WEP '12, Day 76 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 5

You should know the drill by now.  Spoilers for episode 5 of season 20 of The Amazing Race.

There's something that occurs at the beginning of most episodes of The Amazing Race that can be a big clue as to what's going to happen in that leg of the race.  It's what veteran race watchers call the Loser Edit.  In a Loser Edit, the team that's going to be eliminated at the end of the episode is given some interview time at the beginning of it to explain a little more about who they are and why they're racing and so on.  Presumably every team gets interviewed like that all the time to provide Loser Edits for whichever team actually loses, but the one they show is a clue as to who's going out.  The reason they do it, especially for teams who haven't had a lot of screen time, is to try to make that team more sympathetic, so that you feel bad for them when they leave the show.

This week's episode had a Loser Edit for Kerri and Stacy.  Let's see how it turned out, shall we?

First off, we have some travel.  There's a huge eight hour gap between the Fast Forwarded Team Border Patrol and the saved by non-elimination Bopper & Mark, but almost all of it gets eaten up by various travel related delays as the teams take trains across Europe to Bavaria.  Most of the rest of it is lost by a good old fashioned Hours of Operation Bunching, so pretty much everyone is all caught up as they finally pick up clues and get rolling again.

That leads to the first decision point, a Detour.  What's faster, sculpting an old German's beard into something really complicated, or following a trail of gingerbread then using it to complete a gingerbread house?  It turns out that, like all the very best Detours, the answer is "it depends on who's doing it!"  And if they're representative of the breed, my respect for the Border Patrol is growing in leaps and bounds.  Who knew they were such good hair stylists?

Art & JJ prove to be good at beard sculpting, gnome curling, and perhaps most importantly, not getting lost, and manage to come in first.  Again.  That's three in a row for Team Border Patrol, and if that doesn't solidify them as the favorites to win it all, I don't know what does.

The rest of the leg plays out with relatively few surprises.  A few teams get decoyed by the wrong castle, there being two on either side of the highway they're all travelling along, but in the end it comes down to  race for last between Team DEA and Kerri & Stacy.  Kerry & Stacy manage to finish the task, sliding a gnome along ice into the middle of a circle, first.  Nery of the DEA girls has a horrible time of it, just being unable to get it right despite something like two hundred attempts, but to her credit, Jamie doesn't get down on her, and instead is encouraging as team after team races past them.  They finally pull it off by a millimeter and rush to try and catch up with Kerri and Stacy, which any veteran race watcher will tell you almost never works.

Except that this time it does.  Kerri & Stacy managed to get lost for the very last time, letting a relieved and nearly broken Team DEA hang on by their fingernails.

Loser Edit confirmed.

1st - JJ and Art (Border Patrol) 
2nd - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)  
3rd - Vanessa and Ralph 
4th - Blonde Rachel and Dave 
5th - Red Rachel and Brendon 
6th - Bopper and Mark

7th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)  

OUT - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins) 

OUT - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 

OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya

Dead Team Obituary: Kerri & Stacy

Kerri & Stacy had a pretty quiet race, all things considered.  There was a brief fear of heights thing when they got fooled by the first Roadblock about who had to jump out of the plane, but other than that, they were rarely interesting enough to earn much in the way of screen time.  What we did see of them was reasonably pleasant, certainly there was little of the overblown drama that infects the couples teams on this season.  But that doesn't mean that I'm really upset to see them go.  It's like that sometimes.  With twenty two people racing around, the edits favor the most dramatic people and situations.  Kerri & Stacy never had much drama.  That's good for them in a way, because the drama is almost always ugly on this show, but it costs them the chance to be seen very much.  C'est la vie.  

WEP '12, Day 74 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 4

With episode six on the air tomorrow, I really need to get my ass caught up on this one.  Same deal as always, read the recap at TWoP or view the episode itself at CBS.com.  Oh, and spoilers.

Episode four of season twenty involved three major race concepts, one of which we've discussed before, the Travel Fail.  That came up before when the second bus blew a window and re-shuffled the teams.  This time, though, the Travel Fail was self-inflicted, with Mark and Bopper failing to read the part of the clue that told them that they need to get their plane tickets to Italy at a travel agent instead of at the airport.  That costs them time.  So much so that they end up on a plane an hour and change behind every other team.  The big question to this leg of the race was whether or not they could manage to erase that deficit.

I'll save you the suspense, and anyway you should have already seen the episode or read the recap, right?  No, they can't.  To their credit they do manage to get within line of sight of one other team, but it's as that team is leaving the location of a challenge that the boys from Kentucky are just arriving at, and they never get even that close again.  So our beloved boys from Kentucky come in last.  I'll deal with the fallout of that at the end of the analysis.

The second concept we have to talk about is the Fast Forward.  The Fast Forward is a game mechanic that allows teams to try to complete a side challenge.  If they pull it off, they can skip all other tasks and head right to the Pit Stop.  The catch?  Only the first team to complete the challenge gets the benefit of the Fast Forward, and each team can only use a Fast Forward once per race.  In the first few races there was a Fast Forward available on every leg of the race except the last one.  When you used your Fast Forward was a big part of the strategy of racing.  For the most part, the Fast Forward was used defensively.  In other words, you saved it until you were in danger of getting eliminated.  Then you gambled that no one else had tried to use it ahead of you.  It was a moment of tense decision making for teams that added to the drama of the show.

Alas, that drama is dead now.  Why?  Because in the more recent races they've cut the number of Fast Forwards down to only a couple per race.  That means that whichever team is in first place when they get to a Fast Forward just grabs it and pads their lead.  Rather than an interesting strategic choice, the Fast Forward's been reduced to a reward that guarantees the team in first place will stay there.  That's what happens here, letting Team Border Patrol surge to a second first place finish in a row.

So we know who came in first and who came in last.  Was there anything else interesting going on?  Not really.  Both teams with Rachels in them had inter-personal breakdowns, showing once again why it's a bad idea to race with your spouse/dating partner.  Other than that?  No, not really.

At the end, then, Mark and Bopper came skidding into last place.  There they got a couple of surprises.  The first was Art & JJ, having heard that Bopper was racing for money for his sick daughter, deciding to split the cash they won for coming in first with the Kentucky boys.  Which was cool of them, I have to admit.

The second surprise was today's third and final concept, the Non-Elimination Leg.  You see, sprinkled tow or three times per race is a Non-Elimination Leg where coming in last doesn't kick you off the show.  The first such leg in Race 20 was this episode.  That means that Mark &  Bopper live to race on.  However, they will have to do an extra challenge on the next leg, called a Speed Bump, as their penalty for failure.  That's well worth it to have a shot at staying in the race, though.

I should also point out that for a veteran race-watcher it was obvious that this was Non-Elimination when Phil didn't eliminate them right off the bat.  The man's not an asshole.  If you're gone, he doesn't drag it out to make you suffer.  He gives it to you right to your face.  If he tells you you're last and doesn't immediately follow it with "I'm sorry to tell you but you've been eliminated from the race," then either some other team fucked up worse than you did or it's Non-Elimination, as it was here.

It does lead to an interesting scenario, though.  If Mark & Bopper manage to beat the odds and win the race and the million bucks, are they going to give Art & JJ their money back?  Hopefully, we'll get to find out.

Episode four standings:

1st - JJ and Art (Border Patrol) 
2nd - Blonde Rachel and Dave 

3rd - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)  

4th - Vanessa and Ralph 

5th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)  

6th - Red Rachel and Brendon 

7th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins)  

8th - Bopper and Mark 

OUT - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 

OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya


With no team eliminated, we'll be skipping the Dead Team Obituary in favor of an updated look at the surviving teams.

Blonde Rachel and Dave

Alas, after a promising start, Blonde Rachel and Dave have degraded into bickering.  Mostly, at least as far as what we've been shown, this is Dave's fault.  The Army pilot keeps insisting that they need to "communicate" better, but what he seems to mean by that is "you do what I say."  That's perfectly acceptable in the Army, less so with your wife.  Likability: Medium.  (And dropping fast if they don't quit fighting.)

Despite a terrible third leg where they came in 6th, we can't ignore the back-to-back first place finishes, and even with the in-fighting, they still came in second on this leg.  Survivibility: High.

Bopper and Mark

They've done nothing to cancel their initial hero status, they don't fight among themselves, and they're friendly and interesting to watch.  Likability: High.

On the other hand, they've been 9th and last in two legs, while 3rd and 4th in the other two.  That's not a recipe for long-term success, but they're better off than some other teams.  Survivibilty: Medium.

Nary and Jamie (Team DEA)

I've gotta say, I've been expecting more from this team.  Certainly they've been pleasant enough for what little screen time they've gotten.  They've done or said nothing to change my initial appraisal of them as people.  Even the whole "going undercover as kindergarten teachers" bit is more cute than insulting.  Likibility: High.

However, they might as well be kindergarten teachers for all their performance to date has shown.  They've come in 4th, 6th, 5th, and 5th.  That's a pretty middle of the road showing, so that earns them Survivibilty: Medium.

Brendon and Red Rachel

With the last couple of legs, this team has proven to be increasingly fragile.  Unfortunately, that's manifested by Rachel whining and screaming at Brendon which in no way endears to me a team that I didn't much like in the first place.  Likability: Low.  (And if I had a more flexible system, I'd call it Non-Existent.)

That fragility has hurt them in the last leg in particular, with them threatening to quit.  Those kinds of teams almost never survive for long, as a desire to quit makes you less likely to give the kind of effor that's required to stay in the race.  Still, they do have a pretty impressive record with two 2nd place finishes to go along with a 4th and a 6th, so we can't count them out entirely, as much as I'd like to.  Survivibilty: Medium

Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Team Jersey Boys)

To my surprise, I haven't found the Jersey shtick as annoying as I thought I would.  Maybe they just look better in comparison to the Rachel teams, but they just aren't on the Hate 'Em List anymore.  That doens't mean that I want them to win, though.  Likability: Medium.

 After a rough start, 10th and 8th, the Jersey Boys have picked it up lately, coming in 3rd for the last couple of legs.  Split the difference.  Survivibility: Medium.

Kerri and Stacy

Still haven't seen much of this team.  Still seem nice, if uninspired.  Likability: Medium.

Can't say I'm impressed with their performance, though.  Coming in 7th, 5th, 7th, and 7th doesn't suggest you're long for the race.  Survivibilty: Low.

Vanessa and Ralph

This team presents a quandary for me.  On one hand, they seem to be petty people, fond of insulting other teams over things like dress sense and the way they wear their hair.  On the other hand, the team they lash out against most is Red Rachel and Brandon, a team I don't care for either.  Still, Ralph and Vanessa's behavior aggravates me.  Likability: Low.

If trends continue, I won't have to worry about it for much longer.  Coming in 5th, 7th, 8th, and 4th doesn't inspire much in the way of confidence.  Survivibility: Low.

Art and JJ

They've cut down on the boorishness, and the offer of cash to Bopper and Mark was pretty redemptive.  Not my favorite team, but they're rising in the standings.  Likibility: Medium.

As far as actual racing goes, they've been awesome.  Third, 2nd, 1st, 1st is a great record by anyone's standards.  Survivibilty: High.

WEP '12, Day 63 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis Ep. 3

As always, this analysis presumes you've either watched the episode or at least read a recap.  As such, there will be no attempt to avoid SPOILERS.

Though I've since learned that other people, who are wrong, disagree on this point, I think that the leg run by Dave and Blonde Rachel in this episode was one of the worst I've ever seen.  Granted, I need to qualify that statement as "one of the worst legs I've ever seen that did not result in elimination."  After all, Dave and Rachel are still in the race, which makes it a better leg than the Momily collapse in the first race, or Misa and Maiya's pitiful efforts in the first leg of this race.

What made it so bad?  Well, let's see how things went.  This leg of the race started off with Travel Bunching at the Buenos Aries airport.  However, a few teams, including Blonde Rachel and Dave, Bopper and Mark, Team Border Patrol, and Team DEA (alias "Kindergarten teachers") all managed to get onto a flight that gets them into the next destination, Asuncion, Paraguay, a couple of hours before the other teams.

They'll need it.  This leg includes a Detour that has two choices, as always.  The first is to create a pyramid of watermelons.  The second is to string a harp.  Every team from the first flight decides to do the melons.  It turns out to be a bad call, because even if you can accomplish the task, it still takes a lot of energy and time. For Dave and Blonde Rachel this is Bad Decision #1.  Granted, it's a forgivable mistake in that virtually every team on this leg will make the same call.

To their credit, Team Border Patrol plans carefully as they lay down their watermelons, making sure that they're all facing the same direction as they go to increase stability.  And it works for them, letting them cruise through the stacking in one try, and after going through the Roadblock without much problem, nets them a first place finish.  I might find them a little obnoxious, but you've got to give the Border Patrol guys credit, they've never finished worse than third place so far.  My original analysis of them as a strong team remains a pretty good call.

But this entry is about Blonde Rachel and Dave.  Their melon pyramid collapses, as does those of Bopper & Mark and Team DEA.  However, while both Bopper & Mark and Team DEA take the hint and immediately bail out to try the harps, Blonde Rachel and Dave decide to try to fix their pyramid, despite the probability that they'll pretty much have to take it apart and start over.  They consider using the Express Pass that they earned for winning the first leg of the race, and decide against it.  I'm going to call this Bad Decision #2.  Either use the Pass immediately so you get the maximum value out of it, or put it aside.  Furthermore, if you leave the same time that the other two teams do, you're still in the pack and not likely to fall very far behind.  Especially since the teams from the second flight are arriving just as Bopper & Mark and Team DEA are bailing out on the melons.  Since you know it takes ages to to the melon pyramid, it's the perfect time to bail out and see how the harp goes.

What's worse, though, is what happens next.  You see, Blonde Rachel and Dave futz around with their pyramid even longer, and when it collapses for real then decide to bail on it.  They rush over to the harp, glance at it, and then decide to use the Express Pass at that moment.  Without even trying to do the task.  That means that they've wasted a ton of time that they could have skipped if they'd done the Pass at the outset, but that they're alos using it while in around fourth place, meaning they're not in great danger of getting eliminated.  They've pretty much done the worst thing they possibly could with that Express Pass, making this Bad Decision #3.

But the hits keep coming!  Next they get to the Roadblock.  The clue is "who's ready to use their head?"  Odds are good that this isn't going to be a running or strength based task.  Probably it'll be a figuring something out task, or something goofy if the clue writes are being clever.  Your team consists of one strong and buff man and one not very much of either woman.  So, logically, you should send Blonde Rachel in for this task and save Dave for a task where carrying or running is important, right?  That is, however, not what they do.  They send Dave.  And, as it turns out, the writers were being clever.  The task is to balance bottles on your head.  And, unlike most tasks where you can keep trying until you succeed, there's a fail state: You only get 20 bottles.  If you break them all, you lose.

Dave breaks them all.

So with Bad Decision #4 in the rear view mirror, Blonde Rachel and Dave make their way to the Pit Stop.  Had they not wasted their Express Pass, they could have used it on the bottle task when it became clear that Dave was never going to succeed at it.  If they had, they'd  have come in second this leg.  Instead, they wait out a two hour penalty and end up in sixth place for the leg.  If everyone had been able to get on the first plane, that penalty would have ended the race for them.

Truly, it was a miserable performance, which even Dave agrees with in a post-leg interview.  "We did everything wrong."

True.  Luckily for you, there was that two hour gap.  And because of that, the twins managed to botch both the harp stringing and the bottles badly enough that even Ralph and Vanessa, who got the bit in their teeth and fought through to finish the melons despite multiple collapses, passed them for eighth place, ending the twins' run.

But I'll remember this leg for Blonde Rachel and Dave's mistakes.  I've rarely seen a team that was doing so well manage to do so poorly and still survive.  Let's see if Nietzsche was right about getting stronger.

Episode three standings:

1st - JJ and Art (Border Patrol) 
2nd - Red Rachel and Brendon 
3rd - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys) 
4th - Bopper and Mark 
5th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)  
6th - Blonde Rachel and Dave 
7th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins)  
8th - Vanessa and Ralph   
OUT - Eliott and Andrew (Twins) 
OUT - Dave and Cherie (Clowns) 
OUT - Misa and Maiya

There are some trends to note here.  First of all, the Border Patrol guys have, as mentioned, never finished worse than third.  Meanwhile, Vanessa & Ralph and Kerri & Stacy have never finished better than fifth.  keep an eye on that.  Also, I'd like to take a moment to compliment Red Rachel & Brendon and the Jersey Boys for coming in second and third, despite coming in two hours behind because of the airport situation.

Dead Team Obituary: Eliott and Andrew

Remember what I said last week about a team not getting much screen time early in the race meaning they'll be around for a while?  In particular, in reference to the Twins?  Yeah, that didn't work out.  Despite my expectations, the Twins went sixth, ninth, and last.  the only significant screen time they ever got was their final death spiral.  I guess they never did anything so interesting that the producers felt thy needed to be on screen.  There are teams that go that way, some races.  The first team ever eliminated from the race, Matt & Ana, went out like that.  I guess I was trusting the tropes more than I was the evidence of the twins' poor performance.  Good to know, I guess.

As for the twins themselves, we never really got to know them.  They didn't fight very much, they didn't interact with the other teams very much, at least as far as was ever shown, and they never did anything particularly cool or terrible except proving to be bad at harp stringing and balancing a bottle on your head.  I expected more of them, but that's the way it goes.  At least Andrew got to play some soccer with a Brazilian hero, so that's something right? 

WEP '12, Day 59 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis Ep. 2

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.

WEP '12, Day 53 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 1

This is my Amazing Race Analysis.  As the season goes along, I'll talk about the show and what happened, and compare the events here to what I've seen in previous Races.  Naturally, this will involve Spoilers.  Anything after the title card is a Spoiler Zone, so be warned.  My original look at The Amazing Race can be found here, and my breakdown of the teams here.  

Episode one of Season 20 served to introduce this race's cast, which we discussed last time, but was also a leg in its own right.  Normally there are certain rituals to the first episode.  For instance, Phil introduces each team one by one, then they all line up or are in a big arc, Phil reminds the audience what the basic rules are since frankly, if a team has gotten to the starting line and doesn't know they're in a race for a million dollars, telling them now won't save them.  Then he does a variation of his usual send-off: "The world is waiting...travel safe....go!"   And they're off.

In the early Races, the first clue was sitting on your backpack and told you a location in a foreign country to travel to.  It would also say that there would be three flights out at different times, and it was first come, first serve.  That tended to spread the teams out in the early going so that the producers could focus on only a few teams at a time.  It also meant that the first team eliminated was inevitably from the last plane in, so the early teams were battling for position while the last few teams were battling for survival.

Over the last couple of Races, though, they've added an intermediary step where you have to complete a challenge at the starting line before you get that first clue.  The problem is, the initial challenge is a luck thing, not a skill thing.  In this case you had to pull down balloons over a vineyard to find the ones that held clues.  There were eleven clues and a hundred balloons, so the last team to find a balloon, Misa and Maiya ended up wasting two hours looking for the damn thing, but that wasn't enough to keep them off the last plane, so it makes you wonder what the point of it was in the first place.  Especially since they skipped all the airport and travel stuff and cut from Misa and Maiya finally getting their clue to the teams from the first (of only two this time) plane getting going.

They make it to Santa Barbara, Argentina, which was cute since the Race started in Santa Barbara, California, and get to the first Roadblock.  That means you pick one teammate to do the task and the other to watch.  Since the destination was a small airport, it was pretty easy to guess that the task would probably involve exiting an airplane in flight, so pretty much everyone put the more adventurous partner up for the task and made sure to not pick the team members who are scared of heights.  Which was then that they discover that it's a flipped task.  The non-participating teammate has to skydive, while the active one has to follow a map to find them.  And, despite some hand-wringing, everyone gets out of the plane and to the ground easily, since it's a tandem jump.

Let me take a moment to note something here.  Never, in any of the Races I have seen, has any contestant ever failed to complete one of the various scary tasks, like bungee jumping, ziplining, or skydiving.  And yet, every time they show one of those tasks they always go to commercial on someone saying something like "I can't do it!"  And then, every single damn time, we get back from commercial and said person can do it after all, and away they go out the airplane.  They've been pulling the "will they or won't they" editing since the very first Race, and the answer is always "of course they will, dumbass...there's a million bucks on the line!"  I'm tired of the gimmick.  Unless someone actually chickens out, I wish they'd cut that trick out of their playbook.

Anyway, while the exiting the plane part was easy for everyone, the partners driving by map to find them wasn't as simple for everyone.  In fact, two teams in the second group had problems.  Joey "Fitness" of the Jersey Boys can't drive stick, so his progress was slow.  Meanwhile, Maiya manages to drive off the road and get her SUV stuck, requiring some random passersby to save her by winching her vehicle out.  It turns out that one big mistake is worse than Joey "Fitness'" driving misadventures, so Misa and Maiya are the last teams to arrive at the next challenge.

Said challenge was to watch a pair of chefs make two types of empanadas, then to make sixty of each type yourself.  The sneaky part was that the meat empanadas and the veggie empanadas had to be folded closed in different ways.  If you didn't notice that, you could waste a lot of time doing half of your empanadas wrong.  Which is precisely what Team Border Patrol members Art and JJ do.  Even though they'd arrived at the challenge first, they ended up coming in third, while getting lapped by Blonde Rachel and Dave, who arrive first and get the coveted Express Pass, and Brendon and Red Rachel, who come in second.

The show itself is pretty unconcerned with the remaining teams, choosing instead to focus on the drama of the bottom-feeders, the Jersey Boys and Misa and Maiya.  Misa and Maiya actually get the task done first, despite arriving last.  But, having made the poor decision to leave their bags in the car they lose time running back to get them and then, in the most inexplicable Racing moment I've ever seen, manage to get out behind the building and within line of sight of Phil...at which point, they turned around and went back inside!  According to the post leg interview, they somehow managed to not see Phil, despite him being right there!

Well, fail that badly, and karma will strike you down.  Before Misa and Maiya manage to work their way back to where Phil is, the Jersey Boys finish their empanadas and aren't struck blind by panic, see Phil, and come in tenth.  Which is a tragedy, because I don't care for them, and was hoping the designated Doomed Hot Girl Team would be able to last at least until the second episode.  But it was not to be.

So, after episode one, here are the standings:

1st - Blonde Rachel and Dave

2nd - Red Rachel and Brendon

3rd - JJ and Art (Border Patrol)

4th - Nary and Jamie (DEA)

5th - Vanessa and Ralph

6th - Eliott and Andrew (Twins)

7th - Kerri and Stacy (Cousins) 

8th - Dave and Cherie (Clowns)

9th - Bopper and Mark 

10th - Joey "Fitness" and Danny (Jersey Boys)

OUT - Misa and Maiya

Dead Team Obituary: Misa and Maiya 

I hate to say it, but that was one of the worst performances over the course of a single leg that I've ever seen.  Fine, being last out of the vineyard was probably just bad luck.  Once they were the last ones left, they'd have to find the one clue out of a hundred balloons.  And it didn't even really hurt them, since they were still on the same plane as four other teams.  But driving off the road and getting your car stuck?  Leaving your bags in the car?  Finding your way to the Pit Stop and then turning around?  And since they only lost by a matter of minutes, correcting even one of those mistakes, especially the last one, would have kept them in the Race!

Rarely has a team self-destructed so completely, and usually when you see such failures it's well into the Race whre Killer Fatigue starts to set in and people start making stupid mistakes because they're no longer thinking clearly.  But this was in the very first leg!  You shouldn't be that tired yet!  Especially for a young and fit team.  There's really no excuse for that.  

Alas, the Doomed Hot Girls Team proved to be exceptionally doomed in record fashion.  

WEP '12, Day 52 - Amazing Race 20 Analysis, Ep. 0

The twentieth season of The Amazing Race started last Sunday, and as I mentioned back during my Competitive Television series, I'm watching it.  So I thought I'd add my thoughts about what's going on in the Race so far.  Naturally, this will involve Spoilers, though I'm only talking about the teams themselves today.  The big Spoilers will start in tomorrow's post about the first episode itself.

Indeed, if you'd like to watch the episode in question, feel free to drop by the CBS website...you can watch the episodes there.  I'd also like to point you to the Wikipedia page which has an excellent breakdown of the history and mechanics of the show.  It makes for a great reference if you're unfamiliar with the show.

SPOILERS for Episode 1 follow.

The world is waiting...for SPOILERS!

The first episode of a large cast reality show like this is always tough.  First of all you've got to introduce the mechanics of the show to first time viewers, but you've also got to introduce all the contestants, and make the episode interesting enough that people come back next week!  It's a tall order, indeed.

From a veteran viewer's perspective, there are a couple of different things I'm looking at.  I'm looking at likability of the teams, which generally determines how much I'm rooting for them, and there's survivability, which indicates what I think of their chances to actually win the Race.

This year's teams are as follows (names given according to the picture, so first name is the person on the left):

Blonde Rachel and Dave

In an improbable bit of casting there are two Rachels racing this season.  Hopefully one team or the other will go out soon, preferably the team with the other Rachel in it, so that I can quit having to distinguish between them.  This early on there hasn't been enough screen time for either team to really get a good feel for them, so I'm resorting to distinguishing them by hair color.

Dave's chopper pilot for the Army, while Blonde Rachel is in administration for hospitals.  They're married, and that usually (but not always) is better for your team's chances than merely being a couple.  You'd tend to think that since Dave's been away at war, that would apply more stress to their relationship than a few weeks on the road would, so from a relationship standpoint they should do well.  Physically, they seem in good shape which is important both for winning sprints and for surviving the grueling later legs.  They also seem pretty on the ball which keeps you from getting lost and helps when trying to figure out what's the best flight to take.  Survivibility: High.

They've been pretty friendly to the other teams and haven't displayed the kind of jerky behavior that gets one villain status on the show, so I'm giving them Likability: High.

Bopper and Mark

Best friends from Kentucky, Mark and Bopper are refreshingly honest about why they're on the Race.  It's not the bullshit that you get from other teams about "seeing the world" or "testing the strength of our relationship."  Nope, Bopper and Mark want the money.  Bopper's seven year old daughter has some kind of health problem, and a one in eleven chance at half a million dollars seems like the best odds they could come up with to get that kind of cash quickly.  That puts them on a semi-heroic level and increases my desire to root for them.  Of course, the downside of it is if, as is likely, they eventually get eliminated, that failure will be that much more poignant because of the sick little girl factor.  Likability: High.

Unusually, there's no designated Old Team on Amazing Race 20.  Ever since Dave & Margerita in the very first Amazing Race there's almost always been one team that was in their fifties or sixties.  Granted, those teams usually wiped out by mid-season because of endurance problems, but they were usually included.  Not this time.  This time, Mark checks in as the oldest Racer at 45.  It's hard to say how smart they are or aren't since they really didn't get much screen time, but I'm going to ding them for maybe running out of gas in the late stages of the Race.  Survivability: Medium.

Nary and Jamie

Virtually every season there's a hot girl team.  Usually they're introduced while frolicking in bikinis.  And virtually every season, said hot girl team is one of the first teams gone, since they lack much in the way of skills, smarts, or endurance.  I've even seen teams that lacked all three!  Surprisingly enough, though, Nary and Jamie aren't that team.  No, they're DEA agents instead.  So rather than watching them frolic, you see them stalking through a firing range with M-16s.  Which is a pity, as I do enjoy a good frolic, but does make Nary and Jamie much more interesting than just another hot girl team would have been.  That said, they didn't get much screen time in the first episode so it's hard to judge their personalities just yet.  But I'll give them the attractive to me bonus points and bump them to Likability: High.  Your mileage may vary, of course.

As far as performance goes, they're DEA agents in their early thirties.  They're in shape and I'm going to assume the DEA training includes things like map reading, basic navigation, and the like, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them in the final three racing to the end.  Survivibility: High.

Brendon and Red Rachel

Brendon and Red Rachel are engaged.  That's a bad idea on the Race, because, unlike most married couples, an engaged couple may not have been through truly difficult times together yet.  Ever since the tragic tale of Lenny and Karyn in Amazing Race 1, it's almost received truth that being on the Race without a strong relationship can break that relationship.  Lenny and Karyn were the first, but they were not the last.  That said, though, there is another factor.  You see, Brendon and Red Rachel were contestants on one of CBS' other reality shows, Big Brother.  In fact, Red Rachel won the season she was on.  Personally, I hate that.  She's already got a pile of cash and some pseudo-celebrity because of Big Brother, why does she need to be taking up a spot on The Amazing Race too?  And can you think of a worse scenario than Brendon and Rachel winning to add to their cash pile while Bopper's little girl gets nothing?  I hate the practice, I hate the idea, and that hate makes Brendon and Red Rachel the first team I'm actively rooting against.  Likability: Low.

However, they have both survived a reality show.  Red Rachel even won one.  That means that things that can fluster newer teams like constant camera exposure and the pace of shooting day in and day out are things this pair have already learned to deal with.  And pretty often, the transfers from other shows do rather well for just those reasons.  Thus I am sadly force to rate them as Survivibilty: High.

Joey "Fitness" and Danny

Right.  These guys.  They're self proclaimed "Guidos" who met on the Jersey Shore.  I can see why they chose to play themselves up that way, as it almost certainly helped them get on the show in the first place, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  Call me shallow for disliking them because of their gimmick, but it's not like I've got much else to judge them on so far.  Likability: Low.

Traditionally teams made up of two young men have done pretty well.  Teams that fit that description won the first two Races, and six of the eighteen that it was possible for them to win.  (Amazing Race 8 was the ill-advised "family edition" that included teams of four parents and children.)  On the other hand, the Jersey Boys don't seem all that bright, and you need to be smart to progress very far.  I'll call it a cautious Survivibility: Medium.

Misa and Maiya

Misa and Maiya are sisters of Japanese descent from San Diego, seem to be friendly and cheerful, and look pretty good in bikinis.  That all works for me.  Likability: High.

However, do you remember what I said about the doomed hot girl team?  This is that team.  I appreciate that they had the Asian-American team as the cheesecake as a nod towards racial equality, but that doesn't change the fact that almost always if they show you cavorting in a bikini, you aren't making it all the way around the world.  It was some decent cavorting, at least.  Survivibility: Low.

Dave and Cherie

Another gimmick team like the Jersey Boys, this is a couple of married professional clowns.  I honestly haven't got much in the way of a feel for them yet, either positive or negative.  Maybe they're funny when not under stress, but through one episode they weren't really standing out for me one way or the other.  Likability: Medium.

That said, they're both in their forties like Bopper and Mike, and they appear to be more out of shape than the Kentucky Boys too.  I'm guessing they won't make it all that far.  Survivbility: Low

Elliot and Andrew

Unlike Misa and Maiya who seem to have gone out of their way to dress similarly and wear their hair similarly to make it as hard as possible to figure out who's who as they run past the camera, twins Elliot and Andrew had the decency to wear their hair different lengths.  Elliot's a musician and Andrew plays professional soccer.  Didn't see much of them and don't have much of an opinion on them as people yet.  Likability: Medium.

Twins who are both in good shape?  That's a pretty solid basis for a team in my book.  Survivibility: High. 

Kerri and Stacy

Thirty year old cousins from Mississippi, Kerry and Stacy didn't leave much of an impression on me.  Part of that was because they ran a perfectly serviceable leg without any major mishaps or feats of brilliance.  They seem pleasant enough, so I don't dislike them, but neither did they really win me over.  Likability: Medium.

Traditionally, though, all women teams have not done well.  In fact, there has only been one all female winning team, and that was on Amazing Race 18: Unfinished Business where popular losers from previous seasons came back for a second try at the Race.  So when Kisha and Jen won, it was something they'd had some idea of what they were getting into.  I'm not sure that Kerri and Stacy have that here, so until I see more of them I'm going with the numbers.  Survivbility: Low.

Vanessa and Ralph

I'll be honest, until I saw their pictures on the website, I hadn't remembered that Vanessa and Ralph were even on the show!  Couples are the most common team format, and there are several every year.  So many, in fact, that they start to blend together after a time.  For me, Vanessa and Ralph have vanished into the same morass that most other couples have.  Maybe they'll do something to distinguish themselves later, but for now Likability: Medium.

I should note, however, that while young men teams dominated the early years of the Race, recently it's mostly been about various couples.  So a team like Vanessa and Ralph perfectly fits the model of the kind of team that has won for the last few years, so I have to say Survivibilty: High.

Art and JJ

A couple of Border Patrol agents rounds out this year's cast, making it the highest percentage of people working for the government with guns this show's ever had.  Honestly, Art and JJ struck me as a couple of meatballs, which is fine after a fashion, but not very endearing overall.  Likability: Medium

On one hand they've got Border Patrol skills, which have to have some benefit while travelling.  On the other hand they the third team in their forties, trying to out run people a decade younger than them some of whom have similar training.  Put it all together and I say Survivibilty: Medium.

So those are our teams for Amazing Race 20.  Come back tomorrow for my analysis of the actual events of the first episode!