etagloh

Mike and Rochelle had problems navigating in the second leg, but they've not been great at navigation throughout; Jenny and Jelani had their flat. The driving was certainly easier in the second leg, and on better roads, but still covered decent distances: 80km or so from Swakopmond to Dorob, then back south through Swakopmond to the Pit Stop, about 120km, so perhaps 200km in total. There's clearly a balance between a post-NEL elimination leg that levels out all the teams with a bunch, and one that carries over the time differentials and throws in a Speed Bump for good measure. The Bangkok leg was probably meant to start with a flight bunch and didn't. The use of drivers at the start of the second leg in Namibia was meant to carry over the time gaps, probably with an eye on the teams' safety. My gut sense is that TPTB have a rough ETA blocked out for first and last teams, especially for NELs, and beyond that, any bunching starts to look like shenanigans. You're right that this hasn't created much competition at the back of the pack this season. But Aly and Steve's deficit was accumulated over many separate mistakes that continued into the second leg, and they'd most likely have been eliminated even without the U-Turn.

I disagree on this because of the amount of self-navigation in these two legs compared to the ones in Thailand. Driving long distances doesn't always get treated as a task by itself, because it doesn't make for good television, but the 215km (133-ish mile) drive to the Pit Stop in the NEL and some substantial driving in the second Namibia leg were challenges all by themselves. Had Steve and Aly run a perfect second leg, perhaps the U-Turn would have done them in at the end, but I think they had more opportunity to save themselves across the two legs than Harley and Jonathan.

Oh, surely a plant, but it was interesting to see which teams asked him to translate, as opposed to seeking out white (German-looking?) people either within the bookshop itself or a nearby hotel.

Aly was obviously KF-ed up on this double-leg, but she was right to be fussed about Steve's driving: if you're not used to being on the opposite side of the road, your road positioning is off and you instinctively drift off towards the edge. We've seen flats before on regular roads when teams have driven on the left, as a result of rubbing against the kerb, and the dirt roads in Namibia were clearly much less forgiving. There's a bit of ongoing-commentary-snark that can be less than engaging about them. They're a strong team, but they're also in the habit of standing back and passing judgement on other teams. Namibia's a good destination, because it's spectacular and sufficiently sparsely populated (and basically safe) to allow self-navigation over long distances. I liked the planning of the second leg, and there was clearly enough leeway for a last-place team to recover if they didn't flake out. The Detour rationing in the first leg, though, was bullshit.

Briefly: manual is still the default in Europe, and if you learn to drive with an automatic you usually get a special licence/license that restricts you to automatics. When the terrain is tricky and there are self-driving legs (rare these days, but not unknown) TPTB tend to provide automatics. For legs in safer environments, they provide manuals. That's what they do. It's a thing. If Ford considered teams thrashing at the gears a promotional disservice, they'd pull the sponsorship. It's been going long enough. I actually think Ford enjoys seeing the Focus and Fiesta driven by teams on European roads, where they fit in very nicely with other cars on the road, as one of the big selling points of newer Fiestas and Focuses is their 'Euro' style, with more features than Americans expect from smaller cars but which Europeans demand from them. This was a much harder self-navigation leg than the one in Germany, because major roads in Monaco and the surrounding bit of France run on different elevations with narrow winding roads connecting them, and yes, GPS would probably have trouble with that. Kurt and Bergen ought to be thankful.

Seems like the other teams don't quite have a handle on Mike and Rochelle, perhaps because they're not a 'TV couple', but also because they're not consistent: they gain time in chunks, they lose time in chunks. They make smart decisions to pull them back with the pack, but can't keep up with the top teams. They're like a lot of teams in seasons past that deserve to make it this far but not much further, and if they do progress further it's because more consistent teams have their one bad day.

They're sort of running a real-time ironic commentary on the Race. Not mugging (mostly) but they're the ones most likely to step back and offer an assessment of the other teams, the blind-date gimmick, and the legs themselves, like the 'bougie' stuff in Monaco. Sometimes that's just nasty-snarky, like Tyler on Mike/Rochelle -- and Tyler is the more likely of the two to cross the line -- but sometimes it's fairly accurate. They clearly never had any illusions about the blind date aspect, and yet TPTB managed to match them well in terms of personality: each can give as good as they get, but they don't take it personally. I can't decide whether i should want them to win for that, or whether a bona fide couple like Matt and Ashley (who are endearingly goofy) have a better claim.

The bonus clips this week are an interesting contrast to what was shown on the episode itself. There are three that fit together: one where they're together in the Nice hotel and being awkward ('No Kisses'); another in the same place where Hayley is muttering to Laura about how everything Blair says is so embarrassing ('Embarrassing'); and one where Laura and Tyler describe their reaction to that exchange ('It's Just Sad'). The second of those is fairly revealing: Blair is getting his hair made up as part of the fitting process, and talks about how his family went on a boat trip to Bermuda when he was younger, which ended up on local TV news, and how the attention mortified him and he cut his long hair short. Hayley seems disgusted by Blair talking about something that isn't her; Blair loosens up so much when he's separated from Hayley.

Lots of bonus clips for this episode, including Mike & Rochelle's date night ('Red and Blue') as a fully-edited segment that didn't make the final cut. And there are three clips that, seen together, really don't show Hayley in a good light when the episode itself was kinder to her.

For this leg, I think you have to treat the Detour as if it extended from the moment teams received their clue to the moment they reached the Pit Stop. That's what made the edit a bit murky in the final few minutes, but it's also what levelled things out, and I'm certain it was intended to do so, given how it wasn't the usual choice between options. So I think it was more finely balanced than the Detours in previous legs, and was probably tested to be so. In fact, I think that's why the perfume task had those "mystery scents", to handicap the task sufficiently so that it didn't grant such a big advantage over the zipliners. Also, excellent judge for the perfume task. Always good to have an expert judge with a bit of character.

Looking at the maps, Èze is closer to the Pit Stop, but it's complicated by how you have two major roads running parallel, one near the coast and one up high, with narrow winding roads connecting them. Really tricky navigation all the way. For Jeff and Jackie to end up at Nice airport meant they overshot the turn-off to St Jean-Cap-Ferrat really badly.

Emmy leg? Possibly, though perhaps not given the previews. TPTB definitely pulled out the stops for the visuals that Monaco and environs can provide. I liked the leg design and was happy with the way it played out. Kudos to Mike and Rochelle for airport savvy and nabbing standby seats -- clearly the rule on booking a single flight doesn't prohibit that -- and kudos for TPTB for a decent staggered start to the leg for the Road Block task. I'm honestly fine with making the Detour subject to the spin of the wheel: it meant there was only a 0.0078125 probability that one side wouldn't get chosen, and they clearly wanted both sides used. Self-navigation was obviously a big factor in the final placings, but it also implied that the zip/slackline Detour teams had a longer and trickier drive to the Pit Stop, perhaps to compensate for a task that was actually quicker to complete. Pretty sure the perfume Detour teams all got in ahead of them. The edit made the finishing order seem a bit weird because we often assume that finishing a Detour first with the Pit Stop ahead puts you in prime spot.

In their TV Guide exit interview they said that they'd got their Detour clue and were heading to the Stacks (in pitch darkness) when they were told to stop racing. Phil showed up after about 45 minutes. I'll take them at their word, though I'm sure they were just going through the motions. I imagine that once Mike & Rochelle checked in, TPTB got in touch with Kurt/Bergen's crew to see where they were and set up the field elimination.

That's one of those situations where you'd need a "spirit of the rules" ruling. (TAR rules enforcement is more like golf than other sports.) Given that Camera & Sound need to fit into the car alongside the team, and Focuses aren't big cars, was Jackie allowed to sit on the fanny pack? Could she move it while the team was driving as long as she returned it to the back seat when they got out?

I'd assume so, though at that point it would become a logistical nightmare, especially if the subsequent leg involved significant travel. As I said upthread, time penalties are the only real tool we've seen used for infractions* . Perhaps there's some small print in The Rules We'll Never See saying that if you stack up a certain amount of time penalties, you're obliged to "voluntarily" withdraw from the race. * I'm sure there are actions that earn immediate disqualification beyond losing passports, mostly tied to breaking local laws or flagrantly ignoring safety rules, but we've never seen that happen.

I don't think we're really disagreeing here, but I do think he's aware that 'calm and rational' winds her up. There's not much to be done about that. The extent to which Hayley is (perhaps subconsciously) setting the team up for failure and then very loudly placing the blame on Blair, though, is something to behold.

Bonus clips are selective in their own way, but they also point to some of what's being left out of the episode, and there's something... abusive about the exchange in that clip. That's just three minutes of two people who can't stand each other, can't communicate with each other, don't want to be in the same timezone as one another, and particularly in Hayley's case, don't mind being filmed showing it.

Central Munich, like a lot of German cities, is not really meant for driving: there are lots of restrictions in the central ring and lots of incentives to use public transport. Like I said upthread, this didn't feel like a heavy self-navigation leg, but there it was clearly a challenge at the outset. If I'd been there, my navigation approach would have been to drive out of the city until I hit one of the ring roads, and then go round in a circle until I hit the right exit. I can't think of anything we've seen on TAR that earns an outright disqualification other than losing passports: the James/Abba precedent for that is that if it's a NEL, you're even allowed to compete in the next leg, though that's surely dependent on the next leg being in the same country as well as local laws on carrying ID. You could skip all the tasks and incur hours of penalties for other not-following-the-clue infractions and not be given the hook. When it's an elimination leg, as Phil explicitly stated at the end of this leg, then the field elimination kicks in once the second-last team is checked in. When it's a designated NEL, it gets tricky. (We can only extrapolate The Rules from what we see and the on-the-record statements from Phil, the producers, and to some degree from former contestants. There are very strong patterns to suggest that significant changes are only made because of circumstances In The Real World, not the Race itself.) The juxtaposition of Blair at the end with Kurt/Bergen seemed very deliberate. This isn't to set up Blair as a heroic figure, but to indicate that there's a difference between persevering with an excruciating situation and quitting. On reflection, it might have been better for TPTB to disqualify K/B the moment they abandoned the car and since this was the first time it has happened, I'm sure there was a lot of real-time back-and-forth on how to handle it. But like I said, we've never seen any mechanism for doing that in seasons past, and since it was the very start of a leg, TPTB couldn't simply tell them to go to the Pit Stop, go directly to the Pit Stop, do not pass Go, do not collect $1m.

It's worth watching the bonus clip of them waiting around in the hope of finding the fanny pack ('At Least We're In Lederhosen') mainly because of how impressively Laura can swear. Also includes her saying 'if you were my boyfriend, your ass would be grass'.

We're not really meant to comment on bonus clips in episode threads, so I'll just say this: while they are, of course, selected from hours of footage, this week's in particular show that some (even) more fractious exchanges from the blind date teams are left out, along with some other comments on Hayley. 'The Amazing Argument' would be terrible television, so there's good reason to cut that stuff, but If anything, the editing's softer on the blind-daters, perhaps to reflect the season's gimmick.

Finally caught up. I suppose it was entertaining, but it was also a trainwreck of a leg, and if TPTB had set it up with half an eye on sending it for Emmy consideration, they'll have tossed it in the bin. A fifteen-ish hour westbound flight can do that: call it induced KF. Most teams were snappy and snippy and some blind date teams were plain nasty to each other, but the established couples who held it together did really well. Once again, though, the winners weren't really in doubt early on, and nor were the last-placers. It's hard even to pass judgement on the leg as a leg: the tasks seemed decent, the Ford promo task wasn't terrible, I'm very much not a fan of GPS for self-drive but Ford marketing money helps keep TAR going, and this didn't feel like a leg that needed to make navigation between tasks a massive factor, especially after such a long flight. We've seen teams get past Rule #1 Of Race Preparation before, in the way Netfoot described: they may take half an hour to get out of first gear and put 50,000 miles of wear on the transmission, but once that's done, they can manage. Kurt and Bergen didn't have half an hour's patience with each other. (I feel bad for Harley and Jonathan watching this.) I suppose we did find out that Germany's public transportation network is good enough to get you out to places you'd normally expect only to be accessible by car. The exchange between Tyler/Laura and Blair/Hayley seemed fairly telling to me: this hasn't simply been a selective #FreeBlair edit. The other teams have been exposed to enough of Hayley at bunches to have an opinion of her that's not dissimilar to Blair's.

Of course, doh. They'd have known from the very first cluebox in Bangkok. But yes, they had no way of knowing whether they were racing for last place.

Interesting question. None of the other teams would have seen Jonathan and Harley since they left them in Tokyo, and they wouldn't have known that it was a NEL in Phuket, as teams only find out about NELs when they see surviving teams show up for the next leg. So yes, I think the lagging teams in Bangkok had every reason to believe that they might be racing to avoid last place.

It's perhaps worth going back and looking at that sequence. The majority of teams went to the AirAsia desk; some went to the Philippine Airlines desk, and they were sufficiently far apart in Narita that neither group knew where the others were. Kurt and Bergen lucked out with the last seats on Cathay Pacific, Jonathan and Harley got stiffed with what was left on ANA. The new rules only allow one ticket purchase; the long-standing rules don't allow teams to separate; there was apparently no general ticketing counter that handled all airlines (otherwise we'd have seen teams use it) and no physical way to check availability at multiple desks simultaneously. You can perhaps count barging to the front of the line as "hustle", but it's not as if the other teams showed any particular ingenuity to get their flights: they picked a desk, basically a coin-toss. I like actual airport hustle. I miss the early seasons where people had more freedom to seek out creative connections, but I understand why there's more spoonfeeding and bunching now. I don't like situations where picking the wrong side of a coin-toss decides the outcome of not just that leg but the following one.

It certainly could have been fixed easily: a clue at the Pit Start saying "go here in Phuket", an HoO bunch ("wait until whenever o'clock") and then the instruction to fly to Bangkok, all timed to miss that first flight. That's been done before, usually very pre-determined, though some may have been at shorter notice. Here's where I disagree somewhat. There have in fact been situations like that in past races when Circumstances intervened, though that usually levels out teams. But there's a limit to the kind of intervention TPTB can do to secure availability on scheduled flights, even though I'm sure it sometimes entails block-booking fully-refundable seats on flights then cancelling them a few minutes before teams reach an airport or travel agent. That said, this leg was planned around having all teams into Bangkok at the same time, and when you assume there'll be a natural bunch at the airport... you know what they say about assuming.