out all the time and is generally a dick about everything, so it was hard to tell the difference), and they wasted quite a bit of time before they found it (the Globetrotters had realized their mistake, but instead of returning the pack where they found it, they left it on the floor with the rest of Ron's stuff in the men's changing room. This mistake would end up costing them; although they checked in third, when Christina tattled on them (I only use the word "tattled" because Christina had such a ridiculous pouty face when she told Phil that I immediately forgot how inconvenient it must have been for her and started wishing for their elimination), Phil declared that the Globetrotters would receive a 30-minute penalty, thus dropping them into 5th place.
Zev and Justin, who are constantly reminding me that they are actually a really strong team and would probably have been serious contenders in their season had they not lost their passports (remember, they checked in first on the leg they ended up being eliminated on), came first for the second leg in a row.
And now we come to Mel and Mike. They've had a hard time so far, with Mel struggling to keep up as they run through the city, but like I said before, Mike doesn't seem to care about the Race at all. Any time his father shows the slightest bit of weakness he jumps on it and starts crying about how he doesn't want the Race to kill his father. OK, Dramarama, WE GET IT. You're a sensitive son, you love your father, BLAH BLAH BLAH. Chances are you knew your father was 71 goddamn years old before you ran this Race. In fact, you've run it before, and he had a really hard time then. What makes you think that things would be any easier two years later? I can't help but wonder whether the fact that Mike is already a successful Hollywood writer/director/producer/actor makes him care less about the Race; after all, what's another million dollars when you're already rich as hell? After what seemed like a very short time in the mud pit, Mike stood up and started begging his father to quit, but Mel was having none of it. He continued to dig through the mud, even as Mike walked out of the pit and cried on the sidelines. For God's sake man, if your 71-year-old father can do this, surely you can stick it out for a little while longer. Apparently they were only in the pit for an hour, but it was enough to give them both hypothermia, and eventually they gave up and were taken to the medical truck, only to watch Jaime and Cara (UGH) show up and find a frog within (what seemed like) the first minute in the pit. And so we bid you farewell, Mike and Mel. We'll miss your comedy, but not your whining. Maybe next year you can try out for The Surreal Life (is that still a show?).
Rankings
- Zev and Justin
- Gary and Mallory
- Ron and Christina
- Kisha and Jen
- Flight Time and Big Easy
- Jet and Cord
- Kent and Vyxsin
- Margie and Luke
- Jaime and Cara
I forgot to mention (or maybe I'd blocked it out intentionally), Kent was wearing a cowboy hat this episode, in some sort of attempt to show the Cowboys they weren't the only baddasses on the Race. I wish I could punch people through my TV.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment