Amazing Race Review

(After we finished the show last night on the DVR, we turned back to regular TV and found out that OBL was dead. The recap kind of got lost. But better late than never, right?)

Our remaining teams are still deep in the Alps after, well hold on, I didn't blog that either did I? (Sorry, I don't remember the excuse for that one.) Ok, quick recap of that one, everyone went from Salzburg to Liechtenstein. While there, they had to measure the length of the country while on moped. The Cowboys screwed it up and had to repeat this. Everyone else worked together and got it right on the first try. The Cowboys fought to work their way back in but they fell short and were eliminated. Ok, everyone caught up?

So, our remaining teams are still deep in the Alps after last week. This time they stayed near the Matterhorn and everyone had to choose between Search (where teams use post-avalanche equipment to find buried signals) and Rescue (where a team member must rappel into a glacial crevasse and be winched out). The FP Gal and I were split on this. I thought that Search looked brutal just because it was so cold and windy up on the mountain. She reminded me that they often mix the tasks so that the harder sounding one is actually quicker. This time I was right. The Rescue part was fairly straight forward; each team went down and back up. The Search part involved digging down a few feet through snow.
The teams then made their way to a chocolatier where they had to make chocolate models of the Travelocity Gnome. This involved carefully painting two halves of a mold and then pouring the chocolate inside. There was controversy as the ownership of each particular mold got confused. For once, the camerawork on the show didn't help us figure out who was at fault.
The teams all finished in close proximity to each other. They were given a clue that told them to go on foot to the final Pit Stop, an old Swiss cabin. We were without sound for a couple of minutes due to an Amber alert but it looked like the only unlikeable team left, the Goths, wasted bunches of time looking for a taxi. They were first to leave the chocolate but fourth to get to the Pit Stop. Once there they got a 30 min penalty for screwing up the last clue. That let Zev and Justin slip in ahead of them and they were finally eliminated.

We couldn't have been happier. Why? Because Kent responds to stress by becoming a world class jerk. He blames everyone for any problem. Last night he repeatedly blamed their fatal taxi ride on Vyxsin because 'she read the clue first'. As if that absolved him of a) reading it and b) understanding what the words 'on foot' mean.
One of the joys of the Amazing Race as a show is that it lets you see how people respond to extreme stress. We much more easily cheer for those who try to respond with grace and aplomb. We especially like those who simply move on to the next obstacle and try to knock that one out. The other teams fight and bicker and try to figure out who will get blamed when they lose. It's not hard to see where that leads.