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Recap: 'The Amazing Race' - 'Don't Ruin the Basketball Game'

Last week never happened. This week features a pointless Double U-Turn

By Daniel Fienberg Sunday, Mar 20, 2011 10:47 PM

Kent works with dinosaurs on Sunday's 'Amazing Race'

Credit: CBS

They sent somebody home on Sunday (March 20) night's "Amazing Race."

That doesn't seem like a big deal until you remember that through the first four episodes of the "Amazing Race" season, two of those episodes ended with nobody being eliminated. That's a structure that was pretty much guaranteed to tick off many of the show's most devoted fans. And even though Sunday's episode may have at least culminated in Phil Keoghan dispatching the last team to arrive at the Pit Stop, it was still a frustratingly failed piece of "Amazing Race" architecture.

If not for the need to do these recaps, I confess that I'd be near my breaking point, because this just isn't the way "The Amazing Race" is supposed to be designed.

I'm gonna grumble for a bit after the break...

If you'll recall, we left our teams last week still in the middle of one of those "You've reached the Pit Stop, but you have to keep on racing" carry-over legs. That spared Kent and Vyxsin. The dating Goths had run one of the worst legs in "Amazing Race" history, missing planes and buses and even, as last week ended, misplacing their passport-carrying fanny pack. We don't know exactly how far they fell behind, but the answer can be measured in multiple hours and that's several hours that they were behind the next-to-last-place team, Justin & Zev, and makes no mention of how far they were behind the bigger pack.

It was bad enough that the Goths weren't going to be eliminated for that run of ineptitude. It wasn't like any of their fumblings were bad luck or victimization by outside forces. They fell hours behind because they were absolutely awful at some basic things they were required to do, things like making a three-hour drive to a Japanese airport in under nine hours. They didn't try to blame anybody else, because there was nobody else to blame. And they should have gone home. Or they should have had to do something excellent to make up that time. They should have had to achieve something to make their epic comeback.

Instead, "The Amazing Race" did all the work for them.

For bombing out on that first flight from Japan to China, they got a 30 minute penalty. And that's it. They got no additional penalty for taking a cab to a Chinese destination when every other team took a shuttle, even though presumably a cab would be a faster way to that destination. Nobody even mentioned that rule violation. But surely they had to face some consequence for the leg they had?

Nope.

All of the teams were equalized on an overnight train back to Kunming.

So that leg that the teams ran last week? The Roadblock and the Detour? Both meaningless, because the leg had already been structured so it would have no impact on Race placement other than to give "The Amazing Race" the opportunity to do a bonus Travelocity commercial for the Leg winner. And it wasn't like it was a short journey the teams took from Kunming or back to Kunming. They did a lot of traveling and multiple tasks and the upshot of all of it was that one team won a trip somewhere and another team had many hours of mistakes boiled down to a 30 minute penalty.

That's awful, both for the teams that put in a lot of effort to no purpose, but also to viewers.

But we tied up those loose ends fairly early in the episode and the teams headed off to Kunming knowing that a thrilling Double U-Turn was coming. Oooooh. Double U-Turn. Surely that will yield drama galore and forever alter the course of this race.

Nope.

A U-Turn makes teams have to go back and do the second choice in a Detour, the choice they didn't want to make. It's actually a real difference-maker if the Detour follows the Roadblock in the leg or if one Detour option is markedly more difficult than the other.

If, however, both Detours are fairly simple and can be completed with great speed if done correctly? The U-Turn loses a little power. And if the Detour is actually followed by a Roadblock and the Roadblock appears to be a good deal more time-consuming than the Detours? The U-Turn becomes completely worthless.

So why would you design a leg in which a Double U-Turn is attached to a wicked simple pair of Detours and they're both followed by a potentially diabolical Roadblock? I have no idea. But the result was an episode like Sunday's, where a lot of time was spent talking about the Double U-Turn, but the Double U-Turn didn't have an iota to do with the final result of the episode. Yes, one of the U-Turned teams went home, but they went home because they failed at the Roadblock and not because of the U-Turn. That's just bad.

Let's look at the Detour options: Honor the Past or Embrace the Future.

In Honor the Past, the teams had to watch a performance featuring 15 people in different costumes and then put 15 dolls wearing those costumes in order based on the order the actors came in. It's a straight-up memory/attention-to-detail challenge and, as teams quickly realized, it only required that each team member figure out how to remember a sequence of seven (with a random outlier). That's... not hard.

In Embrace the Future, teams had to carry some solar paneling equipment up to a rooftop and then install it. That's a task with a hefty physical component and then, if you're choosing on spec, there's also the possibility that the installation process might be complicated.

I think the entire Leg was constructed around the idea that teams would take Past over Future. If I were racing, I certainly would have. Under those circumstances, there could have been a possibility that a Ron and Christina might have been forced to do the Future Detour, which might have been crippling for that particular team.

Ron and Christina were, in fact, the only team we can surmise might have had trouble doing the Future Detour, because several teams who probably ought to have done Past chose future instead and didn't have any real trouble. I don't quite get why the Goths and the Cheerleaders picked Future, but they did and it turned out that if you worked in teams, getting the stuff to the roof was easy, while the actual installation didn't cause any delays for anybody that we saw. Other than Kent whining, that was an easy Detour. It was still the wrong Detour to do, because the teams that did Past finished first and would have reached the U-Turn first except that Ron and Christina's vaunted Chinese-language skills failed to prevent cab-driver error, causing the first group of three Past finishers to end up behind several Future finishers.

That's how we ended up with the Goths U-Turning the Cheerleaders. It was an amusing moment because the Cheerleaders were convinced that the Goths were going to U-Turn the Globetrotters, but remembering their U-Turn faux pas in their own season, the Goths elected to U-Turn the one team they knew for sure they were ahead of. The Cheerleaders promptly U-Turned the Globetrotters themselves, which matter for all of the five minutes it seemed to take each team to finish History.

Basically, all of the teams ended up working on the Roadblock at the same time. The Roadblock required one player on each team to construct a rather ambitious life-sized dilophosaurus, using a large number of easily confused component parts. It was a pretty rough task and each team seemed to make multiple errors resulting in Justin and Jaime being the last players standing. Jaime got frustrated due to various mistakes and also the physical component of the task. Justin got frustrated, but still finished.

Thus, Jaime and Cara were sent home. Haters of the Cheerleaders will be happy to see them go. Those who liked the advantages of Jamie stripping off her top or humping the dilophosaurus and who also liked her tart personality will be sad to see them go. But being U-Turned contributed little to their demise. Kent may have gotten off a good line when he said, "Putting a bullet in the Playboy bunny was the only thing that was going to save us," but that wasn't really the case.

The Leg's other major development was that Gary and Mallory arrived at the Roadblock last, saw their deficit and decided they might as well use the Express Pass. It wasn't necessarily the wrong idea, but they struggled to find a cab leaving the Roadblock and the Cowboys, first to build their dinosaur, got to the Pit Stop first.

Other thoughts on this week's episode:

*** If you haven't read the "20 current TV characters we'd partner with on 'The Amazing Race'" gallery I cobbled together with Sepinwall, go do that! This recap will wait.

*** Not happy with Kynt and Vyxsin and their lack of sufficient penalization for last week, but I'll give Vyxsin some points for hearing that they were fifth and announcing "Number 5 is alive!" I can always be won over by "Short Circuit" references.

*** Kent and Vyxsin lying about their penalty served its purpose, I suppose. Several teams got to the U-Turn and didn't U-Turn anybody and I'm guessing one of them would have chosen to put a nail in the Goths' coffin if they'd known. The most cryptic response to the penalty and the initial lie came from Ron, who observed, "It's an arranged kabuki dance and kabuki dancers are known for hiding behind their masks."

*** Seriously. The Double U-Turn was less integral to the result of the leg than Jaime and Cara getting stuck with yet another cabbie in need of gas. When that's the case, the leg can't be well designed.

*** And speaking of the total irrelevance of last week's entire leg, how silly is it that we ended last week with Justin & Zev seemingly horribly lost mid-Detour and we began this leg with them checking in with Phil, as if nothing had happened. Because nothing did happen. Nothing that had a point. Grrrrrr.

*** Impressive to see the Cowboys rock a Roadblock that had no connection to any of their previously established skills.

*** I'd been prepared to praise Luke for being less annoying than his last time on the Race. He and Margie have basically been personality non-factors this season, which is an improvement. Then I watched the scenes from next week's episode...

Anyway... I'm hungry and it's been raining outside all day. Was this actually a great leg and am I wrong to be ticked off?

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Daniel Fienberg
Executive Editor

A long-time member of the TCA Board and a longer-time blogger of "American Idol," Dan Fienberg writes about TV, except for when he writes about movies or sometimes writes about the Red Sox. But never music. He would sound stupid talking about music.

Related Searches: TV, recaps, The Amazing Race, The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business, Don't Ruin the Basketball Game

Alberto

Because the Amazing Race is so hell bent on keeping all the team close to the exclusion of reality, it allowed the Goths to stave an elimination they richly deserved. Nothing like rewarding incompetence. They missed the flight from Tokyo Narita to China and all they got was a 30 minute penalty. Boo hiss, I claim fowl! Much rather see Jaime and Cara competing than those two incompetent racers. Forgetting their pack with their money and passports. Wow talk about rewarding incompetence.
March 20, 2011 at 11:31PM EST Reply to Comment
- john m the penalty for improper transportation has ALWAYS been 30 minutes, go review old TAR seasons
  March 21, 2011 at 4:35AM EST
- SaveFarris ... unless the improper transportation is part of a Detour option, in which case the penalty is 24 hours (see TAR Season 1, Episode 9)
  March 21, 2011 at 10:00AM EST
- Dan John, even if you are correct about the length of the penalty, what about the second violation (as Feinberg discusses above)? At the very least, they should have been penalized for one hour.
  March 21, 2011 at 10:23AM EST
Pythonite

I'm totally with you on this -- the overnight train equalizer was just ridiculous. I'm less upset about the double U-Turn; I can see how it could have been a bigger deal if the leg had gone differently. They've got to find a way to use a slightly lighter hand with the equalizers, though. It's starting to feel like the producers really just want the teams to play elaborate games of "hurry-up and wait" (or as it turned out this week: "hurry-up and play basketball").
March 20, 2011 at 11:33PM EST Reply to Comment
- dan And even if the Goths *hadn't* done what they did, the overnight train equalizer still would have combined with last week's unofficial NEL to make the whole last leg irrelevant. Sigh...
  
  -Daniel
  March 20, 2011 at 11:43PM EST
- rachelmed Agreed. I'm not too miffed about the U-Turn not being a factor because that only happened after all the teams were already clumped together. If they had actually had more trains leaving and not equalized the whole previous leg to start off, there definitely could have been a different outcome. But to have a NEL and immediately follow it up with an equalizer was what really annoyed me. The Goths, as much as I like them, definitely needed a much larger penalty. At least it wasn't as stupid as the "sit on a block of ice for 10 minutes" speed bump. Total joke.
  
  I hope TAR gets back to it's old self soon. I only like a few teams this season and my favorite, Zev and Justin, are at the back right now. I can definitely see myself dumping this season once my teams are out if the tasks and legs don't get better soon.
  March 21, 2011 at 1:04AM EST
- Tyler I just don't get the point of having a "To Be Continued" leg if they immediately follow it up with a 7-hour wait for a 7-hour train ride. Just make it a non-elimination leg. At least that way the team that finishes last gets some sort of penalty. I typically prefer the "To Be Continued" to the non-elimination legs, but if they're going to do it this way every time, it just makes the whole thing stupid.
  March 21, 2011 at 10:22AM EST
belinda

I think they should have at least gotten a one hour penalty (30 mins for the plane and 30 mins for the cab/shuttle). It seems not enough, but from what I remember from the race, for the most part, a 'wrong vehicle' misinterpretation of the clue/couldn't make it usually results in a 30 minute penalty, whereas a forfeit of a roadblock or a detour is the one the show penalizes a lot more, ranging from hours to even a whole day back in season 1. I don't really know how it works.

Not that I don't think it was extremely annoying to see Kent and Vixen make so many obvious and race-breaking mistakes and yet still remain in the game thanks to a non leg AND a double uturn following a non leg (race wise, they just did average in this second half at best). But it happens.
March 21, 2011 at 2:52AM EST Reply to Comment
Jon88

So, no penalty to Ron and Christina for failing to ride down the mountain last week in the marked vehicle and then not returning to the top, but instead hitching a ride with the Globetrotters? Pfui.
March 21, 2011 at 8:46AM EST Reply to Comment
at8ax

"Those who liked the advantages of Jamie stripping off her top" You mean, for instance, the guy judging the dinosaur construction?
March 21, 2011 at 8:56AM EST Reply to Comment
SaveFarris

I'll give Jaime and Cara this: I've known a lot of TAR teams that would have started an altercation had they gotten U-Turned right in the face.

They didn't break down (at least, not at the U-Turn) and were level-headed enough to know their only shot was to turn it around on the Globetrotters and hope for the best.
March 21, 2011 at 10:07AM EST Reply to Comment
- Glitterous I couldn't tell from the editing- were there any other teams behind the goths besides the cheerleaders and the globetrotters?
  March 21, 2011 at 12:24PM EST
- Tyler Gary & Mallory and Zev & Justin were still behind Kent & Vyxsin at the U-Turn because they got lost after the Detour, but because they did the Past detour instead of the Future detour, there was no way for either of the U-Turning teams to know that.
  March 21, 2011 at 12:36PM EST
Jobin

Why were the cheerleaders able to use the U-turn on the Globetrotters?

Shouldn't the cheerleaders have had to complete the memory detour, then come back to the Roadblock clue box again, and only then be able to use the detour?

Because unless the cheerleaders were able to complete the memory detour, and U-turn the globetrotters before the globetrotters had made it to the Roadblock clue their first time.

But maybe its just the editing that threw me off.
March 21, 2011 at 10:42AM EST Reply to Comment
Robin

I've about had it with this season for all of the reasons you've listed. The Goths absolutely should not have been anywhere close to the other teams, and they ended up finishing 5th. And while I usually don't mind transportation bunches, have 2 major ones in one very long leg was just wrong. The only reasonable non-conspiracy reason I can come up with is logistics. They couldn't risk having some teams end up in Li Jiang (?) and some in Kunming, so they made sure there was only one way back to Kunming. But there's no excuse for putting the U-turn before the roadblock and having it end up meaning nothing.
March 21, 2011 at 11:09AM EST Reply to Comment
Glitterous

By the end of the last episode, the Goths were not all that far behind Zev and Justin; their plane landed in China about the same time as that shuttle went up the mountain and, according to google, the drive from the airport to the mountain takes minutes. So by the time they reached the mountain, they were maybe 1-2 hours behind the other teams. They had the set-back with the pouch, which added approximately one hour (15 minutes each way on the bus, 15 minutes each way on the gondola). So that only put them a couple hours behind the main pack. Would they have been out without the NEL? Yes. But the time difference was not so great that the goths could not have
March 21, 2011 at 12:22PM EST Reply to Comment
- Glitterous *could not have made it up without the train equalizer. Must have gone over my limit.
  March 21, 2011 at 12:31PM EST
Nigel

What is the purpose of the "continuation" legs other than to see the looks on the racers' faces when Phil tells them they are still racing? (Margie's look was priceless by the way) I'd much rather have the normal non-elimination legs where last place gets a speed bump on the following leg.

And would somebody tell the producers that the audience isn't so attached to these teams that we don't want to see anyone go home. They've all been there before. If they come in last, send em home. I know it's the All-Star edition or whatever, but I still tune in for the competition, not for the people. Hopefully since they burned through 2 of their 3 or 4 non-elimination weeks early we'll see a string of elimination legs coming up.
March 21, 2011 at 6:25PM EST Reply to Comment
Guesser

A little late to the commenting party here, but it seemed like a pretty good episode to me. As a viewer, I find I prefer a cluster (drama) to fairness (giving the Goths a greater penalty or outright eliminating them). Last season when the Vegas couple (Nick & Vicky, maybe?) gave up on a task, they were penalized six hours and missed a flight for it, and I recall almost everyone in an uproar about how anticlimatic and suspense-free that episode was.

So yeah, if I were a contestant and another team got off easy with a weak 30-minute penalty, I'd be ticked off, but as a viewer I'll live with the injustice if it makes for a more compelling viewing experience.
March 22, 2011 at 4:27PM EST Reply to Comment
RSR

regarding the multi-episode legs, I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have extended-length episodes a few times a season? Two hour premier and finales and perhaps a 90 minute or 2 hour episode in the middle of the season?
March 24, 2011 at 1:43PM EST Reply to Comment

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Recapping Television's Hottest Shows with Monkeys as Critics