etagloh

There are bunches and there are bunches. A NEL followed by a leg that doesn't offer some chance of survival for the team arriving last makes me wish that TPTB could switch in a mercy elimination, and make the subsequent leg a NEL, even though that has its own problems and is never going to fly with Legal. I'd agree with this, except that TPTB can sometimes throw in large amounts of anti-hustle, and definitely did so in this sequence. They got all teams to Narita too late to fly, apparently with specific instructions on which airlines were acceptable, expected them to hustle-hustle-hustle when the desks opened, then gave them a nice party in Phuket on their arrival. That's a lot of in-leg forced downtime punctuated by a tiny bit of crazy RAAACE which turned out to be critical for Team NKOTB.

I'm more convinced by this now than I was last week. It was clear last week that TPTB wanted everybody bunched in Narita to seek flights when the desk opened, then bunched overnight in Phuket. It was clear this week that everybody was intended to be on that first flight to Bangkok. Stuff happens. It's annoying, but that's what comes from TAR taking place in the real world and not a controlled space on an island: occasionally good legs get spoiled by the starting conditions, sometimes bad ones turn out well in spite of themselves. I think he's decided that "needing to work on our communication" isn't in effect. Surgeons often have a morbid sense of humour, and we might be seeing that in effect.

No. As with the Japanese originals, it's for people who like cats but aren't able to have their own, usually through living in pet-free apartment blocks. Bangkok has more street cats than Japan, but they're not into being petted.

Eliminated Team Walking legs are always painful to watch. This leg was clearly planned with an all-teams flight bunch, a Speed Bump to create distance, an interesting Detour, and nothing really to allow large gaps to be closed. TPTB never expected a team to be as far behind as Harley and Jonathan, who did indeed get a superfan exit. So it's a pity that this leg was decided at the start of the last leg, because I'd be able to focus on a pretty good leg design that was obviously hyper-competitive and allowed for a lot of shifting of places among those who got in on the first flight. The edit would have had real competition at both ends, and less focus on the interpersonal draaaamaaaa. I liked how they set off two distinct Detour options with mini-tasks along the way, and I hope they try it again, perhaps with staggered departures (five minutes?) at each side, so that you don't get everybody heading in one direction at the outset. So yes, there was a certain amount of linearity to the tasks, but it's also Bangkok, where you get a bit of crazy city KF and traffic and there's a certain amount of racing skill that's beyond taxi luck and just keeping your head in the craziness. Also, the final clue to the Pit Stop was sufficiently obfuscated that it stymied one team for (in their words) 90 minutes. Perhaps if everyone had started off even, it would have felt like a slightly random elimination, but I also think it would have got rid of a team that handled Bangkok badly and make the overall leg plan feel better. (Tangentially, we've always known that TAR uses two tuk-tuks per team for the crew setup, but we actually saw a camera guy for extended periods in an adjacent tuk-tuk. Guessing they also mount a small reverse-facing remote camera on the dashboard of the one the team is travelling in, which adds a bit of time to any journey.)

Now that makes sense, and I was going to mention it: it looked very much as if teams didn't have free rein of the schedule but instead were limited to a couple of airlines and perhaps even made to go through their desks instead of booking with them online or through a general ticket agent. That's not quite the same as spoonfed, because teams are quietly forbidden from using airlines on a regular basis (usually liability or visa issues) but it's getting close. The question will be whether Jonathan and Harley are "the walking eliminated" in the next leg, with no chance of making up the gap.

Re-watching, I'm more inclined to believe that. We see the starting times of the first handful of teams either side of sunset (4:30pm - 6:30pm) but we don't see how late the back of the pack left. We know that none of the teams arrived at the Nagano Pit Stop in darkness, even Libby/CJ, so it wasn't a 12 or 24-hour pit stop. Let's guesstimate 18 hours. We also know that Jelani and Jenny didn't lose any time on tasks over the first two legs, and still wouldn't have got a flight at Narita, so the intention of TPTB must have been to have the teams fighting for flights when the counters opened. The setup in Phuket seemed clear enough: staggered departures, overnight party. I do think that TPTB give themselves real-time wiggle room with Hours of Operation bunches and staggered departure times, but not necessarily Pit Stop durations unless there's some external issue.

I think TPTB assumed everyone would get into Phuket on the evening. Consider the previous legs: the dance task in Tokyo surely took much longer than TPTB expected, and many teams stuck with it till late. That affected the timing for the Nagano leg, where they might have expected a bigger early morning train bunch. The Nagano Pit Stop was clearly not 12 hours, but I'm sure Pit Stop times can't be jiggered mid-race. Sending them back to Narita (thought blurring all that in the edit) gave them a short window before flights shut down for the night. In that context, the NEL is a kind of failsafe to make sure that if the ETAs do get out of whack, a team isn't punished for it strictly through what happens at the airport.

I had a whiff of it being a NEL, because the flights were tricky, but I wouldn't have been surprised if Harley and Jonathan -- who, honestly, should be filed under superfans, not celebs -- got a superfan exit. Like S25, we had a leg without a Road Block; also interesting that the Detour challenges were genuinely hard, which implies that in spite of the gimmick this season, TPTB might be learning from TAR Canada. Hard tasks are not necessarily bad television. You might grimace a bit about a task at a 'ladyboy bar' in Thailand, but I can't think of any prime-time network show over the past decade that has been willing to push past the heteronormative, and props to all the teams for being equally up for the task. Mike and Rochelle might well have staying power. Also, #freeHayley. She has superficial things going against her, and maaaaybe she could be a little more forgiving, but she's actually the smarts and engine of that team.

The entire range. That's $600 of kit per person. Add in the cooking classes, gym membership (~$1000), option of a year's groceries. I'd say that's a few thousand each (taxable, of course). It's not Kodak Easyshare territory.

This is stuntcasting at its most benign: perhaps it gives an additional bump at casting, but celebrities are allowed to be avid fans of television shows, and Jonathan seems like he's an avid fan. Only trouble is, he and Harley might end up with a superfan exit.

Definitely my early pick to win it all, while treating it strictly as a "blind friendship", which throws a spanner into the CBS dating angle.

In honesty, taking the train to Nagano in autumn is the best scenery TAR has managed in its Japan legs in a long time. (See: fake 'Japanese game show' tasks in previous visits to Tokyo.) I don't think the setting's a problem this time round. The conceit is still wearisome, but I think PhD-Purgatory15 is right about how TPTB have unintentionally created well-matched 'opposite sex, heterosexual friendship' teams, which is not something we've seen often on TARs past, and is a really interesting dynamic that casting ought to take note of. My long bet for this one is that a blind date couple with no desire for a sexual relationship will get on gangbusters, work as a fantastic team, win the thing, and TPTB will be faced with the awkward conclusion of celebrating their victory and having to slap some kind of asterisk on it because they didn't decide to get married on the final mat. The selfie stuff is a sponsorship deal with Nokia/Microsoft (Lumia 730 is 'the selfie phone' according to the branding) which is hard to pull off when you're disabling all the features apart from photo and video and 'ability to miss a train'. (I'll be sympathetic to Team Tuskegee: they were so far behind that they were the walking eliminated, and they've probably never been on a train ride to know that trains in Japan leave at the time they say they will.) The worst bit of it is Creepy Uncle Phil at the Pit Stop. #freePhil Any thoughts on opening titles? The park backdrop looks similar for all of the blind-date couples, and some of the dating ones, while a few of the 'daters' have buildings in the background. I assume they're shot after the Race is over, though there's a hint of greenscreen for a couple of them. I only ask because title shots of teams in past seasons usually show at least a few of them doing something 'theme-y' (medics in scrubs, surfers at beach, etc.) but since there's only one theme this time round ('wuvv, twoo wuvv') we're not seeing that.

Briefly: hated the concept, liked the opener. Hate the selfie phone (disabled in association with Nokia/Microsoft) but like the pacing. Liked the skewed detour, hated that nobody switched. Loved that the accursed Save is nowhere to be seen. Don't hate any teams yet, and I'm wondering whether the blind-date teams where there's no chemistry or awkwardness will actually have the advantage of being focused and accommodating RAAACErs with no drama, even when Creepy Uncle Phil is obliged to ask if they've got to second base at the Pit Stop. The editing and camera work seemed snappy, up a gear from last season. Lots of good stuff, especially the little musical callback to the fake gameshows they've done in Tokyo legs past. (So glad they didn't do that again.) Finally: CJ and Lebya's trouble getting directions to the park felt... well, awkward. Not sure if a white couple would have had the same trouble.

They do now, because they realised in the teens that airport drama is incompatible with the last leg as they want it to play out. (This also, sadly, limits the final leg locations to international hub cities.) I respectfully disagree. The big difference in the TAR10 finale was that teams had free choice over their flights: all three teams flew separately from Barcelona to Paris; Lyn and Karlyn chose poorly by going back to Orly instead of CDG, ended up on a later flight from CDG and got the closest thing to a Guido Edit at the end. (In addition, Tyler and James might not have made it off the standby list, which would have left only Rob and Kimberly on the earliest flight.) You could certainly argue that a hypothetical TAR10 finale in which all teams chose to go to CDG for that last flight, or were told to go there, wouldn't have been very different, but that wasn't what happened. Spoonfeeding that final direct flight -- the way the edit skipped check-in and cut to the gate was not subtle -- made it much more like the start of a new leg than a continuation. When the clue tells you which plane you're on, you're not really racing until the cabin doors open on landing. Levelling up the final teams on their flight doesn't feel so bad after there's been an elimination in the previous leg, but it doesn't sit well with "keep racing".

And as has also been noted, there's never been a TBC leg with a spoonfed long-haul flight. It was a TBC to the extent that there was no leg prize and no speed bump, but it was a NEL to the extent that there was a big ol' sitting-in-the-airport bunch before that Delta-promotional-consideration flight, which functioned as Pit Stop downtime even though teams were technically "still racing". Many of the things associated with past uberlegs -- particularly, teams being able to carry an advantage forward -- didn't apply.

It's not easy to convey urgency in self-driving bits -- well, I suppose if any of them had gone 100mph along the shoulder or been dodging vehicles like a chase sequence in an action movie, that might do it, but "obey all local driving laws" applies, and perhaps a few more additional instructions to make sure they didn't drive like crazy people. I think Netfoot smartly compares the entire Manila-LAX sequence to older two-hour finales, though you could also think of it as three legs split differently: a standard NEL; a very long leg with a travel bunch towards the end that "ended" in an unusual way at the stunt task; and a short leg from there to the final mat. Why four teams to the finish? Perhaps that was indeed how they intended to mop up the Save, though having leg 10 as an optional NEL makes more sense for that job, even in hindsight. Perhaps they needed to fill one more Ford spot and liked the idea of having a small segment of self-drive right at the start of the final leg.

Sooooo, leg mechanics. It was a TBC with a very obviously spoonfed flight, which makes it, frankly, a NEL without a speed bump. But, self-drive in a final leg, in LA? That's a new one, a decent call by TPTB, and the fact that they switched to taxis after the stunt RB shows that this was essentially a two-part leg, where the elimination challenge was getting from the 110 to the 10 to the 20 to the whatever before everyone else in their Ford Promotion. (Yeah, SNL's Californians in full effect.) It was unsatisfying, honestly. But final legs are almost always unsatisfying. This one, I think, was more unsatisfying because the memory challenge was gruelling on the participants but not especially televisual. (TAR2Can was better in that regard.) I can well believe that it took four or five hours, but that was compressed to minutes. I'm not unhappy that the scientists won, but that final challenge was pretty meh, because like most TAR final challenges, it was shoved in a corner of the city out of the way because spoilers. Also, the RB threshold seemed meaningless this time round. Amazing Blind Date, oh dear god no.

There's more than one way to get from Manila to LAX. I'm trying to think of past "pure" TBCs that had a flight between the two halves. The original in TAR6 (created on the fly from a NEL because of Hungary's anti-begging laws) stayed in Budapest; TAR7 had train travel in India; TAR8 never existed; TAR9 had a flight from Moscow to Frankfurt; TAR10 had a flight from Finland to Ukraine; TAR14 stayed in Beijing. Both TAR9/10 had some airport separation that rewarding the teams who led into the second half of the TBC. All shortish-haul, though, and not a final leg.

If the flight rules operates under "(nearly) all airlines are available" and "you're stuck with your first booking" then a TBC might actually make sense, because there are going to be a bunch of competing connections as well as direct flights, and KF might mean some iffy airport decisions. But... it's the finale, and TPTB can't have a team getting a Guido edit from a terminal in Tokyo or Hong Kong, so it surely has to be either spoonfed or have some kind of HoO bunch once they land.

Well, wasn't expecting that. (Nor were the cyclists, I bet, as they got the last proper elimination.) It's really hard to tell what TPTB had planned for the spacing of teams in this one -- no leg prize, making it a true TBC -- so it just makes it a weird leg that put teams through the wringer before giving them all a long (and I assume somewhat spoonfed) flight. We now know at least that the Save was completely a ticket to the final 3 whose main role was to mess with inter-team dynamics. (We've chewed over the stats in previous threads for first-leg winners. First-leg winners either have a single really bad day and go out or they stay till the end. And the U-Turn design cemented that.)

That's completely reasonable, and so is your follow-up and those of others. It doesn't account for why there have there been three fewer Road Blocks by the end of leg 10, and why a couple of tasks have felt like RBs converted to entire-team tasks. And it feels like there needs to be some explanation for the short count other than TPTB thinking "meh, let's leave out a few Road Blocks this time round."

But that can't be so, because all the tasks are decided in advance before casting happens, by separate teams in separate rooms sworn to blood oaths of secrecy and etc. It's weird, though. This is the third time we've had something that possibly could have been a Road Block and wasn't, or where there's an obvious lack of Road Block in a leg. The TAR 5 ox task was a Detour option, so it's not an exact parallel, though as dgpolo notes, the oxen were set up in a way that made it more feasible for a single person to both steer and plough. Either RBs are being edited away all over the place, which I doubt, or something's going on here. Two of those tasks (ox-plough and punting) might have have caused Bethany difficulties had she done them alone; the other (sheep herding) was perhaps considered as a RB but was borderline impossible for one person in practice. And though I don't want to dig up stuff from last week: if Bethany were to face a RB task that depends upon two arms to complete, and either got eliminated or needed to take a four-hour penalty, it would be painful television and make TPTB look terrible. I can accept there's a wall between leg design and casting, while also believing that "not wanting to look terrible" might be a reason for TPTB to breach it.

It's a generational thing as well. Misti and Jim are from the demographic of exurban subdivisions, helicopter parenting and ferrying kids between hyper-scheduled activities in big SUVs. (Yes, perhaps a bit of projection, but I have a sense of how affluent professionals choose to live in places like South Carolina, and we know about the mothers in the South arrested for leaving their children at the park after somebody calls the cops.) The children in the streets didn't look in distress, and I doubt they'd have been shown if so. The oddest note in Misti's comments was "it's not like seeing it on the television", which had me thinking of the South Park Sally Struthers / Starvin' Marvin episode. More a matter of sheltered lives than prejudice, but still a bit off.

Presumably to ensure the buckets at the end were filled mostly with fish, not fish plus seawater. But also to make sure the task was physical through to the end.

As Netfoot ably pointed out in previous threads, this was always a NEL ('too close a finish', Phil? come on) so the tension wasn't really there, and in spite of OX! the leg was really pretty flat. Some of that flatness was baked into the design, with the HoO bunch at the beginning and the nature of the tasks. Transitional leg, there to be used for eliminations if the Save had been used. Oh well. You wasted your OX! leg, TPTB. I feel cheated. Miss Alli, I'm sure, feels cheated. BrooKKKe, right? One part Flo with muscles, one part Kendra with muscles. I get that she's a performer in... well, in wrestling, that completely not-over-the-top not-fake absolutely-a-sport, but retching at every step of the way? What especially grates is that she understood that she was getting a lot of respect from the Filipino crowd watching her and Robbie haul fish, and she was still making exaggerated retches all the way. Pay back that damn respect. Seriously, Free Robbie, even if his aversion to fish-buckets and mud is hilarious. Also, Amy has sufficient wryness that I now want the scientists to win. Actually, I want the cyclists to be reinstated and win, but if that won't happen... At least I get to laugh at Jim asking for the 'international terminal' at Singapore airport. And yeah, if the dentists win, they'll deserve it by how they've competed, but I will never love them as a team.