As usual, this analysis assumes you've already watched the second episode of Amazing Race 20. Those of you who haven't are encouraged to watch it at CBS.com. SPOILERS follow.
Most every leg of the race starts with the teams leaving from a Pit Stop. Usually it's after twelve hours of rest, though occasionally you see twenty four or even thirty six hour gaps. What that means, though, is that if you arrived during the day, you'll be leaving at night, usually very late at night. For instance, Blonde Rachel and Dave arrived at the end of last leg at 2:46 pm, and are thus leaving at 2:46 am, which is a pain in the ass vis a vis trying to get anything done.
That's by design, though. You see, the primary mechanism that the Race uses to keep teams from getting huge leads and thereby killing all the drama in the Race is called "bunching." That occurs when the lead teams run into something that forces them to sit around and wait, which allows the trailing teams to catch up. There are two types of bunching. One is Travel Bunching, where the teams have to fly somewhere but the next flight is hours away, so that while they're sitting around waiting to board, the trailers catch up and with everyone on the same plane, the race is reset to zero when they land. That happens most often at airports, but it can work for any type of transportation, including boats and trains.
The second type of bunching is Hours of Operation Bunching. That's where the location or activity that's next for the teams doesn't open for a few hours, so the leaders get to watch their lead vanish one team at a time. That's what happens in this one, as everyone catches up before the local courier arrives at dawn to hand out the next clue.
It also renders moot the full list of departure times that I jotted down as they appeared on screen, but there was still some interesting data to mine there. For instance the top three teams were separated by all of three minutes, and that the gap between the lead plane and the second plane seems to have been about two hours. Also that the Twins either got lost or were really bad at making empanadas, because there where nearly an hour behind the next team, Ralph and Vanessa. Guess there's some missing drama there.
Speaking of screen time, one way you can guess which teams are going to be in it for a while versus the ones that are going out soon is that the more screen time you get in the early episodes, the more likely you are to get flushed out early. Meanwhile, if you get short shrift, it tends to suggest you'll be there near the end. So, since they only got Misa and Maiya for one episode, the producers tended to show as much as them as they could. Considering that the Twins seem to have lost a whole hour in there somewhere and no one felt it was worth it to show us how, I'm guessing that the Twins will be around into the later stages of the Race.
Anyway, the teams head out into a Detour, the choice between two tasks. One of the ways I tend to keep myself involved in events is to try and guess which one is the better choice. In this case the choice was between setting up a solar oven and boiling some water with it, and collecting wood and clay then hauling it a mile on donkey-back and then making a fire. Normally you should try to avoid gathering tasks, since you never want to be at the mercy of random chance to find something the way Misa and Maiya were in the first episode. However, in this case you weren't searching for a single hidden object, you were just gathering stuff off the ground, so I thought that the fire task was the better bet.
Oddly, only Team Border Patrol agreed with me. Everyone else did the solar oven. And it turned out that I was right, since the Border Patrol guys managed to get lost and lose 20 minutes and still ended up in second place! the big sticking point was in how long it took for the pots to boil, with some teams standing around for as much as 45 minutes waiting for the sun to do its job.
The next step was to take a bus eighteen hours to Buenos Aries. Blond Rachel and Dave, Red Rachel and Brandon, Team Border Patrol, and Bopper and Mark all make the first bus. The second bus has the Clowns, the Jersey Shore Boys, the Twins, and Ralph and Vanessa. Finally, Team DEA and Kerri and Stacy make it to the last bus. These last two are fretting because it seems all but certain that one of them will be eliminated. But then random fate takes a stab at the second bus by somehow breaking a window on that bus, putting all four teams there in a competition for the bottom.
Now I've said in the past that one of the things I enjoy about the Race is that you can't get voted off the island. You win or lose based on when you arrive at the mat, no more and no less. But that isn't entirely true. After all, there is the once or twice per race U-Turn which you can use to screw another team. But there is another social element to the Race as well...how willing other teams are to help you out or team up with you. Team DEA has that clearly in mind. They've gone undercover as kindergarten teachers, since they're afraid that revealing their DEA skills will make other teams more likely to U-Turn them or not help them out.
The social element comes to the forefront in Buenos Aries. The final task, a Roadblock which means only one teammate can participate, involves figuring out the average weight of a corral of cattle during a cattle auction. So you have to count the number of cows, catch the total weight of the corral during the auctioneer's pitch, then successfully do the division all while various bidders yell out numbers. It's not an easy task, especially for frazzled and sleep deprived racers, so many of the teams end up working together. But who to work with? Blonde Rachel and one of the Border Patrol guys end up working together, but purposely exclude Red Rachel because Brandon had purportedly ripped a out of Team Border Patrol's hands during the pile up with the courier. Mark watches Red Rachel self-destruct during the task and shows mercy, basically handing her the answer to the problem. That doesn't make Red feel any better, though, as she continues to implode on he cab ride over to the Pit Stop. Clearly the pair from Big Brother are going to be a high drama team. Here's hoping they implode right out of the Race.
The middle two teams, still believing that they're fighting for last place, didn't cooperate at all, which only makes sense. That leads to Kerri and Stacy ending up team number five, and Team DEA getting the Phil Fake-out where he pretends they've been eliminated, then reveals that the other teams had bus problems and they're still alive.
That leaves us with the remaining four teams screwed by the bus problem. By the way, how does a window of a bus suddenly shatter? Did someone take a shot at the bus or something? Anyway, there's a little more math teamwork that ends up leaving Dave of the Clowns in the dust, and he and Cherie are duly eliminated. That at least frees me from having to distinguish between the two Daves on the show. It was also nice to get some validation on another [b]Suvivibility: Low[/b] team going out early. Now if we can just get Kerri and Stacy out next, I'll really look prophetic.
Episode two standings:
1st - Blonde Rachel and Dave
2nd - JJ and Art (Border Patrol)
3rd - Bopper and Mark
4th - Red Rachel and Brendon
5th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins)
6th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)
7th - Vanessa and Ralph
8th - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)
9th - Eliott and Andrew (Twins)
OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns)
OUT - Misa and Maiya
Dead Team Obituary: Dave and Cherie
As I said, I'd rated this team as a low survivability team, primarily because I figured that they'd fall too far behind in a grueling physical task. As it turned out, it was bad luck with the bus and Dave's poor math skills that did them in. Who knew?
Something that I've noticed is that the show tends to try and slip in something inspirational about a team right before they go out. It's like they've got this story about a team that hasn't got a good context as far as the Race itself goes, but since this is the last time we'll see this team, they might as well throw it in. That's how we learned that Dave had beaten cancer twice, which made me even more suspicious than usual about their chances when I heard Dave relate the tale early in the episode.
Given that they managed to leave the show with clown walks and cartwheels, I have to admire Dave and Cherie for sticking to their roots. Of course, if they'd been more interesting during the Race rather than as they left it, maybe I'd feel bad about their leaving.
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