PurpleTentacle

Pretty sure that's slang from her own youth. "rad" wasn't even a thing anymore when I was a kid and I'm 40. Phil overstates how culturally significant something is all the time. If it was really something sacred, they wouldn't make a task out of it.

Weren't they back in S35 (that was filmed after S36)?

Watch one more season and you'll see one team switch all the time.

That's not what happened. It is.

We know a lot more than one reason why people do it: 1. Mark did it to deal with the trauma of his wife dying. 2. Dylan did it because he couldn't really deal with the job market and got fired all the time. 3. Hellena did it for PR. 4. Gemma was forced. 5. Burt did it so his Innie could get into heaven. / To please his partner. 6. The senator's wife did it to not have to endure the pain of child birth. 7. Irving is still a little unclear, but it seems like he wants to investigate something at Lumon, with all the information he had lying in his flat. The old fashioned language seems to be mostly a Lumon-thing. Then there there are the stylistic choices. Like old cars, old computers, but still smart phones and hightech microchips. That is very deliberate, to project an earie feeling of things being "not quite right", because those things shouldn't exist at the same time.

There was a that needle in a haystack one where Phil needed to come out, but that was a roadblock. I think @iMonrey was refering to a female team, who in their second season, physically couldn't do both sides of a detour, which was a bit of a bummer to go out on. I don't quite remember who they were though. Yep, those are the ones. Damn, I would not have guessed that that was this long ago. Somehow it seems more recent in my memory. Might be a season that I watched a lot later than the initial airing. In the early days of Rob has a podcast contestants and the podcasters spoke quite openly about it. I haven't heard it in a long time. I think as these podcasters and CBS got closer and the podcasters got access, it became a bit of a nono to talk about these behing the scenes things. It could of course also be that it is no longer the case, but I kinda doubt it. I'll just have to believe you on that one. I personally can't remember a single time. At the first judgement the standards are impossibly high and basically nobody gets through. Also I wouldn't call it producer interference. As long as the producer remains fair in their judgement, it isn't a problem. It just means you have a consistent judge who knows by how much they have to lower their standards with every attempt, to get teams through there fast enough that the show still works. That standards get lowered with every attempt should be evident from watching the show.

This isn't a science lecture though, where every bit of information should be conveyed as fast and efficiently as possible. The episode built atmosphere. It showed the town and house Cobell grew up in and thus shed more light on her character, why she is how she is. I appreciated it. I think a lot of people are desperate for answers and thus get restless in episodes that don't move fast enough for their liking. I personally don't feel the need for answers right now. It's not that kind of show, that is only held afloat by mystery boxes, like Lost or From. So I'm just enjoying the ride and do so very much. Ymmv. We know why people sever. There are countless reasons. What we don't quite know is why Lumon wants people to sever. We'll learn eventually, I'm sure. Severance works by not clearly defined scifi technology. You'll never get a step by step explaination or a diagram, because there isn't any real way this would work. You just have to accept that it does work in this world. But at the same time for all intents and purposes it seems like controlled DID. Even the reintigration is very reminiscent of how DID is treated. Fair. They really need to pick up the pace in producing new episodes. Hopefully with the pandemic over and them knowing that they have as many seasons as they want now, they can do just that. On the other hand, it had been so long and I had forgotten so much, it was a joy to rewatch season 1 right before this one started.

On these kind of tasks it's a producer behind the camera giving a sign to the judges on wether or not to let the contestants through and nobody gets through on the first try. It's just how the show is.

That's often a problem with TV shows, but I'm pretty sure these writers have a finite plan here. So far I don't have a feeling that they are piling on mysteries. On the contrary, this episode they answered quite a few questions and I don't think they added any new ones. I don't think it has been very long in show-time. Certainly not as long as it has been in real-time. She did say to Helena in episode 2 of this season "you don't value me, you fear me." Which at the time I thought was a bit self-important and overestimating herself, but now I get why she would think that and why she is probably right. I got the feeling at the end of this episode that Cobell thinks Reghabi is a hack. So I'm pretty sure Cobell can do much more than Reghabi. She might even be the only person who can save Mark's life right now, since Reghabi clearly overstated her abilities. She is really just poking at things she doesn't quite understand, it seems. I guess Devon had the right instincts when she called Cobell. I initially thought it was a bad move, but seemingly it was the only correct one. Reghabi knew about the cottage and she wouldn't have know about something Selvig did on her own. Also the senators wife hinted to Helli about it at the party, where everybody thought she was Hellena. Both point to it being run by Lumon.

I found something interesting on Reddit from a poster from Hong Kong: So it seems like them not showing the drivers the right piece of paper might not have been the problem after all, or at least not the main problem. That's reality TV for you. They'll always go with the more straight foreward or interesting story, rather than the one that is true. The guy also has a few other interesting tidbits. You can read the full post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmazingRace/comments/1j4mvc5/the_amazing_race_season_37_episode_1_post_episode/mgc901n/

Production loves when teams switch tasks. It adds drama and makes sure both sides of the detour are seen. What they hate is if no team does one side of the detour. Because that makes for less interesting TV and means they wasted money on a task that nobody will ever do or see. So if anything, both sides being mandatory was a deciding factor here. Your memory might be playing tricks on you there. The bald snark is a term coined in season 3 of TAR.

Shower thought: Since they clearly didn't want to put more than one task into the fork in the road, it would have been nice to have at least 2 pitstops in completely different locations, not just two amazing bathmats right next to each other. With that you could have also compensated for both tasks taking considerably different amounts of time. Obviously Phil can't be in two places at once, so maybe have him on a screen or as a hologram for both pitstops, or have local reality show hosts for both instead, for this one leg. In any case, the fork needed more differentiation than the one task and that would have been a cheap way to do it. I think they didn't give the drivers the piece of paper, with the chinese letters, spelling out the name of the location, on it. So the drivers were like: "Wtf is that english place you are talking about?! Park? What's that? Go find somebody else." At least that's what the show showed us. The worst part is, they don't even want to test their relationship. They seem to think they are solid now, after their "brief difficulties", which they obviously are not. I'd also like to give some advice to Ana: "Run, girl! Run!" Well, since both were pretty much different races at that point it wasn't a big problem for them to be uneven. I'm wondering though, what about the start-times for the next leg? Will all the sing people be behind the dance people? At least in modern TAR. It used to be a thing in the first ~10 season and I have to be honest, I quite liked it now and then. But even now, half an hour lead could still be a thing, if you are really lucky. They just weren't. I mean it was like 4 lines of text and they took considerably longer than the other half of the fork. So I can believe they memorised it. But it was two different races at that point. Even had two amazing bath mats. That might not have been very clear, since they were right next to each other though. For my suggestion on how to fix that, see the beginning of this post. I also clocked that. But they don't have to have been recruited. Casting is 4 to 6 months before the race begins. If they were cast early, they would have had enough time to lose that weight. It's hard to lose weight that fast and in the case of the husband maybe a bit faster than would be advisable, but very doable. I think it's mainly budget. The faster they are through the tasks, the fewer tasks they have, the faster they are through the leg, the more predictable the leg length is, the less it costs them. I "have" seasons 1 through 17. Let's leave it at that. Phil does look increadibly young. Just looked it up. He was 34 at the time. Quite a bit younger than I am now. Getting old over here. I was 16 back then...

If you put a fork in the road, maybe put more than one task in each fork. Otherwise it's just a detour with two eliminations. Having like two or even three tasks in each fork, would be a lot of fun. To see how teams cope with them and how their skills help or hinder them in more than one task. This was a bit low on tasks for one hour (without ads) anyway. Which doesn't bode super well for the rest of the season. Amazing Race US still having so much fever and shorter tasks than any other version, and itself in earlier seasons, is a bit of a bummer, since I think they do everything else right. The camera work, editing, locations and voiceover are all spot on and better than most other versions. But the lack of tasks makes these longer episodes drag. It's kinda okay in the first episode, since we get to know the teams better and that takes up time, but as soon as the second episode, it's a problem. Other than that, I'm glad the race is back and that they are trying new (and old) things. I'm excited for next week the upcoming thing was always one of my favourites.

Still a bit baffled how many people seem to love "HPI: Haut Potentiel Intellectuel ordered on wish". Maybe it's because I watched the original first, maybe otherwise I would have liked High Potential, but it's just so boringly shot and written compared to the orignal. Like HPI is something truely special and High potential is just your generic cop show with one weird twist, like the countless cop shows with one weird twist before it. "The gang does a school shooting" sounds very much like a Sunny episode though. Did that already happen or they still have to do it? I'm way behind on Sunny. I can only ever binge so much of that show before my brain gets wonky.

I think it's just to disinfect the chamber after somebody went out. How much for show it is, I don't know. She ended up wearing the suit from the head of IT of silo 17. So not the fire fighter suit. Because that would have been smart and we can't have that in our supposedly super smart protagonist. :D She should at the very least go back there and search through their IT department and bunker for answers, if she can't get access to 18's bunker next season. 17 is safe from the safeguard procedure and it doesn't look like the procedure gets triggered by people going outside. So learning as much as possible in 17 seems like the obvious next step.