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One thing that TARCan seems more able to do than TAR-US is have the final leg in relatively open environments. The tasks themselves werein private locations, but the leg was run in public. I think tankgirl73's right that Gino & Jesse got all the taxi breaks, and Shermie's right that those breaks were the main separator between them and the wrestlers, because the two Road Blocks were one-at-a-time challenges. That doesn't feel so good, and it fits the US pattern of having to rely upon cabs and road travel in the final leg. (I assume the drive from the ski-jump task to the final bathmat was a relatively straight shot, but it was also a drive, which was unusual.) The brothers certainly earned their win, but it was all a bit meh.

Ugh. So much taxi bullshit in a leg that was really ill-suited to forcing teams into cabs. I understand the reasons for avoiding self-drive (safety, other logistics) but this one would have been very different with teams in their own cars. We got to see the classic kick-down bullying dynamic, and it leaves Brent & Sean as the only F3 team worth shouting for. Simi and Ope were without a doubt the weakest team, and had been hanging on at the back for a while, but it was a sad way to go out. I was more okay with this use of the Face Off than the previous one, because repeating skill-based tasks generally improves your chances, as you don't get physically exhausted, but I still hate the concept.

There was something joyless about how Brian and Cynthia greeted all the destinations, but especially this one. That Brian's big failure was a task that required attention to detail -- hey, police skills! who's a police officer? -- made the elimination fairly satisfying. Anyway, TARCan does India, around the time (legwise) that TAR-USA generally does India, except that this is hardcore KF-generating travel. I was slightly surprised that they didn't NEL this one, in part because taxi luck/karma was going to be a massive factor, but anyway. I liked the tasks, I liked the leg format, and I think that TPTBCan recognised that the environment was sufficient of a challenge for them not to add additional tasks as they've done in Canadian legs. It also felt as if the yoga side of the Detour was probably faster than the delivery side if you were decently flexible and attentive, which was a good weighting. I can understand the wrestlers' frustration at not winning legs, because the leg prizes are pretty nice, but as HistoryGirl says, winning legs doesn't count for anything in the final leg. What wins you the big prize is not getting eliminated and being smart at the very end. For sure, strong teams are going to make fewer mistakes and finish higher throughout the race, but it's not like you get credit for those leg victories at the end. (Though that might be an interesting tweak for TPTB in the future.)

When Dujean and Leilani were able to check in after their penalty, it brought home how I had no idea how much time had elapsed for tasks on this leg. No way did I think they'd be able to sit around for two hours and check in mid-pack, especially given how Gino and Jesse had finished ahead of them without skipping any tasks. Self-navigation had a fair bit to do with that, but it's a sign that the challenges in TARCan are more challenging than TAR-USA, but also that the pack is now being stretched and weaker teams are likely to be picked off one by one in the order we expect them to depart. Kristin and Neil's departure was only untimely in the sense that they couldn't cope with the time challenge at the start of the leg. They've flattered to deceive throughout most of the Race.

I was thinking 'Staying Alive' at 120BPM right through that task. Nic and Sabrina were, let's be fair, a woeful team who didn't deserve to get this far, although I hope they (and the other bottom-end teams) got to say hello to Alex Trebek and that he wasn't booked solely for a couple of hours. Less brutal than the previous leg, and I could quibble with the structure a little. TPTBCan probably wanted two teams to compete for the Fast Forward, hence the bunching into twos at the mine, but it didn't work out that way. The swimming task was always going to be the also-ran of the Detour, so it was a forced task with the quotas, but there was plenty of order-shifting right through.

Late to show up here for this season of TARCan, but that was a brutal leg. Brutal brutal brutal. And I don't actually mind that, because TARCan still has some ragged edges and you get to see teams put through the wringer. I expected a NEL at this point in the race, but liked the stealth TBC, even though it's one of those semi-TBCs where there's an airport bunch. (I doubt the 4-hour penalties were actually enforced at the mat, as they were mooted by it being really dark and everybody needing to fly out to their next destination. They'll be enforced in spirit.) It also exposed the big problem with the Face-Off concept: that if a team sucks at a head-to-head physical task, they'll probably suck their way right to the back of the pack, because repeated attempts are only going to tire them out more. If you don't get good at a head-to-head challenge on the second attempt, then you're going to end up like Simi and Ope. I don't mind TPTBCan experimenting, and it's probably a better two-team task than the collaboration approach of the short-lived Intersection in TAR-US, but the Face-Off probably needs to be a skill or mental challenge rather than a physical one. I don't like how it neutralises the time gap gained by good racing in the first task -- you basically inherit the time gap of the team directly behind you -- but on this leg, with self-navigation and a Detour and a W-Turn and a drive to the Pit Stop, I'm more comfortable with that mechanic than if it were a tighter city- and taxi-based leg. I think it mattered in terms of testing the teams, setting up tensions, forcing the team with the Express Pass to make a choice. I'm actually happier with how this leg was structured than ones where being at the back end of a W-Turn is a guaranteed elimination.

That'd be weird, though, because they were Nokia/Microsoft Lumia phones. (I've mentioned this before, but I'm 99% sure they were using the Lumia 735 "selfie phone" that, in the end, no US carrier decided to sell.) They were definitely under-the-radar superfans who showed more basic race savvy than the other teams throughout. Their only big slip was missing the early flight out of Amsterdam and going to a bar instead.

It's not just "some spectator": there's a large online community (RFF) that tracks the Race while it's in progress, and for multiple seasons it has pinned down eliminations up to the final leg, but AFAIK it hasn't spoiled the winner. (I deliberately avoid spoilers, but look at the spoiler thread here and check the datestamps.) TAR could get away with more in earlier seasons, because there wasn't the same interest in following the Race in progress, or smartphones with cameras. The design of final legs is shaped by the desire to avoid a) spoilers; b) interference from fans who know what's going on; c) safety issues; c) previous rule-bending, going back to Colin's town-car rental in TAR5. That's why you end up with tasks that feel more segregated and artificial, because the risk of a more open task being disrupted or altered at a critical point is too great.

It was still very... linear. Go up a wire, go down a wire, catch a ball, kick a ball, ride a horse in a straight line, go down a wire, drive a truck in a straight line. All with lots and lots of protective gear and safety crew around. And let's be honest, there was zero zilch nada indication of anybody losing a second because of fear of heights, and only a few hairy moments with the horses. We know the problems with final legs. The final city usually needs to be accessible by a direct flight into the US. Most of the tasks have to be in enclosed, controlled or out-of-the-way areas to avoid spoilers. No driving (other than a monster truck for 50 yards). No public transportation. Limited interaction with locals outside of cab drivers and those who are part of the tasks. As djlynch says, the cab drivers for this leg were obviously airport drivers, and were mostly useless for any destination that wasn't the football stadium. TPTB could have helped things out by having teams close out their airport cabs at the stadium while bundling some money to half a dozen other cabs to wait nearby, and I wouldn't have considered that shenanigans. Anyway, a sprawly car-dependent city isn't a good place to end the race. Sorry, Dallas. It's not us, it's you. There have been comments about great finales with cab/car luck, but how about the foot race finish in TAR2, or the Manhattan tasks in TAR10, or the finishes in Anchorage and Portland? I don't mind flashy tasks in opening legs, but there have been plenty of finales with more creative challenges: it's not like they've gone from pizza-eating to 300 foot drops without anything in between. And as I said in the previous episode thread, by having a NEL and a midway elimination in the finale, TPTB are depriving viewers of the F3 elimination, which is often a highlight because there aren't as many constraints and everything to play for.

Final legs are always weird because of spoiler-avoidance and limitations on what can be done to keep things safe. This was no exception. Partly because there are things you can't do well in the US and/or the final leg, partly to look spectacular. In a way, it was all hat and no cattle. Flashy challenges, but not a massive amount to do in them until seeking out the clue from the tower, and then the final memory/selfie task. (And yeah, the stadium task was straight outta TAR Canada.) Mainly, splashy flashy stuff was being done around teams, not by them: get yanked up on a rope, don't fall off a horse. It was also pretty clear that taxi luck played a big role in spacing out teams between the tasks, but none of that really made the edit. Mike & Rochelle should have really gone at the end of the previous leg, so they got an extra half-leg out of it, but to be eliminated mid-way because of taxi stuff seems pretty meh. Laura & Tyler were the strongest team, and are worthy winners. They seem to have gelled because they're secret superfans who knew what it took to make a TAR team work, with a dash or three of snark to go with it. But this is a season that might have been -- not atrocious, but could have been better without the damn gimmick, and TPTB shouldn't dare repeat it. I wonder if they had an earpiece and were being given the thumbs-up/down from afar.

Yeah, F3 deciders have often been the best legs in past seasons, because they're still outside the US and don't have the structural limitations of a finale. In earlier seasons, the planning wasn't necessarily as smooth as it's now become, but the intensity was there. The TBC conceit at the end of this leg was just to avoid talking about Speed Bumps. It's a NEL in all but name, but because they've said "keep racing" and handed out a clue, it passes some kind of rule muster.

The NEL was guessable early on with the shots of all the teams in the same location (the Pit Stop overlooking the coast) and neither of the trailing teams looking sad. (Though it was weirdly presented as a keep-racing TBC, but only to the final team, it's clearly a spoonfed flight, so that's how they got the post-leg shots.) Looks like the non-elim F4 and mid-finale elimination is something that TPTB are going to stick with, perhaps because it adds a bit more drama to the last leg, and also perhaps because it's a bit harsh to ask a team to play decoy straight after an elimination. The leg itself: good locations, well-balanced Detour for once with judges on both sides who kept it even. Nice to see Road Block limits kicking in, too. Tyler and Laura don't look comfortable racing from the back (a bonus clip shows how they bled time at the Chan Chan site) so they'll benefit from the bunch. Mike and Rochelle are nice but all the challenges become a drag for them, and it's often painful to watch. Blair and Hayley seem to be acting out a kind of meta-relationship. It's bizarre, and probably only works when they have a healthy lead, but it's better than what has come before.

Except that you can't imagine any of the leg's tasks being completed during the night, so there was going to have to be some kind of forced bunch and a morning start. There might have been a stagger if more than two teams had got on an earlier flight, but it's moot: it was an Hours of Operation bunch. (There aren't many bonus clips for this leg, and none from the overnight in Peru, but I assume TPTB put on some kind of reception/buffet at the square for the early arrivers, as they've been doing elsewhere this season.) That, I agree with: the gimmick has eaten away at a lot of the little details that we're used to seeing. Ironically, the time's taken up by bits that show how the gimmick hasn't worked (Blair and Hayley stuff) while Date Night has been mostly shoved off into bonus clips.

It might have been as simple as it looked: if you got in on the evening, you got the fireworks and a HoO bunch; if you took the spoonfed reservation, you got to start when you arrived in Trujillo. Perhaps if all the teams had got earlier flights, they'd have divvied out staggered start times. But the options would have been well scoped out by TPTB, given that the journey required a connection from Lima to a regional airport that doesn't have that many inbound flights.

To be fair to the leg-planners, even if you felt the Olympians were the walking eliminated in Namibia, Matt & Ashley had ample opportunity to catch up in this one, and just had too many brain-farts along the way. Can't control for that. They even took the right side of the Detour before being sent off on that semi-wild potato chase. On that topic: I think J&J's spud-sorting tactic was the right one: do the sorting in the relative quiet of the farm, then do a quick check at the market, instead of bagging them randomly and trying to sort them at the stall.

Yes, and they do. They're one of the most-seized food items by US Customs because homesick Peruvians (and Chileans) try to bring them back.

That's an odd thing, because they're obviously deactivated Nokia Lumia 735s (sold as 'the selfie phone'). However, a) Lumias won't be Nokia-branded from this year onwards, after the Microsoft takeover; b) none of the US carriers decided to sell them, and you literally can't buy one through official channels in the US. So I imagine Microsoft made a deal with TPTB in the autumn when the phones were launched and then everything associated with it fizzled out by the time the Race was over in December. Perhaps there are deals in foreign TV markets?

Oh, that's a bit harsh. Mike did as decently on the cane cutting as he's done in a physical challenge right through (1100 calories burned for the day, courtesy of the sponsor-gadget!) and they picked the right side of the Detour. They ran their own race, even when Laura and Tyler overtook them. (We got a "we're polite to people" in this leg, after the bonus clip last leg where they didn't cut into the cab lines at Schiphol. Interesting.) There was a certain amount of spoonfeeding all the way through this leg: marked taxis for the trip to the cane field, possibly pre-arranged autorickshaws for the Detour. Perhaps it was for the teams' safety (the thing about it being too dangerous to walk), perhaps it's because Lima cab drivers persuade you to get in by saying somewhere is 10km away, then take you the scenic route.

That was a KF-ridden leg, from Laura and Tyler's sloppiness at the start right through to the end. I think it was unwitting, because they hadn't seen the Mamas starting point; if it was deliberate, well, that's a wee bit sketchy. (Yes, you can tell other teams lies, and they don't have to listen to them, but there's a point at which confusion becomes outright deception. I don't think that like was crossed here.) And that wasn't the first time: Laura and Tyler missed the clue at the shoeshine stall for the Road Block and told Matt and Ashley it was far away before they even got to the square. I do think Matt and Ashley could have caught up: the Mamas side of the Detour seemed easier if you spoke Spanish (and didn't have Hayley jabbering at you) and not difficult if you were polite. (This is my one Hayley comment: I'm staggered how she couldn't accept that Blair speaking the local language might actually be helpful when getting directions. She has some serious control issues.) Curious whether TPTB expected all (or at least most) of the teams to seek out better flights than the backstop reservations so that they'd arrive at night for the fireworks and get the HoO bunch, instead of the morning.

That's plausible, and the flight from Bangkok to Germany was certainly one of the biggest latitudinal jumps TAR has done over populated areas (i.e. not the Pacific) -- so yes, you wonder about a missing leg somewhere in-between. But that prompts further speculation related to the overt dating theme and the casting of gay (or simply unmarried) couples. But perhaps it was just the easiest way to fit together some of these new locations. And I'd agree with selkie that long north-south journeys along roughly the same time zone but with very different environments and climate create a different kind of travel fatigue that's worth seeing. Going from the Namibian summer to an Amsterdam winter is quite a transition.

Actually, it makes a lot of sense, and there have been a few occasions where they've travelled east on a westbound race and vice versa. After a double leg, they weren't staying in Namibia any longer, no matter what. Perhaps there was a leg planned elsewhere in Africa or South America that had to be pulled late, but I doubt it. This was basically a transitional leg, because there are very few direct flights from southern Africa to South America. (Or even North America: I was on a flight once with someone going from California to Johannesburg, changing in Amsterdam. Long trip.) My guess is that TPTB wanted teams bunched on a direct flight for the forthcoming leg, and they did it by setting up a quick leg in a major European hub. We've seen it a few times before, which is why Amsterdam shows up quite often on TAR.

I was mortified by Hayley and Blair on their way back to "H-Street" (Herengracht?) riding on the left-hand side pavement, then on the left of the road among trams. Amsterdam has lots of cyclists, but everybody knows which lane they should be in for which mode of transportation, and if you're playing salmon or in the wrong lane, it gets ugly quickly. And to those who pointed out the previous navigation horrors in Thailand and Germany: yes, you're right. The specific dysfunction there is that Hayley feels somewhat confident in something, she still cedes responsibility to Blair so that if something goes wrong she can give him grief, because that's easier than her making an assertive decision and taking responsibility for any screw-ups. The ride into town from the Road Block in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel wasn't a short one: about 12km, so perhaps 40m on one of those Dutch bikes. But it's a reminder that if you do rent a bike in Amsterdam, you can get to some pretty villages relatively quickly. It looks like the floating hot tubs aren't a thing in central Amsterdam itself, hence the stares from locals, but there are rentals elsewhere in the Netherlands.

Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities, even in December where it's coldish, overcast and the damp clings to you. I liked how they started teams outside Amsterdam and got them to bike in, and there was plenty of team-shuffling out of the Road Block. Definitely a transitional leg, planned more for flight routing than the location, but I'm surprised it was a NEL. (Yeah, I didn't pay enough attention to the rest-of-season preview.) It's true that orientation can be difficult in the Centrum because of how the canals and streets are interwoven. That said, for all her screaming, Hayley got the navigation right, and Blair messed up because he hasn't learned to let her take the lead on that particular bit. That said again, if I had to listen to Hayley, I'd probably have ignored her as well. I'd have nailed the shuffleboard Detour. Tyler and Laura must be favourites to win this thing now, surely? They're treating the blind date gimmick with the contempt it deserves, and treating the Race with the love it (often) deserves. They are, I think, a covert superfan team, which is why they've gelled well as a team far more than the blind date couples who aren't quite as into it.

That starts to become a bit limiting. Do we want U-Turns in NELs? That would make for an interesting twist, but if not, you're ruling out U-Turns in six of twelve legs. TPTB don't want U-Turns in the first couple of legs because teams and viewers barely have a sense of who's who, and so it doesn't produce enough drama and potential retribution. (There was the Blind U-Turn in the opener this time, but it was a weird addition.) Throw in the final and penultimate leg as ones where they won't be used, and that reduces the available legs for U-Turns to a point where teams will know exactly when they're coming. It's already fairly predictable: the pattern in previous seasons has been either earlyish and mid, or mid- and late with the F4 decider as the late one. It really depends on the leg design, and even then, how it plays out depends how the last-place teams respond. I don't like 'eliminated team walking' legs, but the tasks weren't processional on this one, and there was definitely time to be gained or lost. I can't think of how TPTB could have put their thumb on the scale for this one to make it more competitive at the back -- including removing the U-Turn -- that wouldn't have felt unfair.

It was an uphill struggle for the team in last, as it often is, but the case-drop Road Block was clearly one where you could bleed time or make it up: Jelani rattled it off, while Mike struggled badly. Steve had the physical fitness not to get exhausted, but messed up the navigation. Had the Express Pass not been in play, or another team been U-Turned with them, then it wouldn't have felt as processional. From the TV Guide exit interview, it sounds like Steve and Aly's driving woes ran into the second day: Now, they're not going to say that TPTB stitched them up like kippers after the NEL, but 20 minutes plus a 10-minute Speed Bump seems like a navigable gap if you run a no-mistake leg.