On The Air

David and Mary are scared of fish and scared of river rafting, but they face both those fears. They’re still horrible at navigating, though, so they get eliminated. Read it all.

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

Previously on The Amazing Race: The deserts of Chile threatened to chew up most of the teams, but it was Drew and his fifteen hundred medical maladies that came in last and were eliminated.

Currently on The Amazing Race: Teams leave the Valley of the Dead in the middle of the night. The hills all around the Pit Stop are lit up gorgeously with spotlights, giving a ghostly effect to the whole scene. It’s the little details like this that set this show apart, you know? So the first order of business is to drive to a nearby town and find a clue in front of a church, and the clue tells them to head back to the airport. But they’re not leaving the country yet, it’s just a short hop across to a different part of Chile.

On the way to the church, the Guidos stop to get directions, and Eric rolls up nearby and eavesdrops on the conversation. He then uses the directions to get to the church first. Kind of an underhanded move, but there’s nothing wrong with it, really. It’s the same situation as Kevin “eavesdropping” on Mary at the Roadblock last week. If you don’t want people to hear you, just talk quieter. The Guidos get a little pissy about this, though, even pulling the grade-school move of standing in front of Eric’s truck so he can’t drive away. Really? Don’t be children, Guidos. Just don’t. They pulled crap like this in their season too, trying to block other teams in the airport so they’d miss their flight. I love these guys, but they’ve got to cut out the petty little games.

David and Mary get choked up in an interview about how hard it is to run the race without the Cho Brothers. Really? I would have thought the opposite would be true. Being in that alliance last year looked pretty rough. We even get a black-and-white flashback shot of the Chos, just like we had last year. You know, they aren’t actually dead.

Most teams head right to the airport to book tickets, but Rob and Amber go to a travel agency first. And this travel agency is located in a mud hut. Like, literally. They’re got computers and they’ve got internet, but aside from that it looks like a Flintstones house. It seems to work out for them, getting them a flight that lands an hour earlier. And Uchenna and Joyce get on the same flight by ditching the airport and heading to a hotel to shop online. They even take everyone else’s credit cards to buy them tickets, which seems like a stretch of the rules to say the very least. They’re allowed to do it, though, although the Guidos were the only ones that gave them enough credit card info to complete the sale, so the other teams are stuck trying to buy tickets on the faster flight at the airport. Some make it, some don’t, and there’s a showdown between Mirna and Teri and Ian that shows us the old folks are not to be taken lightly. They don’t buckle under Mirna’s ten tons of bullshit like other people do, and she seems a little taken aback, like “Why aren’t they intimidated by me?” Of course it’s just one more imagined slight that she’ll use to feed her persecution complex. What’s that saying about mud wrestling with a pig? Eventually you realize the pig is enjoying it?

So all the teams fly from Chile to Chile, and have to make their way to some fish hatchery with seven words in its name. The name is so long, they don’t even show it on the screen, just the much-shorter name of the town, Metri. And the teams have to get in a car and drive themselves. I’m so glad to see the return of having to navigate yourselves around. I was really getting tired of everybody taking taxis everywhere like they have for the last six seasons, it seems like. Even if “drive yourself” now means “hire a taxi to lead you”.

The Roadblock at the fish hatchery involves grabbing fish out of one tank, putting them in a crate, and running them down the hill to another tank nearby. But this is a huge tank (1,800 gallons, Phil says) so you actually have to put on hip waders and hop in to get the fish. And the fish are huge too, like 15 inches in diameter. And they’re flatfish, so they’re all lying on top of each other, and one of the first challenges seems to be to get in the tank without stepping on them. Eric and Danielle are in first place (where are Rob and Amber?), so Danielle takes the Roadblock without realizing that you actually have to grab the fish. Which is something she cannot do. Eric’s idea of being supportive is to scream at her and threaten her. Doesn’t sound very productive. Then he keeps screaming at her, “Use your boobs! Use your boobs!” Eventually Rob shows up, and even he is telling Eric to chill out. When Rob is tell you you’re being too abrasive? Time to step back and take a long look at your life.

Danielle isn’t the only one having a hard time with the fish, though. David gets in the tank, but as Mary says, “he don’t never touch fish. He’s afraid of fish.” And indeed, we see him very gingerly trying to pluck at the fish, almost like he just wishes he can rub them the right way and they’ll leap into the crate by themselves. David is Not A Water Person, I think is what we’re supposed to take away from his story. Remember last year and “Water over your head, if you fell, you’re dead”? Eventually he gets serious and starts flinging fish. You can tell he’s serious because he’s taken off his hat. And elsewhere, Mirna is having a full-on panic attack. She gets one fish in the crate, then recoils from it and it almost reduced to a sobbing mess. It’s kind of funny to see her in distress, you know? There are some people you just don’t feel sorry for.

Uchenna is the first one done with the fish, and he finds out that the clue is written on the bottom of the tank, in several parts. The clue leads them to the river near the town of Petrohue. So you have to write the clue down yourself, and hope that you don’t miss any pieces. You’d think this would be easy. But we see the Guidos, the second team to finish, write down the clue, and Joe misses the part about Petrohue. Doesn’t even see it. So basically all they know is that they have to go to “the river”. Which is so incredibly vague, you’d think they would realize something’s missing, right? They don’t, and they set off running.

Danny has a hard time with the fish, rather uncharacteristically because everything they do usually seems so effortless for them. When they leave only Charla and Mirna are still working on the fish. Everyone else is getting directions to Petrohue, but Mirna is still crying and freaking out, probably for a long time. But finally even she gets done and gets the clue. Then, while they’re driving around looking for directions, they run into the Guidos, who are doing the same. Except they’re not having any luck at all since they don’t have the whole clue. So the four of them accost a local on the street to ask directions, and eventually end up just grabbing the guy and stuffing him into Charla and Mirna’s car. The guy weakly tries to protest (“I have work!”), but they offer to pay him $50 US, so I guess that’s a pay raise for him. The whole thing has a “kidnapping the locals” vibe to it. They just yank him off the street, leaving his wife and young child behind. I think I saw this in a documentary once. It involved salt mines.

“Welcome to Charla and Mirna’s world,” they tell him. “It’s a scary one.” No kidding.

Charla and Mirna’s world descends on a police station or something, still with the Guidos in tow, and they’re asking for directions there. The Guidos are like, “what is this Petrohue of which you speak?” Mirna’s kind of dumbfounded, like “You didn’t write down the whole clue?” But then because her desire to be seen as a hero overrides her desire to knock out the competition, she gives the Guidos the missing piece of the clue. Even she can’t believe she did that. “You’re lucky you found us,” she says. And really, they are. If they though being stranded in Alaska was bad, they almost never got out of Chile there. That’s a pretty colossal mistake the Guidos just made, and they’re damn lucky they got out of it.

While this is going on, nearly every other team is arriving at Petrohue and the cluebox along the river. The Detour this week is a choice between climbing a rock wall, which is literally right there at the box, or going white water rafting, which is at some undetermined point elsewhere on the river. The rock wall is only 40 feet high, so it seems like this task could be done very quickly. Like the rafting shouldn’t even be an option, because first you have to find the place, then you have to change into the rafting gear, then you actually have to raft two miles down the river, then get out of the boat and get into a van that will take you all the way back to your car. That could take forever, you know? Forever. Compared to hopping up a really short rock wall. Astoundingly, no one takes the rock climbing, and they all go for the rafting. Is there something here I’m missing? Was there additional information on the clue that scared everyone off the climbing? I’m so confused.

So I said everyone chose the rafting, but that’s not really true because the Beauty Queens, Dustin and Kandice, somehow find the rafts before they get the Detour clue. I can see how they get screwed up, because there are yellow and red arrows letting people know where to park for the rafting, and there are obviously camera crews and everything set up there, so they know that what they’re looking at is part of the Race. But there’s no clue box, so they’re a little confused. So their reasoning is that they need to get in the boat first, and look for the clue box along the way. And, that’s not how it works. There have been tasks like that, to be sure. But there’s always been an intermediate clue that tells you to get in the boat. So they hop in and do the rafting, doing the right thing but for the wrong reason.

The rafting does look fun, I’ll give them that. It’s probably more enjoyable than the rock climbing, it just takes a lot longer to do. And only one person falls in, Teri. She fell off of the jet ski in her season, too, if you’ll remember, so I’m guessing watersports aren’t her thing. There is much tense music and they cut to a commercial, trying to make you think she drowned. But of course she didn’t, and they get her back in the boat in about five seconds.

Oh, by the way, Rob and Amber? First at the Pit Stop. Of freaking course. The funniest thing about the Pit Stop, though, is that the greeter is a little person, and I bet you a million and half dollars that they wouldn’t have hired him if Charla wasn’t on the Race.

Dustin and Kandice finish the rafting, and they find a clue. Just like they thought they would! And it’s the clue to go to the Pit Stop! Gosh, seem like anything’s missing there, girls? They’re in second place as they get back to their car, but then the car decides to play a joke on them and it won’t start. So while they’re sitting there trying to get the engine running, Uchenna and Joyce and Eric and Danielle peel out of there, making it to the Pit Stop in second and third place. Finally the car starts, like it’s just as anxious as us to see what happens when they check in with Phil, and when they get there Phil just gives them this look, like “are you kidding me?” Then he tells them, in one of the vaguest statements ever, “you did not pick up all your clues,” and sends them away. They wander off the mat with absolutely no idea what they did wrong, and as much as I’d like to tell you that they drive around and around and never find the missing clue, that’s not what happens. In fact, they not only figure it out, they figure it out so fast that they’re able to get back to the Pit Stop, with the missing clue, and check in before any other teams have a chance to catch up. Man, it’s so frustrating when people you don’t like do well.

But speaking of people I do like, Oswald and Danny check in fifth. It’s a bit of a slip from second place, but remember that they were second-to-last out of the fish Roadblock. So they made up a significant amount of ground over some other teams. What’s that you said? Two of the teams they beat were ones that got lost? La, la, I can’t hear you. They do remark on the greeter, though, saying the same thing the rest of us were thinking: “Charla’s gonna be in love.”

One of those teams that got lost was David and Mary, who end up taking what looks to be a series of very wrong turns, some of them made even when there are signs clearly telling them where to go. They meet up with some family that tells them Petrohue is a long ways away, back the way they just came.

Teri and Ian check in, while Charla and Mirna and the Guidos are just starting the rafting. Both of them have every reason to believe they’re in last place right now, so they’re hustling to get this done.

David and Mary finally get the Detour clue. Mary asks if the rafting is okay, and David tells her it doesn’t matter what he thinks, since she’s the one calling the shots anyway. What he actually says is, “It’s up to you.” So she immediately jumps all over him for this, shrieking about how she can’t do the rock climb, and he’s like, “okay.” She’s so exasperated with him. How dare he let her make a decision without interfering? What’s wrong with him?

Charla and Mirna are the first ones done with the rafting, and they race to get back to their car. And when they get back, who is still waiting for them? The local they kidnapped earlier. He’s just standing by the car like an obedient little puppy. I personally would have run when I had the chance, but I guess Stockholm syndrome is setting in early. Mirna actually apologizes to him for wearing a bathing suit, in that broken Russian accent of hers that she uses to talk to foreigners. Hey, she told him that Charla and Mirna’s world was a scary one. No use apologizing now. Plus, Charla’s the one that should be apologizing for her bathing suit, especially with that frilly little tutu ruffle on it.

Charla and Mirna have lost their keys, though, so that gives the Guidos the chance to get out of the parking lot ahead of them. Of course they back into a pole on the way, shredding the hell out of their rear taillight. You know, the car rental insurance rates for The Amazing Race have got to be sky-high by now. It must be getting harder and harder to find a rental agency that hasn’t heard of the many, many cars that have been destroyed by this show. They make it to the Pit Stop, but not before Joe has an emotional breakdown over how stressful the day has been. Hey, at least you weren’t eating cow’s lips.

It’s a race to the finish for Charla and Mirna and David and Mary, and for the first time this season I don’t really care who goes home. There is much tense music, but of course it’s Charla and Mirna who get there first. Did you really think David and Mary would ever win a race anywhere? Charla finally gets to make her love connection, and she’s so happy not to be eliminated that she gives the greeter a big hug. Aw. Somebody’s getting lucky tonight!

So that leaves David and Mary with the sad music and the tearful reminisces of how much the race meant to them. You know, they shouldn’t have even been here in the first place. There are about fifteen teams, at least, that deserved All-Stars more than David and Mary. Their whole hook was that they never left the couch, and they had never seen gay people or Asians before, and they were afraid of water, and they were country folk with a heart of gold, and seriously all of those bases were covered during Season 10. There was nothing more to be rehashed here, no reason for them to be brought back, and they sucked just as much at racing the second time around. This is one piece of casting that should have never been, and at least now it’s been erased. Good riddance. Go home.

Next week? Charla and Mirna are causing even more crap, this time with Rob and Amber. Do they never stop?