Monday, September 18, 2006

Episode One: My Thoughts

Episode Title: Real Fast, Quack Quack!

Just like that awesome Elton John song, the Bitch is back! And in this case, that's a good thing. The TV show that holds my attention like no other, whose random facts and stats live in a special part of my silly brain. Oh, how I heart thee. What I dig even more is that now this little pool, which started with 9 people in season five, has grown to 46 for this season--the biggest pool ever. But can anyone stop Adam from being a three-peat champion? I'm beginning to think he's the Roger Federer of reality tv pools. Anyways...back to the episode.

We open in Seattle, with Phil in what I admit is a very fetching outfit. Phil has been at the mercy of some really bad clothing choices in the past (does anyone else remember the white puffy parka from season 5? I thought he was the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters), but this is good for him. We then turn our attention to the sea planes carrying all of the teams. I'm glad they got this entrance out of their system, because having to get on one of those ancient contraptions where "in case of a water landing" is actually the norm would have Philiminated me even before the race started. The teams are introduced. And here are some of my initial thoughts on them:

Rob and Kimberly: "She can't control me--I'm a human being and she has to learn that", says Rob. Huh. She seemed very much in the same vein as Brandon's "What Nikki needs to understand..." interview from season five. Of course, that one went on to explain that they have to trust in God (more on that later), but still kind of the "my girlfriend needs to learn something which usually ends with the conclusion that I'm right and in the clear." Not my favorite.

David and Mary: Oh my, I think I heart them. I can't remember what interview it was in, but Mary waxes superlative about the hotness of David, and how she didn't think he'd ever be interested in her. Well, I'm not sure anyone would usually give a second thought to someone who handed them their fries working at McDonalds. David is totally the dude who used to wear a mullet in high school, and I bet anything he was a small town football player. He's her lobster, that's for sure. Mary reminds me of Amy Adams' character in Junebug. And if you haven't seen it, go now. Netflix, video store (do those even exist anymore?), whatever. And then continue reading once you're done. Wasn't that a great movie? I have to give props to anyone who works as a miner. The idea of being down inside a mountain / big hill / hole in the frickin' ground isn't that appealing to me. I've been on tours of both old coal and salt mines, and there's always this overwhelming paranoia in my mind that there are millions of tons of ROCK above your head at all times. But, there are perks. Like transportation.

Tyler and James (but not Frey): Oh, the addict pics. Children, let this be a lesson to you. Crack is whack.

Tom and Terry: Of course their intro video shows them getting manicures. I wonder if they were at Cao Boi's nail salon?

But back to the show itself. The starting line is Gasworks Park, which we've seen on the race before. Seriously, are we out of starting lines in the country? I can think of one. While Phil gave us plenty of eyebrow pops throughout the intro, his final one between "Travel safe" and "Go!" was a disappointment. They should really amuse us diehards who look for that moment a bit more. And we're off to...China? Are we, for the first time in ten seasons, going to head the other way around the world? I am a bit afraid that this will cause higher degrees of killer fatigue and faster due to jet lag (maybe it's just me, but I always find flying east to west is when the jet lag is worse). Which might be cool and entertaining, but hard on the racers.

And in the car on the way to the airport, this is where the ___win brothers endeared themselves to me: "To the homeland...although we're not Chinese." Too funny. I have a feeling some teams might have said to them "this must be so cool for you to go back to where your family's from." That'd be like someone saying to me, "wow, that must be cool to go to Lichtenstein since your family's from Europe." Except nothing interesting happens in Lichtenstein, and I'm Danish. Same principle. And then they pulled the whole watergun stunt, giving the sound editors their first opportunity to use the "what are these idiots thinking?" music, which is my favorite next to the "nuns descending the escalator" music. I'm just glad all they got from the security agent was a stern talking to, otherwise they may have been in some trouble. But, really, as this looked like it happened at the gate, way to go Transportation Security Agency on letting those through the security checkpoint!

Then it was time for the 'bama mama's to make me smile "They like Alabamans in China because of Forrest Gump." Oh, the funny. And so true! All I had to say to someone in Ireland was that I used to live in Fargo, and they'd buy me drinks. Certainly helped out the pocketbook.

Has anyone noticed the number of shot's we're getting of Sarah's prosthesis? In her case, "gratuitous leg shot" means something a different than it would for oh, say, Dustin and Kandace or something. I just find it a bit funny. And speaking of Sarah, Eric had a discussion question for the group at my house. Sarah and Peter said that they have a few different legs for her that they're carrying with her. First off, what happens in a "non-elimination leg" (giggling at leg in that context)? I would imagine that they would take away the others in her bag, or at least they should. And second, is this actually fair? If I was faced with, say the scaling the Great Wall challenge, I wouldn't have the option to swap out my arms for ones that actually have muscle in them. I'm just saying.

Also at the airport (good lord, a lot happened there) we had "handshake-gate", when Bilal and Sa'eed refused to shake Dustin's (I think) hand because she is a woman because it's against their religion. Now, this is true. Some devout Muslims follow the practice that they cannot touch a woman who is someone other than their wife. And I liked Dustin's joking comeback "what if I accidentally shook your hand?" I took this as just a friendly joking "totally cool, I get it" kind of thing. What I liked more was the question someone at my house posed "what if she pinched his ass?" That would have been interesting.

This also led into Kellie and Jamie's question of the day: do Muslims believe in Buddha? While it seems that most reasonably aware people should know the answer to this question, I'm going to give them a little leeway because if you watch the Insider Videos on cbs.com, there's a clip of Kellie and Jamie giving the other teams nicknames, and they wanted to call Bilal and Sa'eed "The Buddha Brothers". Which is a very cute and alliterative nickname, I think. I'm really hoping that the edit of "Do they believe in Buddha?" was in reference to them coming up with nicknames or reevaluating said nicknames.

Okay, maybe I'm just willing to give them a pass because Jamie sent me a tshirt from her college last week (okay, technically she sent it two tshirts to one of the racers from last season who is an email buddy of mine, and Joni thought I'd get a kick out of it, much more so than her sister who was the other intended recipient. And she was right. Keep in mind that they are from the University of South Carolina, whose team is the "Gamecocks".)

Teams depart for China, and we are encountered with a roadblock. Why is this surprising? Only because this is the first time we have ever had a roadblock on the first episode (they did do one in the first season, but it wasn't aired and the racers were mad because it was the Ostrich Egg Eating challenge that was later done is season five, and it was pretty tough). And we're going to eat...fish eyes. But I was okay with this eating challenge. Apparently, some people consider the eyes to be the best part of the fish (if it doesn't actually taste like fish, I'd probably be okay with it), it's culturally relative, and it wasn't a quantity challenge (see caviar or questionable meat products). The only people that have problems are Dustin and Kandace, and it's not the eating, it's finding the place. And why? It wasn't because they were dumb (I like these two), it's because they were asking for the "Golden" house instead of the "Gold" house. Thankfully we didn't spend much time there and the teams took off to get the standard first episode departure times, except that one of them read "LAST TEAM". Huh? And Bilal and Sa'eed were the ones who got it. All of a sudden, here's come Phil, an ethnic greeter, and the Amazing Bathmat. Jigga what? An elimination in the middle of the episode? This is a little crazy. I can't say that I was all too sad to see those two go. I had a sneaky feeling they might turn into Weaver types with their religious talk, but I don't know. My favorite line of this sequence was Bilal saying "well, we don't have control over what the creator does." But were they referring to Allah, or Bert and Elise?

Next morning: the first detour. Labor or Leisure? The best part about this task was that what looks like the physical task actually required mental fortitude (they needed to put the grey bricks in before the lighter ones) and the "easy" route required a fair amount of dexterity (catching the ball). The main challenge designer from Survivor came over to design tasks for race this season, and if we have more like this, I will be very excited.

Detour done. Off to the Great Wall (or, as Kimberly said to her cab driver, "The Great Wall...of China!" Um, which wall did you think he was going to drive you to? The Wall of Poughkeepsie?), where to actually get to the pit stop they had to scale the wall itself. SO COOL. This is the only time I felt a bit bad for Sarah. Her leg was leaking fluid (now, if someone else's knee was leaking fluid, they'd bring a medic. Shouldn't they provide her with a mechanic?), and she had on the "running" leg (the one I like to call the "freaky one"), and that was not made for trying to climb up those loops. How long does it take to change prostheses? Does anyone have a background in that kind of stuff? I couldn't figure out why she didn't just switch to the other with the shoe at the bottom.

Props to all of 'em for getting up that wall. That was crazy. Especially Tom who, as Terry said, had to "go straight" to get up the wall. Hee.

And Vipul of the fabulous tshirts and Arti get the second philimination of the episode. Harsh, but that's the way the game is. I was actually okay with it because the most memorable thing about them was the tshirts, and that doesn't necessarily make for the best tv.

Other random thoughts from the episode...
  • Rob: "99.9% of the time I'm in love with this relationship. The other 1%..." Rob? That would be 100.9%. No wonder you couldn't figure out the mental math for the brick challenge. And no wonder you're a bartender.
  • Dustin and Kandace found the first Fern of the season! Thank god for nice strangers.
  • Dustin, "We worked so hard to get on the first flight." No you didn't. You drove to the airport.
  • Kellie and Jamie "We could have a conversation with a doorknob", followed with a shot of the rehab models. Thank you, editors.
  • I wonder what Tyler and James are going to buy with their $20,000? Crack is whack. Remember that, boys.
  • Peter is a bit annoying with his over-enthusiastic "support". He's like the lovechild of Stewart Smalley and Susan Powter.
  • When Sarah says, "I'm sprung a leak", she means "hydrolic fuel". In any other past season if a woman had said that, it probably would have been silicone. Yea for diversity!
  • Kimberly on the way to the airport, when they were trying to figure out where to park the car "I don't know what Thrifty is. I don't rent cars." At first, I was going to give her a pass and assume she was younger than 25 and really can't rent them yet, but she's 28, so this was just kinda snobby.
  • I figured out why the 'bama mamas don't like Sarah. They figured they would be the ones to get the "overcoming hardship and tough times" edit because they're single moms. And they got upstaged by a couple running the world's longest three-legged race.
Okay, I thought that last comment was funny. But I'm bad like that.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Based on anecdotal evidence switching a leg should take no more than one minute provided there is no pain and the wearer is a prosthesis veteran.

11:03 PM

 
Blogger Tracy said...

so glad to see your show updates again! And yes - I agree - east to west flying makes for horrible jet lag.

2:09 PM

 

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