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spiderbraidsAnother week, another five eps to get (about halfway) through...
Ep 5
- As expected from last week, Rich/Dom are out, and the next stop is Jordan (our first non-Euro destination since the pandemic :-)) We lead off with possibly the most epic leg open ever, in which contestants get to ride a steam train into the Wadi Rum desert (with plenty of B-roll that might belong better in a documentary), and encounter a cavalry of horses and camels straight out of Lawrence of Arabia, and indeed, the clue leading to the start of the leg proper mentions the iconic movie (but Phil Keoghan also mentions other films that have shot here like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Transformers, and Star Wars during the Roadblock)
- Teams get a ride from a Bedouin (in an SUV, rather than a camel LOL) to a Roadblock: "Who wants to test their metal?" Not a typo, it's a task to use a metal detector to find a sheet of metal at a mock UFO crash site, which turns out to say Petra (iconic ancient Jordan town, so of course they have to include it somehow) In concerning news, one of the twins (Emily/Molly) appears to have tweaked a muscle running up the dune to the clue box :-\ (Next episode, it's suggested one of them tweaked it in Italy)
- The Bedouins then drive teams to the iconic town, for a Detour between Camel Caravan: retrieving and feeding hay and water to camels, and Palace Puzzle: Do a giant slide pizzle with a replica of Petra's original facade... While the top four teams are milling about Petra trying to complete either Detour, team ballroom (couple Aubrey/David), Boom-Boom (newlyweds Glenda/Lubumba) and Jamaica (parent-child Linton/Sharik) are left at the Roadblock, and David is not exactly doing great at this, going outside the circle at points, and returning a broken motor to the judge at one point LOL. Eventually David and Boom-Boom get their metal sheet, leaving Jamaica at the Roadblock
Ep 6
- Recap says Luis/Michelle (Team Miami) won the leg, and Jamaica is out... and that's not all, since Phil has all the teams gather together in Amman to reveal that another team has been eliminated: Childhood sweethearts Abby/Will, for a positive Covid test (the only thing I knew about the season was that there was a Covid elimination, though not who) So it's a de facto "non-elimination" up front, with a mass start, and the placement will determine the start groupings for "next week", where one team will start 15 minutes behind the next to last group
- First stop is a hard to pronounce bookstore, and it's a crazy montage of contestants asking for directions, with some getting flummoxed with the Arabic lettering... Detour is between Step by Step (another dance, a flirting dance even), and Letter by Letter (memorize all the Arabic letters) Of course team ballroom would do the dancing :-) But in a confessional they say there's nothing similar to what they do... Meanwhile, Luis/Michele spot the final mat first LOL.
- Over at the Arabic lettering, the real hard part isn't just having to remember the order, but also having to memorize the pronouncation of the letters themselves (ghayn and qaaf are really hard, but Derek(/Claire, Big Brother) is finding the rolled "r" tough as well and Claire suggests making a gargling maneuver) Twins, having grown up in Jewish families, note it's like Hebrew (no surprise since they're in the same general region of the world) Meanwhile, despite the non-similarity of the dance to salsa, team ballroom still knocks it out first LOL!
- Roadblock is "Who's feeling broken carted?" Head to some park, put together a cart and drive it to the Pitstop, and that's about as far as I got, but Luis manages to give us two quips about how they're basically having to do it from scratch: "This is not a Lego set" and "This is definitely not Ikea" LOL!
Ep 7
- Next stop is France, more specifically a rural area known as the Dordogne Valley :-) First stop is a castle called Chateau de Commarque... In confessional, we learn that despite their separate individual lives, Emily/Molly share a lot of things like, how they like their eggs, getting punished in 5th grade for kissing their boyfriends, and playing woodwind in their school band :-) Also, Luis/Michelle are hoping to win a third leg in a row...
- Anyways, the castle has a Roadblock called "Who wants to climb the family tree?" which combines rappeling down the castle wall, with memorizing the seals of wives of the Commarque family to match them up with the given names... and the tree has like hundreds of entries LOL! So Michele decides to just rappel first and check what names she's looking for, and even adds fun mnemonics like referring to someone with the surname Chapelle as chap-stick, and Brouse as (eye)brows :-) Everyone has to rappel a few times to get their clue...
- Meanwhile, Boom-Boom end up in a ditch after mistaking the roadside for grass (we even get to see a member of the security crew for the contestants, replete with name caption), and have to wait to have their car dragged out by a farmgirl on a tractor... and it apparently takes only five minutes, but they're also the team starting in last, so they're just looking to get to the finish line :-)
- Quinton makes a mock cheer for Mattie, and there's discussion about cheering in the military LOL. Speaking of the military, after they finish in fifth, they're heading to their car and find out they forgot their keys, so end up having to run all the way back from the bottom of the hill back to the castle to get their stuff LOL, which thins their margin over team ballroom quite a bit...
- Boom-Boom makes it to the castle, and Glenda quips about hoping that the restraint equipment doesn't affect Lubumba's sperm, because they're trying for a baby :-) Back with other teams, military bros are at least good at maps, so they manage to jump all the way up to first by the time they arrive at the Detour cluebox at a farm called La Ferme de Turnac... Detour is between Walnut Cracker (extract walnut oil from walnuts spread all across the ground) and Medieval Gamer (play 3 medieval games) Only got about as far as military bros standing there dumbfounded for a few minutes at what a walnut grove is before realizing that duh, they're spread on the ground they're standing right now LOL!
Ep 8
- After an exit from Boom-Boom and a win from the twins (and a product placement mandated scene of them looking over their prize trip) next stop is a self-drive to Toulouse, France (aka "The Pink City", which will figure in one of the Detours), to the Stade Toulousain stadium... Luis and Derek have a bromance going on (Michele's words, not my own) Derek also mentions he doesn't have good memory, and Luis mentions that Michele had a dream about her late father, daww... Meanwhile, Aubrey decides to switch driving with David after having issues with all the maps they're having to handle LOL.
- Roadblock at the stadium is "Who's ready to take one for the team?" It's a rugby drill with Stade Toulousain's women's rugby (most successful rugby team in France) Most of the task (tackling, running, passing, receiving) is a formality; the real issue is the dropkick, which is a problem for the twins... But they have plenty of time, because the military bros (who started in their group) end up on the wrong road to the stadium and get into a traffic jam, and only arrive at the same time as Miami and Big Brother, quite a bit after the twins got their kick through on something like the 6th go
- Both Miami and Big Brother nail their kicks first go, with Luis giving a nice celebration (heck, Big Brother send Claire to do it; in confessional Claire claims that she was recommended to join her college's rugby team, but Derek doubts that story) Meanwhile, military takes like seven attempts because while one of them did play regular American football, he was a receiver... and on top of that, they proceed to get on the wrong road on their way to the next task LOL. They're only narrowly ahead of team ballroom, who "only" need 4 attempts to get their kick in :-)
- Military bros aren't the only ones making a wrong turn though, as the twins end up in a parking garage, wherein they learn how to use a vending machine to pay the parking fees with cash... Back to racing, and the next stop is Couvent de Jacobins to pick up a Detour clue from a dude blowing a French horn, and it's between Say Six (memorize French poetry from three different locations) and Lay Bricks (into the given pattern, using Toulouse's distinct pink bricks) Miami start doing the poetry and decide to switch to bricks, while the twins (with their knee issues) just go straight to bricks... Derek studied French in high school, so he's pulling plenty of weight on this task, while to her credit, Claire memorizes "les yeux" as "lasers" LOL.
- The trick with the bricks (ooh, rhyme :-)) is that there are two different lengths of brick to lay, and one has to start from the inside part... Luis quips that he doesn't put stuff together or even do Legos, but he does pay attention to detail, so it looks like Miami's getting the job done quickly... Meanwhile the cheerleaders arrive in last at the Roadblock, and of course there's always going to be that one guy who mistakenly tries to punt the ball instead of dropkick, and that one guy is Quinton :-) That said, he gets the hang of the dropkick quickly, and gets it first go :-) Back to the Detour, and Big Brother are the first to get the pitstop clue for a boat on Canal de Brienne :-)
Ep 9
- After the exit of the cheerleaders, it's another megaleg, starting in Malaga, Spain at a fort on a hill, where teams find out that they're not getting extra money for this megaleg (they haven't noted how much money they get for the leg lately; teams got $10 for one of the Jordan legs and that's it as far as that goes) Anyways, from here teams will have to walk to a plaza to do the Roadblock: "Who's the master of pieces?" Malaga is the birthplace of Picasso, and this one involves sliding a bunch of giant glass plates into a giant frame to assemble one of his works, "Three Musicians" :-) A contestant quips about the Picasso statue at the plaza still having both ears, and promptly gets the response "That's Van Gogh" LOL. Claire quips about getting her fair share of cardio running between the example and her station (furthest from said example) and lifting the giant glass plates, while Emily has Molly (with the bum knee) do the task because Emily has done 5 Roadblocks, and Molly has only done 3...
- Big Brother are first to get the picture done (and team ballroom are in 2nd, their best position in a while), and get a clue to bike to El Cubo, which a) is literally a giant multicolored cube b) sounds like bad mock Spanish for "The Cube", but is actually correct Spanish (!) Derek comments that he's crashed a motorbike, a scooter, and a skateboard, so he has plenty of trauma to deal with while trying to keep up with Claire... Anyways, it's a Detour between Fish Fry (grilling sardines on a sword, AKA Espeto) and Sailboat Supply (paddleboard to supply a sailboat, as a nod to Malaga's role as a supply stop for ships; Miami will do this because they practiced paddleboarding before the race :-))
- Molly manages to finish ahead of military bros despite her bum knee, and after fiddling with the glass plates for a bit, the military bros only realize to their dismay that they forgot about the back panel after removing all the glass plates :-\ During the biking, Michael (well, the smaller of the bros) talks about how he got into a biking accident and the doctors didn't give him much chance to live, "But this boy's a fighter, and that's why I'm a fighter pilot" LOL. Meanwhile, the twins bike past El Cubo, and don't believe that that big multicolored cube to their right is what they're looking for because apparently it's supposed to be on their left :-\
- After Derek has a quip about the sardines being salted "Salt Bae style" (and he even imitates Salt Bae's style later in the task), we learn in confessional Claire is vegan and has never done a fish dish before, so she's mainly here for salting and watching the fishes, while letting Derek do most of the work (including referring to the example to make sure he's doing it right :-)) since he's the chef at their apartment, and was the chef on Big Brother... and Aubrey's also excited about this task, because she grew up in a Filipino household and ate sardines with her grandma :-) (Meanwhile, my mom was surprised to see the show and assumed it was old stuff, and was surprised to hear it was new, and amazed [heh] that they'd be running this race with the pandemic still somewhat going on... I noted that they're mainly confined to Europe, but she noted racing in Europe isn't exactly a small deal either)
Ep 5
- As expected from last week, Rich/Dom are out, and the next stop is Jordan (our first non-Euro destination since the pandemic :-)) We lead off with possibly the most epic leg open ever, in which contestants get to ride a steam train into the Wadi Rum desert (with plenty of B-roll that might belong better in a documentary), and encounter a cavalry of horses and camels straight out of Lawrence of Arabia, and indeed, the clue leading to the start of the leg proper mentions the iconic movie (but Phil Keoghan also mentions other films that have shot here like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Transformers, and Star Wars during the Roadblock)
- Teams get a ride from a Bedouin (in an SUV, rather than a camel LOL) to a Roadblock: "Who wants to test their metal?" Not a typo, it's a task to use a metal detector to find a sheet of metal at a mock UFO crash site, which turns out to say Petra (iconic ancient Jordan town, so of course they have to include it somehow) In concerning news, one of the twins (Emily/Molly) appears to have tweaked a muscle running up the dune to the clue box :-\ (Next episode, it's suggested one of them tweaked it in Italy)
- The Bedouins then drive teams to the iconic town, for a Detour between Camel Caravan: retrieving and feeding hay and water to camels, and Palace Puzzle: Do a giant slide pizzle with a replica of Petra's original facade... While the top four teams are milling about Petra trying to complete either Detour, team ballroom (couple Aubrey/David), Boom-Boom (newlyweds Glenda/Lubumba) and Jamaica (parent-child Linton/Sharik) are left at the Roadblock, and David is not exactly doing great at this, going outside the circle at points, and returning a broken motor to the judge at one point LOL. Eventually David and Boom-Boom get their metal sheet, leaving Jamaica at the Roadblock
Ep 6
- Recap says Luis/Michelle (Team Miami) won the leg, and Jamaica is out... and that's not all, since Phil has all the teams gather together in Amman to reveal that another team has been eliminated: Childhood sweethearts Abby/Will, for a positive Covid test (the only thing I knew about the season was that there was a Covid elimination, though not who) So it's a de facto "non-elimination" up front, with a mass start, and the placement will determine the start groupings for "next week", where one team will start 15 minutes behind the next to last group
- First stop is a hard to pronounce bookstore, and it's a crazy montage of contestants asking for directions, with some getting flummoxed with the Arabic lettering... Detour is between Step by Step (another dance, a flirting dance even), and Letter by Letter (memorize all the Arabic letters) Of course team ballroom would do the dancing :-) But in a confessional they say there's nothing similar to what they do... Meanwhile, Luis/Michele spot the final mat first LOL.
- Over at the Arabic lettering, the real hard part isn't just having to remember the order, but also having to memorize the pronouncation of the letters themselves (ghayn and qaaf are really hard, but Derek(/Claire, Big Brother) is finding the rolled "r" tough as well and Claire suggests making a gargling maneuver) Twins, having grown up in Jewish families, note it's like Hebrew (no surprise since they're in the same general region of the world) Meanwhile, despite the non-similarity of the dance to salsa, team ballroom still knocks it out first LOL!
- Roadblock is "Who's feeling broken carted?" Head to some park, put together a cart and drive it to the Pitstop, and that's about as far as I got, but Luis manages to give us two quips about how they're basically having to do it from scratch: "This is not a Lego set" and "This is definitely not Ikea" LOL!
Ep 7
- Next stop is France, more specifically a rural area known as the Dordogne Valley :-) First stop is a castle called Chateau de Commarque... In confessional, we learn that despite their separate individual lives, Emily/Molly share a lot of things like, how they like their eggs, getting punished in 5th grade for kissing their boyfriends, and playing woodwind in their school band :-) Also, Luis/Michelle are hoping to win a third leg in a row...
- Anyways, the castle has a Roadblock called "Who wants to climb the family tree?" which combines rappeling down the castle wall, with memorizing the seals of wives of the Commarque family to match them up with the given names... and the tree has like hundreds of entries LOL! So Michele decides to just rappel first and check what names she's looking for, and even adds fun mnemonics like referring to someone with the surname Chapelle as chap-stick, and Brouse as (eye)brows :-) Everyone has to rappel a few times to get their clue...
- Meanwhile, Boom-Boom end up in a ditch after mistaking the roadside for grass (we even get to see a member of the security crew for the contestants, replete with name caption), and have to wait to have their car dragged out by a farmgirl on a tractor... and it apparently takes only five minutes, but they're also the team starting in last, so they're just looking to get to the finish line :-)
- Quinton makes a mock cheer for Mattie, and there's discussion about cheering in the military LOL. Speaking of the military, after they finish in fifth, they're heading to their car and find out they forgot their keys, so end up having to run all the way back from the bottom of the hill back to the castle to get their stuff LOL, which thins their margin over team ballroom quite a bit...
- Boom-Boom makes it to the castle, and Glenda quips about hoping that the restraint equipment doesn't affect Lubumba's sperm, because they're trying for a baby :-) Back with other teams, military bros are at least good at maps, so they manage to jump all the way up to first by the time they arrive at the Detour cluebox at a farm called La Ferme de Turnac... Detour is between Walnut Cracker (extract walnut oil from walnuts spread all across the ground) and Medieval Gamer (play 3 medieval games) Only got about as far as military bros standing there dumbfounded for a few minutes at what a walnut grove is before realizing that duh, they're spread on the ground they're standing right now LOL!
Ep 8
- After an exit from Boom-Boom and a win from the twins (and a product placement mandated scene of them looking over their prize trip) next stop is a self-drive to Toulouse, France (aka "The Pink City", which will figure in one of the Detours), to the Stade Toulousain stadium... Luis and Derek have a bromance going on (Michele's words, not my own) Derek also mentions he doesn't have good memory, and Luis mentions that Michele had a dream about her late father, daww... Meanwhile, Aubrey decides to switch driving with David after having issues with all the maps they're having to handle LOL.
- Roadblock at the stadium is "Who's ready to take one for the team?" It's a rugby drill with Stade Toulousain's women's rugby (most successful rugby team in France) Most of the task (tackling, running, passing, receiving) is a formality; the real issue is the dropkick, which is a problem for the twins... But they have plenty of time, because the military bros (who started in their group) end up on the wrong road to the stadium and get into a traffic jam, and only arrive at the same time as Miami and Big Brother, quite a bit after the twins got their kick through on something like the 6th go
- Both Miami and Big Brother nail their kicks first go, with Luis giving a nice celebration (heck, Big Brother send Claire to do it; in confessional Claire claims that she was recommended to join her college's rugby team, but Derek doubts that story) Meanwhile, military takes like seven attempts because while one of them did play regular American football, he was a receiver... and on top of that, they proceed to get on the wrong road on their way to the next task LOL. They're only narrowly ahead of team ballroom, who "only" need 4 attempts to get their kick in :-)
- Military bros aren't the only ones making a wrong turn though, as the twins end up in a parking garage, wherein they learn how to use a vending machine to pay the parking fees with cash... Back to racing, and the next stop is Couvent de Jacobins to pick up a Detour clue from a dude blowing a French horn, and it's between Say Six (memorize French poetry from three different locations) and Lay Bricks (into the given pattern, using Toulouse's distinct pink bricks) Miami start doing the poetry and decide to switch to bricks, while the twins (with their knee issues) just go straight to bricks... Derek studied French in high school, so he's pulling plenty of weight on this task, while to her credit, Claire memorizes "les yeux" as "lasers" LOL.
- The trick with the bricks (ooh, rhyme :-)) is that there are two different lengths of brick to lay, and one has to start from the inside part... Luis quips that he doesn't put stuff together or even do Legos, but he does pay attention to detail, so it looks like Miami's getting the job done quickly... Meanwhile the cheerleaders arrive in last at the Roadblock, and of course there's always going to be that one guy who mistakenly tries to punt the ball instead of dropkick, and that one guy is Quinton :-) That said, he gets the hang of the dropkick quickly, and gets it first go :-) Back to the Detour, and Big Brother are the first to get the pitstop clue for a boat on Canal de Brienne :-)
Ep 9
- After the exit of the cheerleaders, it's another megaleg, starting in Malaga, Spain at a fort on a hill, where teams find out that they're not getting extra money for this megaleg (they haven't noted how much money they get for the leg lately; teams got $10 for one of the Jordan legs and that's it as far as that goes) Anyways, from here teams will have to walk to a plaza to do the Roadblock: "Who's the master of pieces?" Malaga is the birthplace of Picasso, and this one involves sliding a bunch of giant glass plates into a giant frame to assemble one of his works, "Three Musicians" :-) A contestant quips about the Picasso statue at the plaza still having both ears, and promptly gets the response "That's Van Gogh" LOL. Claire quips about getting her fair share of cardio running between the example and her station (furthest from said example) and lifting the giant glass plates, while Emily has Molly (with the bum knee) do the task because Emily has done 5 Roadblocks, and Molly has only done 3...
- Big Brother are first to get the picture done (and team ballroom are in 2nd, their best position in a while), and get a clue to bike to El Cubo, which a) is literally a giant multicolored cube b) sounds like bad mock Spanish for "The Cube", but is actually correct Spanish (!) Derek comments that he's crashed a motorbike, a scooter, and a skateboard, so he has plenty of trauma to deal with while trying to keep up with Claire... Anyways, it's a Detour between Fish Fry (grilling sardines on a sword, AKA Espeto) and Sailboat Supply (paddleboard to supply a sailboat, as a nod to Malaga's role as a supply stop for ships; Miami will do this because they practiced paddleboarding before the race :-))
- Molly manages to finish ahead of military bros despite her bum knee, and after fiddling with the glass plates for a bit, the military bros only realize to their dismay that they forgot about the back panel after removing all the glass plates :-\ During the biking, Michael (well, the smaller of the bros) talks about how he got into a biking accident and the doctors didn't give him much chance to live, "But this boy's a fighter, and that's why I'm a fighter pilot" LOL. Meanwhile, the twins bike past El Cubo, and don't believe that that big multicolored cube to their right is what they're looking for because apparently it's supposed to be on their left :-\
- After Derek has a quip about the sardines being salted "Salt Bae style" (and he even imitates Salt Bae's style later in the task), we learn in confessional Claire is vegan and has never done a fish dish before, so she's mainly here for salting and watching the fishes, while letting Derek do most of the work (including referring to the example to make sure he's doing it right :-)) since he's the chef at their apartment, and was the chef on Big Brother... and Aubrey's also excited about this task, because she grew up in a Filipino household and ate sardines with her grandma :-) (Meanwhile, my mom was surprised to see the show and assumed it was old stuff, and was surprised to hear it was new, and amazed [heh] that they'd be running this race with the pandemic still somewhat going on... I noted that they're mainly confined to Europe, but she noted racing in Europe isn't exactly a small deal either)
