Status quo on 'The Amazing Race'

Sunday (Nov. 25) night's Amazing Race was a perfectly timed episode for the Sunday after Thanksgiving. If you chose to spend the evening with leftover-turkey-stuffed family, or if your DVR got confused by NFL overrun, give thanks to CBS that you barely missed anything.

[Just because this episode was dull as heck and even though I'm currently being distracted by the surprisingly tight Patriots game, that won't stop me from spoiling things. Be warned.]

If you missed last week's episode, Marianna and Julia did a kind (but strategically stupid) thing by giving Lorena camel-milking advice. As a result, the happy couple finished ahead of the sassy sisters. That was the good part, the absence of elimination. The bad part? As they started Sunday's episode, Jason and Lorena were more than two hours behind the first-place Azaria and Hendekea.

Under the vast majority of Amazing Race circumstances, an initial two-hour deficit isn't prohibitive. You catch up at the train station. You catch up at the airport. You catch up when everybody's left standing at the entrance to a national monument that doesn't open until 9 a.m. One of the things that irks many Race purists is just how often you find two or even three equalizers on the same leg.

On Sunday night's episode, there were no equalizers. The episode began in the morning in Burkina Faso and ended in the late afternoon, still in Burkina Faso, with Azaria and Hendekea still in first. The only travel was done in cabs and although there were minor irritations, none of the challenges put any stress on any of the contestants. As a result, Jason and Lorena started the episode far back in last and they ended the episode far back in last. The margin was so great that this was one of those instances where we barely watched their last task at all and the mournful music began playing even before Phil Keoghan told them that this wasn't a non-elimination leg.

Also unchanged? Jason's difficulties with marriage. Sure, he loves Lorena, but as he put it at the end, "I just think there's some sort of confinement within a marriage."

The episode's facets:

Detour -- Shake your Pan or Shake Your Booty. The teams were offered a choice between doing a native dance and panning for one ounce of gold. Neither task required any strength, speed or agility and the only punishment for dancing badly (or without sufficient inspiration) was that a judging panel of three local celebrities would assess a 10-minute penalty. Jen and Nate and Ronald and Christina were penalized. Ron and Christina's sin appeared to be suggestibly bumping butts, while Jen took her penalty personally since she used to be a Clipper Girl. Kynt and Vyxsin were obviously the most inspired dancers, while Shana and Jennifer treated the locals to a little bump-n-grind. The gold-panning didn't stress anybody out, though Donald was once a miner, giving his team a little extra steam.

Roadblock -- "Who's ready for a juggling act?" Well, the misleading question caused a couple people who wouldn't have volunteered otherwise to take the task, which really required them to load up bikes and take the contents to somebody in the market. Some of the bikes were a bit rickety and it helped to speak a little French, but nobody was stressed out by the task. We were warned that one part of their haul was a "potentially uncooperative goat," but after uncooperative mules and uncooperative camels, the goats were all docile.

If the Detours were easy and the Roadblock unencumbering, the only things keeping the episode even slightly interesting were two additional two red herrings.

The U-Turn. This is a newly introduced twist, right? Instead of having two options to Yield during a season, the U-Turn is a new different way to invite karmic punishment. If a team chooses to U-Turn another team, the U-Turned team discovers, after finishing one Detour choice, they have to go back and complete the second task as well. For reasons never adequately explained, Shana and Jennifer chose to U-Turn Jason and Lorena, despite the fact that they were over an hour behind and dancing challenge hadn't taken them much time. They went through the usual protestations about how this is a game and they didn't think bad karma should be distributed for playing by the rules of the game. I can't argue with that. Bad karma should have been distributed for their casual bigotry last week. Their choice to make the U-Turn this week, just makes me dislike them more. Although the editing relentlessly tried to suggest that Jason and Lorena might be catching up, that they might still have a chance, they never got anywhere close and the U-Turn provided no tangible benefit.

No chicken, no check-in. At the episode's start, each team received a bag and a chicken courtesy of a village elder. They were told to take the chicks with them everywhere, all the way to the mat. It kept being periodically mentioned and that was the thing that kept hope alive for Jason and Lorena. Maybe karma would cause the Blondes to forget their chicken somewhere and have to travel all the way back to who-knows-where to find it. That would have been a hoot. Didn't happen. Everybody had their chickens. We didn't hear what Phil was going to do with the poultry, but can we assume they were regifted to the tribe in some way that didn't cause the elders to lose face? Like the U-Turn, the chickens didn't matter.

Anyway, the line of the week goes to...

Jen's observation that "I'm going to get so much crap from the dancing world when we get back." I somehow don't think that the dancing world will be collectively amused at her lack of creativity. I also liked Jen's "We're gonna win this race like frickin' men" refusal to use the U-Turn. I'm not a Jen-Nate fan -- her little competitive rant at the end saying that Hendekea and Azaria should have let somebody else take a turn finishing first was bush league --- but they were quite quotable.

Did anybody get any real enjoyment out of this week's episode?

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