djlynch

I went back and looked and there was a guy with a beard and a cape, but it was someone else who they described as a DJ. I think I remember that other guy from last year, when he surprised me by looking the way he did and having a female significant other on the sidelines. It felt like they didn't show nearly as many competitors in Orlando as they did in Houston or Kansas City because they spent so much time focusing on Travis Rosen, Drew, and Flip. I guess either whoever edited that video didn't realize he didn't compete this year or didn't realize that his run was going to end up getting cut completely.

Did I see correctly that William Brown (the power plant employee who wore Spartan costumes in years past) was in the theme park product-placement segment but didn't actually compete, or did I miss his segment? I checked for him in the final leaderboard and he wasn't among the 30 advancing to the next round, at a minimum, and I assume that they would have made a point of showing him fail.

It's because they stuck with the cabs that they got at DFW Airport. About 90% of their work is taking people to/from the airport hotels, and Dallas/Fort Worth is so huge and sprawling that you can spend a lot of time there and not really know the geography that well. Also those weren't exactly major landmarks teams were going to. Alvarado, where the horses were, is a fairly small town about 40 miles away from the stadium and Continental Avenue is only a few blocks long now that the bridge has closed to cars. I've lived in Texas my whole life with frequent visits to the DFW area and the only reason I knew where either of those were is because they have freeway exits.

I feel like the guys who are really lean to start with really show it most. If Max or Vince were still there, I suspect they would look a lot worse off than the ones who are left. Will, in particular, seems to have lost a ton of weight just based on how his shirt looks like it's about three sizes too big for him now. Dan lost quite a bit too, but it mostly shows in where and how his belly sits on his body. He started with a very full-looking belly that stuck straight out, but now what's left is kind of loose and hanging down. I'm built the same way and it's similarly hard to see when my weight fluctuates because the belly never really shrinks or grows that much.

The other thing that I noticed was that the editors left a shot in where you could see the clue envelope in Phil's back pocket before B&H got to the mat, then it wasn't mentioned until M&R got there, which made for a confusing couple of minutes. They just didn't seem to be on their A game this week.

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only person who thought it should have been a non-elimination this week, but it seemed pretty obvious that they couldn't do that because they already burned their opportunity for that kind of a gimmick by saving Trixie the first time. Also, was anyone else having trouble watching the end of the episode? I really liked the boy drag (butching it up in full-on boy drag ought to be a challenge sometime) and the half and half effect was really interesting for a little while, but it was kind of breaking my brain seeing two different faces on the same person for the entire last fifteen minutes.

That was pretty much my thought. If a reality show is halfway through the season and there are still people being eliminated where you ask yourself "Huh? When did that guy get here?", it's a bad sign for the casting and editing.

This is pretty much what I was thinking the rule was. From the way the dentists talked about it last season, I was left with the impression that they were stuck with their original schedule because the rule was that you couldn't buy tickets for more than one flight, which does seem to leave open the possibility of changing flights as long as you can do it on the same ticket you previously bought. I'm also pretty sure that Team New Jersey were on a third flight from the same airline, so it really is good thinking by Mike and Rochelle that they thought about gong standby before anyone else did.

There have been times in the past when similar things have happened with flights selling out. There was the thing in the last all stars season were Margie and Luke ended up hours behind the other teams because there were only enough tickets for six ought of the eight teams to get on a direct flight and they chose to play it safe and not attempt a very short connection in Singapore (which Brendon and Rachel ended up making.) At least with that one, you can put some of the blame on them for not taking the risk, but it still seemed like a pretty awful situation that could have been avoided with spoon-fed flights or with some other change to make it a little less major to not be on the first flight out.

At a minimum, the pit stops seem to be flexible enough that there are usually at least a couple of times per race when it seems like the thing that's set in advance is the first team's departure time rather than the length of the stop. I wouldn't be surprised if they have the option to lengthen or shorten them as necessary to keep the race on schedule. Also, I bet the timing of the first teams getting Narita when it was too late to fly out that same evening wasn't a coincidence. Given that the detour options both looked like they had to be done in daylight, if some of the early teams had managed to get an overnight flight and arrive in Phuket the next morning (basically what Harley and Jon ended up having to do, but a day earlier), they would have ended up either sitting through a full day in Phuket or with an almost 24-hour lead over the back of the pack, neither of which make for good TV. Better to have an airport bunch and a departure-time bunch back to back.

Didn't the preview at the end of Episode 1 show him telling her that he hates the sound of her voice or something like that? Maybe it was some other team, but it just seemed like something that would happen with them.

Google Maps says Nagano to Narita Airport is three hours by bullet train or four hours by road, so it would have been around 8:00 or 9:00 when they got there and the cameras started rolling, assuming they didn't get lost or delayed en route. From what I can find, there are only a few departures that late in the evening, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that most of the ticket counters would have shut down by then. The pit stop length seemed a little odd, given that it meant that everyone had to spend the night and most of the next day at the airport and they weren't even bunched up. I'm also surprised that they didn't try to reserve a block of seats, considering that it ended up resulting in one team arriving more than 12 hours behind the first teams.

I'm pretty sure he was joking. I know/am related to a lot of people like him who are deadpan enough that they joke about being offended by something in a similar tone of voice to actually being low-grade offended, but once you get to know them it's usually pretty obvious that when they truly are angry about something, they show it a lot more. "Boyfriend twins" is a thing that happens often enough that someone decided to give the phenomenon a name. Not everyone is like that, but I have to admit that one of the body types I really go for is basically how I would be built if I had a faster metabolism and/or put more effort into working out and eating right.

They never specifically said anything more than about the selfies, although I think it's more than just a camera because I noticed that there was a quick shot where one of the racers had it out and was checking the screen while they were walking down the street. I got the sense that they were using it to either translate or to re-check the clue, but I don't remember enough of the context to be sure.

Somewhere near the end of the episode, I thought I heard Rebecca say something like "We know who the real killer is, so stop protecting her!" Did anyone else catch that? I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I don't think it was in a flash forward. If it was a woman who killed Lila, that would narrow it down to Rebecca (who would have had to be talking about herself in the third person), Bonnie, and Annelise herself. Annelise and Rebecca seem to have motives, and Bonnie's a part of enough weird talk that it feels like it might be her. On the other hand, if it was in a flash forward and I just wasn't paying attention, a woman killing Sam might explain Michaela's meltdown.

I'm beginning to think that they're playing a lot dumber than they really are. They're used to being characters. Also, Robbie reminds me of the kind of guy I liked to make very fun bad decisions with back in college. I'm rooting for them.

It's not trying to make you believe anything about all gay men any more than Scandal is trying to make your believe anything about all presidents. Most of the single-episode characters don't have any kind of attraction specified. For all we know, there have been several interactions between gay characters that didn't end in sex because if they don't have sex or talk about a boyfriend/husband, you don't know that they're gay. On the other hand, I'd say that gay men's culture is extremely OK with casual sex. It doesn't mean that every gay guy goes out and gets it on with virtual (or actual) strangers all the time, but there isn't really a lot of judgement around it as long as it isn't cheating. Also, the mating dance can be fairly short because we tend to not be very subtle when we are interested and we don't feel the need to establish the whole "I'm totally into you as a human being, and not just after your body" line of plausible deniability. Basically, I've had conversations that I knew were going to end in sex before a single word was actually said and pretty much started with "Your place or mine?", so Connor and Oliver or Connor and Pax going pretty quickly from "hello" to "take off your pants" doesn't seem unreasonable for me. The only difference is that it seems to happen with him a lot more than it does for me, but this is Shonda Rhimes, so of course the pretty people on her shows are going to be having way more sex than the rest of us.

My other thought about the racers encountering Phil is that it's been a looooong time since Phil came out to the course to eliminate a team that was stuck on a challenge after everyone else had checked in, but could that be the source of all of the frustration while he's there?

Doesn't he now say "...may be eliminated" on the first leg, too? Ever since season 20(?) when the grandparents got saved by a NEL on the first leg?

@Bluepiano, and there's also so many people early on that it's impossible to keep them all straight, so you really don't know if you're remembering someone from this season or not. The only thing that's worse for casting the same type over and over again is The Amazing Race, but they're usually better about having ones that fill the same niche without blending into someone from a past season. (Exception: the teams of a square-jawed meathead and his big-boobed girlfriend/fiancee/wife/ex. The season where three out of the final four teams fit this description was really hard to follow because I could not tell some of them apart.)

I think maybe he was just a little bit passive about not cutting Diane off and leaving when she didn't shut up, but it didn't seem to occur to Candice at all that maybe he didn't immediately jump up and follow her because he was trying not to be rude to the other people he was in a conversation with at that moment.

I can give you a one-word reason why they don't do two-man or two-woman teams: conflict. They're assuming that, because men and women tend to communicate in different ways, which heightens any argument that they get into, that two men or two women will get along too well, and without conflict, the show is just a home movie from someone's really awkward camping trip. Ensuring that conflict happens why they cast sexist men and independent women every single week on top of the combinations of devout Christians and pagans, hippies and ex-military, avid hunters and vegetarians, and so on.