Tag: The Amazing Race

Spoilers for last night’s The Amazing Race:

Yippee, the Barbies are gone! That makes me happy. I couldn’t stand them, as I indicated last week. Their fate was sealed in that they didn’t come in first after being “marked for elimination” last week, and what a good thing. God, they were irritating.

A commenter on that post mentioned that the Barbies were fairly positive, which I can’t deny; they never did seem to fight one another at all. (Of course, how much of that is due to editing and picking of footage is something to wonder.) What bothered me about the Barbies was that they exhibited utterly no sense of direction at all; their general approach was to bat their beautiful blue eyes and blond locks wherever the Race took them, in order to get some local guy (always a guy) to hop in their car and personally guide them to wherever they were going, while everyone else had to make do with directions given in unfamiliar languages. At every juncture when the Barbies were alone and had to find their own way, they were always at sea (at one point, they were literally at sea).

I also hated their constant mispronunciation of the fairly famous locales they visited, and the way they just seemed to have no sense of wonder for it all. They’ve just traveled the world, and seen things that I will almost certainly never get to see, and yet they were so focused on the Race itself that the Race might as well have been a Race through Greater Cleveland.

As for the remaining teams, I’m rooting for either Alabama (the two single moms) or the two guys (whose names I can’t remember for the life of me). The remaining couple is supremely irritating.

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I’m having difficulty with The Amazing Race, because we’re down to four teams, three of which I can’t stand, and the one I like (the single mothers from Alabama) I really can’t see winning because they seem utterly incapable of running with any kind of speed, and this seems to be the part of the race when the ability to run your ass off becomes fairly important.

But as long as the Barbies, or the Beauty Queens, do NOT win, I’ll call it good. We’re talking about two ladies who have demonstrated such geographical ignorance that they pronounce “Kiev” as “Keev” constantly, they misread a clue way back in the Thailand episode and ended up just paddling their boat around the islands of the South China Sea looking for Phil (and somehow still not coming in last), and so on. And this past week, they finally came in last — only to win a stay of execution, since it was a non-elimination week. Gah!

I also recently read that the next iteration of TAR will be an “all-star” edition, which will apparently feature among its contestants the famed Rob-and-Amber, the people who have already been on Survivor twice and TAR once. Why doesn’t CBS just give them a million bucks? Geez.

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Brief Note: I won’t spoil it, but I’m watching The Amazing Race right now and I can’t believe what the Godwin Brothers just did. Wow. You don’t often see that on reality-TV competitions.

(It may get spoiled in Comments, so beware!)

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[Spoilers for The Amazing Race]

My faith in television has been restored, thanks to the wonderment that is The Amazing Race. What a thing this was — and the ending, with those wild and whacky hippies winning it all after courting certain disaster all along, was the greatest display of cosmic justice in human history. This show was so good that I think I can safely eschew series TV for life now, and if not for the fact that I need something to watch Star Wars on, I’d sell the TV right now, for nothing else I watch will ever capture the absolute joy of seeing B.J. and Tyler win that thing.

Long live B.J. and Tyler!

(Yeah, this post is purposely over-the-top, but in all seriousness, it just makes me happy to see those goofy guys win. They won me over several episodes back when one of them uttered the immortal line, “Don’t touch the termite mounds, dude! They’ll eat all the wood in your body!”

And from a pure production standpoint, TAR is just incredibly well done. It’s beautifully shot, it’s got terrific pacing, and it’s full of the “sense of wonder” that’s a hallmark of all the best travel writing. What a good show.

(Way to go, Alan. Next thing I know I’ll be buying a diesel car.))

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As long as I’ve been reading him, Alan has been touting the reality TV show The Amazing Race, which I’ve avoided watching, until this season, when I watched an episode a few weeks back just to get an idea of what the show was about.

Now I’m friggin’ hooked on the damn show.

I’m rooting for BJ and Tyler, the hippies. They just crack me up: “Dude, don’t touch the termite mounds! Those termites will eat all the wood in your body!”

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