On The Air

The race heads to India…eventually. First we spend half an hour in the airport.

Episode links:
Miss Alli’s recap
TV Squad review
TV Guide review
Download the episode with BitTorrent

Previously on the Amazing Race: we learned that precious few people know how to row a boat anymore. We also learned that Peter is a bottomless pit of assitude, from which no light can escape. Stay tuned; we’ll see more of that later.

Currently on the Amazing Race: According to my wife, Phil needs to wear more blue. As she said, “Khaki pants? Okay. Khaki shirts? Not so okay.” But this week Phil and his Amazing Khaki Shirt are coming to us from Soi Sim island, the site of the most recent pit stop. As team rip their clue, they find that they’re heading to Chennai, India. So this time the annual “you think you’ve seen poverty?” leg is coming earlier in the Race, and with more teams involved.

Teams have to take a train back to Hanoi to catch a flight to India, and along the way Tyler and James just happen to spot some drug addicts shooting up in an alley. Drug addicts? Gosh, that sounds familiar. If only there were someone on this race who could lecture us about the evils of drug addiction while a melancholy soundtrack plays in the background. Oh wait, we’re in luck!

Also on the train we find out that the Cho Brothers have brought along an endless supply of kooky props to be used on the race. You’ll remember they were the ones who busted out squirt guns at the airport in the first episode, and were only kept out of prison by several CBS executives showing up to vouch for them. This time it’s the ever-popular fake phone, which they use to place a fake call to a travel agent to mess with Peter’s head. This isn’t so much of a brilliant practical joke as a tremendous backfire, however, as it motivates Peter to go find his own phone, a real one, and make a real call to a travel agent. Who’s laughing now, Cho Brothers?

Which brings us to the travel portion of this week’s episode, which takes up fully half the show. There’s a lot of airport intrigue happening here, and it’s not exactly interesting airport intrigue either, so I don’t know why we had to see so much of it. Basically everybody has to get a connecting flight in Delhi, and there are about ten airplanes involved, and everyone rebooks their flights six times, and we’re literally halfway into the show before the first team arrives in Chennai. Why? Don’t know. The only thing of consequnce that happens here is that David and Mary arrive in India in last place, but they’re only 40 minutes behind. So it’s not impossible to recover from. Unless you’re David and Mary.

The Detour this week is a choice between wrestling alligators and painting with rice powder. I miss Phil telling us that each task has its own pros and cons, but I’m sure if he was still on his game he’d tell us that wrestling alligators could be potentially scary, but teams that are able to get the hang of it could finish quickly. This is obviously the better choice, since we find out that you’re not really so much wrestling the alligator yourself as you are just putting a rubber band over its snout while somebody else holds it down. So it’s not all that scary, but its still more hands-on than taking a picture of a crocodile.

Everyone eventually chooses the alligators except Tyler and James and David and Mary. And it really does seem like the hardest part of this task is climbing over the wall to get into the alligator pen. Lyn almost doesn’t make it. And Sarah has trouble too, but she soon learns that that was the easy part as Peter starts coaching her again. Yes, after everything that happened last week, Peter is still right there in her face telling her what to do and how to do it. And, hilariously, he’s telling her how to put a rubber band on the alligator. He’s standing over her like she’s a three-year-old, telling her to “Pull it tight” and “no no no, grab this one here.” He’s practically hysterical because she’s not following his directions. Peter: it’s a fucking rubber band. Chill. Sarah, surprisingly, doesn’t wrap the rubber band around his neck, but instead waits until later to chew him out. And chew him out she does. “We’re a team and we have to work together. This isn’t just about you,” she says, and tops it off with, “I’m not really having fun with you.” Peter’s not getting it. He’s sitting there stuffing his face with some damn cookies or something, looking everywhere but directly at Sarah, and brushing off every one of her complaints by saying, “I like the way I am.” I guess that’s the white guy way of saying “I’m just keeping it real.” And it has the same meaning: I know I’m an asshole and I don’t care, and you need to accept it because it’s the real me. It’s one thing to be an ass, and it’s another thing to be unrepentant about being an ass, but there’s a third level here, and that’s Peter being proud of the fact that he’s an ass. We fade to commercial with the kind of slow-motion dramatics that normally indicate a team thinks they’re in a hopeless situation and losing as far as the race is concerned. But here it’s used to indicate that Sarah is in a hopeless situation and losing as far as her life is concerned, which is infinitely sadder.

After the alligator/rice detour, teams have to make their way to the Roadblock, a driving school, and get their Indian driver’s license. This is the comedy portion of this week’s show. It involves first sitting in an oper-air classroom and taking lessons from the Indian Gene Shalit. He gives such helpful tips as when to use hand signals, not to drink and drive (Rob: “Drink what?”) and how to use a bicycle horn to warn children that you’re coming. Then the racer has to get in a tiny little car and try not to get killed driving through the streets of India. And while normally an adjective like “chaotic” is enough to describe crazy traffic, here it falls short. There are bicycles going diagonally across the road, there are mopeds with a death wish trying to hit your car, there are tiny taxis and huge buses, and while there’s a general rule of “keep to the left,” very few people seem to be following it, And all of this on road with no stripes.

After surviving their excursion through the streets of Chennai, racers are given their Indian driver’s license (which looks like it’s made out of construction paper and Elmer’s glue) and a clue to head to the next pit stop. Peter and Sarah show up first, with the rest of the racers trickling in throughout the afternoon.

Except for David and Mary. Even though they arrived at the rice powder Detour while Tyler and James were still working, and leave just a short time later, it isn’t until after dark that they show up at the Roadblock. What the hell happened there? Did they take the scenic route through St. Louis? Because there is absolutely no explanation for this. One minute they’re shown on the bus, in daylight, and then the next minute they’re coming off the bus and it’s pitch black. And indeed they check into the pit stop hours after everyone else has gone to bed. But, upon hearing one of Phil’s famous pregnant pauses (”I’m………………………pleased to tell you”), we realize that this is a non-elimination leg. And, in the best news I’ve heard all season, Phil informs us that they’ve finally stopped mugging the racers of their money at a non-elimination leg. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. I’ve hated that stupid “twist” ever since they first introduced it in Season 5, and it’s never led to anything good. Because mugging leads to begging, and I’ve written at length about how much I hate the begging.

So it’s time for a new twist, one that looks like it will actually be interesting to watch play out. David and Mary will be “marked” for elimination on the next leg. Which means they have to come in first next week, or else they’ll get an automatic 30-minute penalty at the Pit Stop. And we’ve seen that 30 minutes can make a big difference in your standings in this race. You can drop from first to last in 30 minutes, or get knocked out of the race all together. And as much as I like Mary and David (he wants to get out of the coal mines so he can go where? Disneyland, of course), someone else is going to have to screw up royally next week to keep them in the game. We’ll see.