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Because locals don't get a wad of cash in an envelope from on high to use on a taxi from the airport, but they have anecdotal accounts of how much taxis cost and this one time someone in a cab got stuck in traffic for three hours. I hate it when a team takes the public transit option from the airport when it's presented as an either/or choice and it starts their path to elimination. It happens far too often for my liking, and I wish it didn't. (TPTB: make them take the subway! Please! In real life, people try not to take taxis from airports unless they have lots of money or are expensing it.) In fairness, the elimination was more about taxi luck than subway luck, but it's still not great. That said, this was a really fun leg, another late-night bright-lights big-big-city leg, which TAR does well. I much preferred the e-sports task to the contrived fake "Japanese game show" stuff they've done in the past in this part of the world. I am sort of off Tara and Joey from their animus against the gamers. C'mon. If it were playing a ball game in a village, you'd be okay with it. And you're not sufficiently old to be all bah, humbug about gaming.

I think it came down to the loading: follow the model and get all the traps looped on the nails so that bumps won't dislodge them and the question becomes whether you want to try cycling at speed or just Fred Flintstoning the bike to the destination. Even London made it there intact, though the bike itself was broken when she headed back. That makes it a pretty subtle task: ostensibly a physical "delivery" challenge but in reality more of an "assembly" challenge.

It wasn't exactly a classic "deliver something from A to B" task; it was more "get a fully-laden bike from A to B". But you're right: being able to unload at the destination and re-load at the starting point would have been less gruelling -- and having to start from scratch and re-check the model would also have made it easier to grasp that you'd loaded things up incorrectly.

To me, those were probably two of the best TAR legs in recent years, and definitely the best NEL/EL two-fer in a single country for a long long time. I don't think it's coincidental that they were mostly in Vietnam, a location that has always delivered for TPTB, and had a lot of callbacks to earlier seasons. (Brooke, of course, is a walking callback to TAR3.) Obvious KF plus heat, plus big tough challenges, plus urban/rural split, plus subtle and non-spoodfeedy task design (like the number of marked ladders) plus teams having good and bad (and really bad) days, plus good editing in spectacular locations. Turns out that if you combine all of those things, especially towards the end where the remaining teams are fairly strong, you get something very close to old-school TAR. I also liked breaking up leg 9 with that huge flight -- though it eliminated any advantage gained from the last leg and the bungie RB, that was also something done in earlier seasons. Should TPTB have come up with a less brutal failure mode for that shrimp-basket Road Block? Yes, but Floyd was the only one of the five to be sent back, which to me suggests that he repeatedly got the loading wrong. (The snippet of Joey explaining the hanging technique where "gravity takes over" seemed to be in there for a reason.) It's tricky to play-test in a way that factors in both the ground conditions and the impact of KF, and the problem with that task was that there was no way to make it progressively easier on repeat tries. I was glad to see hard challenges, but not ones that trigger a medical emergency. The rowing task in leg 10 was probably set up to be a "the other team member must perform" Road Block in the event that Redmond didn't make it this far, but became a "you choose" task when he did. That's fine by me.

Brooke is actually competent at Road Blocks when she's on her own and when she can't perform the I-can't-do-anything act instead. Aside from the early U-turn placement, another genuinely well-designed leg in another great location. (And another ferry to be memorised for the end, I'm sure.) And I'm with those who are happy that there was a genuine contest at the back -- with that much self-navigation, even a U-Turn and a Speed Bump wasn't a guaranteed "dead team walking" situation, so you might as well hedge your bets. The editing seemed quite compressed for the final third, because there were really two separate legs being shown in parallel. That's probably inevitable when navigation problems separate teams so much. (I just couldn't understand Michael's assumption that if you miss a turn, there'll be another turn somewhere up the road that puts you back on track. Uh, no. Sometimes you just have to turn round, even if you feel ashamed to do so.) Tara & Joey are pretty decent at this. Oh, also: animals! Not just donkeys, but goats! More fan service.

Was that the case with the coconut-leaf bag weaving in Zanzibar? It didn't seem like the demonstrators there were waiting for teams to show up in order to begin on a new one: they were just weaving bags one at a time from start to finish, and were at different points in the process when teams showed up. It feels like more of a deal here because the racers turned it into a deal, and that made it into the final edit.

I'm sure that technical considerations about the final edit go into the task planning, as well as more obvious stuff like timing. Having to repeat short tasks gives the editors more material to work with. Nail the song on the first attempt, and you'll see the same backdrop for all the teams, and there might be footage you can't use. (It also gives the Amazing Crew a chance to get the camera angles and sound right while sitting in a gondola.) Repeat it a few times and you end up in different places, and the editors can also cut between teams for the shots we saw on this leg without it looking forced or messy.

$250. And with a free ride from Lake Como to the lagoon. They were dropped off near the airport vaporetto stop (you can see planes in the background as they speed off) and that's at least 100 euro for starters.

This pins down what I've been scrabbling at for the entire season. The interpersonal stuff operates on a really superficial high-school level because the relationships between teams are basically the same as the relationships within teams. I don't care about specific tearjerker backstory narratives: I care about teams being able to draw from the reservoir of trust and knowledge and confidence that only comes from an established relationship. Or not being able to in spite of one. "I got this" / "I know you got this" is good. The teams have known each other for... maybe two weeks now. It's difficult, but I think it was the only way to a) get them into Venice early in the day (9am-ish) before it gets crazy touristy with people coming in from the mainland; b) create some separation between leading and trailing teams. Had they left at those times and needed to take trains, they'd have probably been bunched together and arrived around midday. Piazza S. Marco was relatively empty when Phil did the intro, and when the teams landed. It doesn't stay that way. (This was a taxi luck leg in some ways -- cunningly disguised because it was on water.)

Again, again: a great setting, probably the best leg design so far, some proper focused raaaaaaaacing when teams got separated, and still a bit weird. (I blame the party bus start.) If we're not going to get uncooperating animals, then at least we get a masked ball in a beautiful old house. (And yes, we all remember Chris & Amanda and sigh.) So we're getting a kind of fanservice in the locations, and the teams aren't quite doing it. Man, they're catty towards each other. I'm so completely fine with not sharing information, but it's clear enough that a bunch of teams are ganging up to knock out the competition, even though they're all smiles and hugs with them on the mat when it's a NEL. Brooke really does come across as someone who blundered into TAR by accident. It felt like teams got two mandatory failures and then it was a judgement call. Probably TPTB trying to balance things out based upon how they timed the luggage task. I hope they paid for any damage to the corners of historic buildings (and in Venice, every building is historic.) Did anyone get a sense of whether they were doing a rough circuit for the duration of the gondola ride, or just going on a meander and getting off at the nearest point when they were done?

I've liked the attempts to bring back eat-sleep-mingle in newer seasons -- it's now typically during in-leg bunches where teams are bunking down together and food is laid on -- but this feels a little different to me, because they're E-S-M-ing more as individuals than as team members. Everyone's known each other around the same time, and though they've spent more time up close with their teammates, that's generally been in more stressful and fractious situations. So you get racers who seem more sociable with other teams than they are with their own partners, which in turn makes cross-team relationships different. I'm not sure how it's going to resolve itself as we pivot towards the final 3.

It's the combination of "drawn from central casting" and "no pre-existing relationship" that creates conditions where everybody gloms onto the tropes of Generic Competitive Reality Show, which basically means Survivor's model of intimidation and alliances. The level of buddy-buddiness between teams is especially weird this time round -- think of the dynamics on the Lake Como ferry, and high-fives at the climbing Detour -- because it's mostly a product of ganging up against other teams. It's a weird collision of the "I'm not here to make friends" cliché with a situation where everybody is desperate to make friends with other teams. It's a pity, because the locations have been well-chosen this time round, especially given the safety constraints on world travel in 2017, and most of the leg designs have been okay, but you can't help wondering what they'd be like with a different cast. TARCan is an interesting comparison, as the teams there appear to remain on friendly terms (because Canada) but the difficulty of the tasks keeps them focused on the race and not on the "social game". No point in plotting and cultivating alliances if you can't do the basics.

In the past, finagling free upgrades has been okay, but buying non-economy isn't, and there have to be four economy seats available for you to be able to get on a flight. I'm not sure if that's changed since the arrival of "premium economy" and other intermediate classes. Since teams are generally buying full-fare at ultra-short notice, that probably gives them better reason to ask for upgrades if there aren't sufficient frequent flyers to move up the plane. (First class on European short-hop flights is pleasant enough, but it's more like business class on comparable domestic US flights.)

To hell with "social game." That was actually a fun leg, taking advantage of the locations well, and would have been more enjoyable with conventional teams, a few tweaks and without the "social" drama that made it dead-team walking once the U-Turns were settled. Have two teams competing on both sides of the Detour on such different tasks? That's a much more compelling finish than a footrace for the leg win. And having the U-Turn placement before the Detour clue box instead of at a post-Detour route marker again just feeds into Survivor Rules. Night-time tasks in cities are always good value, and Milan provided that. The climbing side of the Detour seemed less challenging and more Road Block-y than I expected -- I thought they might set it up so each team member had to do the climb and get half a clue, but perhaps that was thrown off by seeing good climbers at work, and perhaps the belay stuff would have been difficult with the size disparity within teams. In some ways, it felt like an old "transitional" European leg, like ones we've seen in past seasons (often in and around Amsterdam), where the aim is to get teams between one spectacular location and position them for the next leg. Except Lake Como's pretty spectacular in its own right. Anyway, we're going to end up with teams "social game-ing" their strongest competition into the final legs and then acting surprised when they themselves get eliminated. (The fact that Vanck and Ashton got to complete the Detour and be eliminated at the Pit Stop confirms in my mind that Sara & Shamir's "minor Guido" elimination in Tanzania was accelerated by production schedules.)

When are displays of "decisiveness" actually decisive, and when are they impulsive? On TAR, running around alleyways with the crew trying to keep pace conveys "doing something" more than huddling behind a computer, but that's more a trick of the filming and editing process. A good team has a sense of the clock ticking and the appropriate amount of time to devote to things. A bad team either cuts its losses too early (e.g. Detour-switching) or over-invests time in a losing battle. If you're a TAR fan who gets cast, you can definitely learn strategy from previous seasons, but there are also risks in trying to behave like your favourite teams in situations where their edit has silently cut out the less telegenic stuff. Vanck comes across as the sort of person who would never be able to take a vacation without weeks of research, a big guidebook and a detailed itinerary, and would also prefer working from a map or a printout than asking people. Ashton sometimes acts as if not being "decisive" and in motion means you're falling behind. It all adds up to a lot of dysfunction, as it did with Mike & Liz. I think Hera is on the mark here: teams with more established relationships generally have a way of navigating from imperfect information (whether it's mutual, or just a truce that frays under stress) but that doesn't apply here.

Not necessarily, given that the FF clue was deliberately light on detail, as many of them are: "Take a helicopter ride into the great unknown." I'm fine with a modern-era FF (i.e. not one every leg) that takes longer than a standard task, offers more of a challenge, and perhaps requires things that team members are not willing to do: the head-shaving FFs are the best example, and TARCan also had a clever one that I won't spoil. This one apparently only allowed one team into the helicopter, and there was no indication from Becca & Floyd on the drive to the Pit Stop that they encountered any delays. They acted as if everything had gone without a hitch, and assumed they'd get first place. I'm also fine with them not getting first on a TBC leg with no prize, but I wonder if that was expected when the leg was planned out: if bad weather had grounded the helicopter at some point, they'd have been away from their car and a long way from the remaining tasks.

Agreed, but if there's a chance of "circumstances beyond our control" then a FF task should really be set up to allow more than one team to go for it. This was a FF designed primarily for the visuals (and succeeded in that respect) not as a calculated risk within the context of the leg or as a reward for a team that self-navigated best to the first clue.

Sending Phil out to do the S&S elimination was presumably driven by production schedules and not the venue, given the long flight north. Had two teams missed the first ferry and been left to fight for survival over the Road Block, that could have caused a big logistical problem. That in turn suggests everyone was expected to be bunched on that one ferry, negating any advantage gained by the Detour. Messy planning for an elimination leg.

Ohhh, that's where the Insider Videos went. And yeah, Ashton seems to mistake "making impulsive choices" with "being motivated for TAR" even when her impulses lead her to miss things.

After Leg 3 in Zanzibar I read up a little more on the reason why he and many others ended up as refugees in 1964, and though TPTB didn't touch on that, you did get a sense in Leg 4 of the complexity surrounding how current residents approach the island's history. Absolutely, and this is where we all miss the Insider Videos that were posted in previous seasons. There are aspects of TAR where regular teams are likely to work out a strategy ahead of time -- basic stuff such as "who'll drive? who'll do heights or swimming or muscle or dancing?" All of this is being worked out on the fly by teams who know each other less well than we think we know them when watching, because we're getting a week between episodes and they're getting at best a day or so, and they're sorta busy with stuff rather than stepping back and doing psych profiles of their partners.

There's also a weird time-shift effect going on: in "race time", these teams have been together for just over a week. That's it. In normal seasons, that doesn't matter much because the relationships are already established, and whatever happens between partners has some kind of precedent. For this one, every leg represents just one or two more days of being partnered up, and the gap between that timeline and how long we feel we've known these teams grows wider and wider as the season progresses. Combine that with long flights and culture shock and overnight bunches and it's KF squared. On the FF not granting the leg victory: the fish-eating clue and the skydive landing zone were on Gødoy, about half an hour's drive from the Pit Stop. It's quite a drive.

This has been my suspicion since, well, the premiere: that it's not just about MacGyver and scheduling and budgets and the way that certain routes and stops are difficult compared to a decade ago, but that the casting delivered a nightmare. At the same time, we're starting to see things getting worn out: the editing's a bit off, the execution's a bit off, the leg planning's a bit off (the ferry bunch in Ep 4, the FF in Ep 5), everything feels a little weary compared to the spin-offs. In a weird way, it's a testament to how well TAR has worked in seasons past when it's worked well, and the amount of effort it takes to nail everything.

I didn't hate the "social media stars" season as much as I expected, perhaps because most of the teams had a) relationships; b) public images that they'd honed through their social media following and wanted to maintain, so there weren't really any big blowups or displays of assholery. This just feels... broken. Broken in a F*m*ly *d*t**n way, where enough of the core premise is thrown out that even the moments where TAR is on top form (say, the landscape shots in Norway) feel wasted on this cast. We're at a point now where we can start thinking about F3 contenders. Probably the bro asshole team, then pick three from Tara & Joey, London & Logan and Becca & Floyd. For everyone else, it's just waiting for the interpersonal trainwreck that gets them eliminated, and that's not great. It's Demolition TARby.

Well, that was a weird pairing for a double-header, with lots of weirdness within. The Tanzania leg felt like a NEL in waiting once teams were sent back to the mainland, and I assume that TPTB expected all teams to be on the same ferry fighting it out over the Road Block. Instead, we had the rare mid-task Philimination: okay because of how Sara and Shamir messed up the Detour, but teams at the front that rocked the Detour got bunched back with the pack. The Norway leg was in a glorious landscape and had some breathtaking camera work (up to Emmy leg standards from early seasons) but everything felt choppy and messy from the initial shots of teams driving, right through all the tasks to the end. Was the FF meant to take longer than completing the tasks at full speed? Dunno, but it did. Was it okay to drive your car during the Detour to collect rockets? I guess so. Was there a preferred way to get to the Pit Stop? I guess not. Yeah, something's off about this one, especially when the edit seems to be endorsing Redmond's view that male/female teams are suffering because emotions get in the way.

Even the hint of an intervention suggests that something went slightly wrong with leg planning. There are always unanticipated things along the way, and it's difficult to know just how much of a squeeze TPTB wanted to place on teams' cash reserves, but this felt like a miscalculation either of the leg money, the taxi fares or the amount that would be charged at the market. Since the trailing teams more were affected more than the leading ones, the taxi fares might have been the big factor here. Anyway, the ground producers aren't going to put teams in danger or legal jeopardy, especially if they become aware in real time that they might have messed up.