vousviou

That was my guess too, but I'm wondering if logistics had something to do with culling a team now. At any rate, it wasn't the most interesting leg, but whatever -- big props for even getting this off the ground. I'm not sure this is going to be the most competitive bunch ever, but I'll keep my fingers crossed things pick up.

The article I mentioned above also talked about a couple of the changes, including the safety measures they took (as @vousviou wondered about). Everything I read made a lot of sense for precautionary measures, and a couple of the changes sounded like they'd be great if they kept them as permanent alterations. I'm really in awe they seem to have pulled this off. I have to take my hat off to the amount of thinking and work that had to have gone into this, even as I'm keeping myself willfully spoiler-free until it's all over. I just finished watching the 2020 Great British Baking Show and the finale when they brought out all of the crew, medical and hospitality staff who had been in a bubble to make the show possible was striking -- so many people you never even see who are involved. And they were in a single location show with a predictable set of tasks. TAR has so many moving pieces, and so many language and legal and logistical issues. If they had simply moved it to rural Canada it still would have been hard to pull off. I really can't get my head around how the did it, and I look forward to reading about it when it's over.

I don't want this info now, but I would be very interested after the season is over in knowing how they dealt with the restart. What places were scratched and what were the replacements? What kind of safety measures did they put in place, such as putting in a lot more self driving and moving challenges outside. Did they have vax and mask requirements, and did they require a lot more turn taking rather than simultaneous challenges? I don't think it would possible to read this now without a lot of spoilers, but it would be fascinating once it's all played.

I started out snarky, disliking the couple that makes videos for a living, the NJ couple that was fighting right away, and the overenthusiastic Detroit father and daughter.... ....and then I thought, TAR is back, they managed to complete a season after having everything disrupted by Covid, and I really should give them all a chance. You're right, they're all OK. At least in the first couple of episodes there hasn't been the ridiculous positioning for alliances and exclusions in the previous season. None of them seem unredeemable and I want to give them all a chance, and some of them seem genuinely fun and interesting. I thought the challenges were fairly simplistic this time but still were decent for doing a first round of sorting, and I thought they worked well in the setting of London. I'm glad the show is back and I'm going to do my best to enjoy it.

You may be right, althouvh I am holding out hope that their edit is due to producers deciding their personalities are so polarizing they make people stick around to root against them. Although unlike Justin the superfan from 27 or Brendan and Rachel, they seem to be getting a much less critical edit. I fear we are seeing a season long coronation like the All Star season won by Dave and Connor (really just Connor, with Dave along for the ride).

They remind me a lot of the Afghanimals, who were definitely mugging, especially in the beginning. They are also a lot more performative than Tyler and Corey.

I think one way to mix things up is to make choosing vehicles more of a challenge than pure luck. At least in some locations have more cabs/boats/rickshaws than teams and seed some lousy vehicles or bad drivers in the mix and force teams to do more evaluation than just grabbing the first one who says they know the way.

To be fair to them, I strongly suspect that repetition was something that came out of prompts while being interviewed and choices by editors. I think producers decided that was their storyline and made it happen -- I don't think it ever came up in any of the candid shots, just the sit downs.

Except if you are a strong team, you want the weakest pool possible in the last day. There is no bonus for coming in second, and in the final day you really want to have at least one team in the mix with lousy navigation skills, poor attention to detail, or at least one other major flaw.

I agree that the Speed Bump is a good penalty, and my only complaint is sometimes they're sort of dull. This one was quite good because they kept the facial hair for the rest of the day (except for the one moustache that started falling off). I don't know if that was just because they were having fun with it, or because getting the glue off without the right solvent would have been a pain. But I think more Speed Bumps where there is something racers wear for the rest of the leg would be great.

It's not how I feel about the team, but the one thing that keeps me from wanting Gary and DeAngelo to win is they both had successful NFL careers, and it is hard for me to see them needing another $500 K each. I'd still pick them over Will and James. They rank with some of the worst teams since I've been watching, up there with Brooke and Scott from a few seasons ago.

I think Edsels had problems, but as an American car they were still a lot better than East German Trabants.A big part of the failure of Edsels was styling and marketing. I think Trabants were basically aluminum foil bodies, sparking wires, wax paper gas tanks and rubber band tires. I think Yugos may have been better cars than Trabants.

You are right about many taking advantage of the scholarships -- the typical athlete, even a star, has no idea if they are going to make a pro team or not, and they know they need a plan B.

Which is notable considering the location of the Symphony in the last episode was throwing some of the teams for a loop because it wasn't a fancy orchestra hall but a plain building in the middle of a refuse sorting area.

The first episode intro pointed out that they had bonded over their diverse interests, including enjoying sci fi and going in costumes to conventions. The stereotype of NFL players as meatheads is wildly exaggerated -- George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, talked about how he realized it was wrong when he wrote Paper Lion in the 60s, and said he found the Detroit Lions back then were generally well educated.

I think it's worth pointing out that the caption for Michelle and Victoria was almost certainly referring to the whole day's time in the car -- Airport to chateau to museum -- not just the section from chateau to museum. The caption only referred to "elapsed time in car" and factoring in all of the other travel time, if they had spent six hours just on the little 2 KM stretch they showed on the map, they would have gotten a visit from Phil shutting them down before they started playing carnival games.

After a while I've gotten more accepting of the fact that even silly-looking days can be really exhausting, especially factoring in the jet lag, anxiety and lack of sleep. I don't know that the producers always show as much of the things that make the race hard, although I realize it can be hard to convey a bad allergy or indigestion or sore feet onscreen.

Based on the way DeAngelo blew through making the cello, which threw a bunch of people for a loop, I was really astonished how much they struggled with the watermelon stacking. Usually that kind of physical problem solving translates well from one kind of construction to another.

When the son revealed the dad had two hip replacements and knee surgery, I was sort of surprised they let him race at all. He obviously wasn't all that mobile, and it seems like they'd run into a challenge where he just couldn't make it.

I think some of the obviously strong teams are savvy enough to know exactly how this plays out if other strong teams keep advancing. And I think they are savvy enough to realize the other strong teams are thinking the same thing too. Fortunately for the watchability of the season, I think most of the teams in the alliance won't be throwing a pity party for themselves when the inevitable shakeup happens.

The alliance got them all rushing together, which led to them getting into a pack mentality and turning off their brains. I think that was the biggest reason for not reading the clues and forgetting to keep track of the things they bought. Pack leaders who are genuinely interested in the well being of all of the members of a pack will take care of all of the responsibilities of thinking for the group, even if that hurts them individually. Obviously Will and James didn't do that, but then there is ultimately no incentive for them to do that. I think they are taking a huge risk by making it so blatant and other teams are being smarter by letting them be the obvious instigators. The football players were the most clever by holding back crucial info about bringing the bag but then revealing it halfway down the river -- they got an advantage AND got goodwill.

I hope her comment about struggling with being short was just a throwaway line specific to getting under the truck and not a foreshadowing of something coming up

Disagree. The Yield as originally deployed was a sort of randomizer. And it was far less destructive to a team's chances than a U-Turn. It was a hard and fast 30 minute delay, whereas the U-Turn can keep a team back for a very long time, depending upon the difficulty of the other/second task. For a while, the U-Turn was an automatic eliminator! And originally, the Yield was deployed at a time when every leg also had a Fast Forward. This new Yield with a delay of only 20 minutes, and possibly only 10 minutes, is not a major game changer! Everyone having a Yield may be an interesting wrinkle. I can see some strategy coming into play if Yields are still in play when the pack shrinks. Especially if they can be used cumulatively to gang up on someone -- is that an option?

That reminded me of the finale of the previous season in Detroit with the endless repetition of Seven Nation Army. It's got to be demoralizing the more you're hearing the same song over and over and over....

Those shells are really easy to tip over, and while they showed the shells tipping and getting swamped, what they didn't show was the process of getting fished out of the water and taken back to the dock. I think the teams that switched all realized correctly after it happened the first time that they were looking at a major loss of time if that happened one or two more times. It's not something quick like a bike, where if you fall over you can get right back on and keep going.