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Every once in a while there are ultra-hard legs on The Amazing Race. They're filled with things which, on paper, look pretty easy but for one reason or another prove terribly difficult and time consuming. Tonight, we got one of those legs.
Things got really weird instantly. On their way to the airport, Michael & Mark asked to borrow their cabbie's phone. They did, and somehow placed a call (or perhaps their cabbie did) to Cara & Jaime's cabbie instead of to Lufthansa. Cara & Jaime very happily pretended to be Lufthansa, making up some random information to distress the stuntmen. The truth of the flights though was equally confusing. The teams were given umpteen choices to connect from their current stop to Moscow and then on to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Five teams failed to make their connection in Moscow, getting stuck for several hours.
What I was stuck on was why exactly the producers failed to show us the blown connections. They skipped straight ahead to some teams -- Mark & Michael, LaKisha & Jennifer, and Jodi & Christie -- reaching Siberia before filling in the gap with left behind teams recounting their missed connection. It would have made a lot more sense to see it all take place.
The three teams that reached Siberia first had to wait a few hours before the hydroelectric dam they were heading to opened. And then, further distressing me as a viewer, the dam proved irrelevant, there was no task there, just a clue sending them to a church.
The Detour was at the church; teams had to either stack firewood properly or build and install some shutters. All three early bird teams went with stack, which they proceeded to do as locals sang, played accordion, and I'm pretty sure, drank. There was one nice local who declared to the camera -- with some sort of liquid in hand -- "America, I love you." I think it's safe to say we all love her and her bright red hair right back.
Well, maybe not all of us. Maybe not Mark and Michael who, in building their wall, proceeded to knock down the wall they were using as a guide and then, rather than fixing it, went off to build shutters. That certainly didn't show love on their part. Cara & Jaime, Amanda & Kris, and Mel & Mike at least had the decency to not have the example pile get knocked over when the ones they were building went down. Mel & Mike and Amanda & Kris both moved to building shutters too at that point. That task also proved to take forever, but only because teams couldn't find the house they were supposed to fix.
Detour accomplished, Phil introduced the newest twist in the game -- the Blind U-turn. There will be no more of that pesky guilt teams feel when they're forced to declare themselves the perpetrators of the U-turn. No, a team forcing another team to U-turn can now remain blissfully anonymous. I kind of think of that as pulling the curtain behind you in the voting booth and am all for it (not that I would ever feel bad about U-turning someone). I'm guessing that the producers thought it would lead to a little more malice. Perhaps it did. Margie & Luke U-turned Kris & Amanda to try and buy Cara & Jaime time. If I were Luke, I'd want to keep Cara & Jaime around too.
The next stop was a Roadblock forcing one member of each team to complete a three mile bobsled run in under four minutes and to spot seven letters along the way. Completing the run and correctly spotting the seven letters, a player could move on and rearrange the same letters to spell "Chekhov" (they were going for Anton, not Pavel). Apparently people don't know Chekhov, lots of folks had trouble working that out, especially Luke. Go ahead, I know you want to call that Karma, I don't believe in such things, but if you want to call it that you can.
LaKisha & Jennifer left the Roadblock first, but couldn't find the right entrance to the Pit Stop and Christie & Jodi finished the leg first. Amanda & Kris, having to move from woodpiles to construction only to do the woodpiles again meant that if this were an elimination leg they'd be gone.
The show tried to pretend like it was going to be a close finish, with Mark & Michael running out of cash and trying to barter with their cabbie, but the changes in light seemed to indicate it wasn't that close. It was an elimination leg however, and Amanda & Kris went home. Sadly, they went home figuring that it was either LaKisha & Jennifer or Christie & Jodi who U-turned them. They decided that Margie & Luke would feel terrible about seeing such a thing happen. Oops.
I'm left at the end of this episode with the same question I always have with U-turn episodes -- would you really not use it because you'd think someone would get upset? Isn't it just a part of the game?
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Here's my question. How did that people that didn't know who Chekhov was figure out how to spell his name? There are several 1000 combinations, and if you really don't know who he is I would think it could take an infinite amount of time for some of the more dim witted contestants.
The U-turn is a valid part of the game, and clearly useful, so I'm pretty sure I'd be happy to use it. But I can understand why people don't--I don't think they're afraid to pull the trigger because they think it's evil or wrong; I think they just want to avoid having someone mad at them. And if it turns out not to result in the affected team being eliminated, they're almost certainly going to be mad.
Amanda and Kris wouldn't necessarily have been eliminated had they been running a better leg. They were having trouble stacking wood, then went to build shutters, but were pretty slow at that, too. They were already in last place by a decent margin when they found out they had been U-turned.
I simply don't believe all those people came up with Chekhov by random guessing. I think the producers had to give them the answer or at least strong hints, after they realized none of the contestants had heard of him. (And for that matter-I can accept some people might not know theater-but NONE of them had heard of him???)
Thank you for pointing out that there is no reason to feel guilty for using the U-Turn. That bugs me every season.
The Asians and the gays knew Chekhov.
Mel & Mike, stop wandering around wasting time. . . or you're going to find yourselves wandering off to the Amazing Lockup of Losers! I want to scream at those little guys!
And it's really embarr***ing when a bunch of allegedly educated Americans can't come up with the name of a FAMOUS RUSSIAN AUTHOR with letters that pretty clearly spell Chekhov!
If the hillbillies had still been in the race it would have been interesting to see them try to figure out Chekhov
Glad that Amanda and Kris are eliminated so that Margie and Luke do not have to worry about having a target behind their back. The cat would usually be out of the bag (like in the preview). At the very least, it's not the U-Turn victims who are targeting them. I love Margie and Luke to bits and would love for them to win the whole race. Especially for Margie, she has to race and be a mother at the same time! Spells supermom to me!
Josh,
I agree that the trip to the dam was pretty pointless, so I want to petition the producers to, at least one time during a season, go back to the season 1 standard of not telling teams exactly where to go. It would have been much better to give the teams a clue in Moscow telling them to go to the location on the back a the 10 ruble note and then let the teams figure out on their own that they had to go to Siberia.
I too agree with this comment {I agree that the trip to the dam was pretty pointless, so I want to petition the producers to, at least one time during a season, go back to the season 1 standard of not telling teams exactly where to go. It would have been much better to give the teams a clue in Moscow telling them to go to the location on the back a the 10 ruble note and then let the teams figure out on their own that they had to go to Siberia.}
Let them figure it out with clues. Why make it so easy?
Regarding the U-Turn: I think it is "bad Karma" to use the U-Turn just to use it when you have no real strategy to doing so - for example using it on a team that you just don't like even though they are not really directly competing with you on that specific leg. Margie and Luke's use was specific, they were trying to protect allies and had the bonus of not having to declare themselves. But what if the first team that got there did the same thing. They did not know who was behind them at that point so to just haphazardly use it then really wouldn't make sense. Furthermore, it can be used only once so why use it if you don't really have to and make an enemy if you don't really have to, particularly in the past when it was required to declare yourself. Especially in a race where people can go from first to last so easily. Even with this blind U-turn, the team that did it would have to try to keep the secret from the other teams they didn't trust and that could easily throw off their game or lead to other unwitting consequences like turning off an ally.
Which leads me to my conmpalint about the blind U-turn. What a wasted oppurtunity to add drama to the race by making this leg a non-elim. Then you could have the U-turned team trying to divine who "screwed" them. If that was the intent of introducing the blind U-turn it seemed to fail since, because of the difficulty of the 2 challenges and the bunching of the back-end teams it almost ***ured the elimination of the U-turned team regardless of who it had been.