kris4n6

I don't really understand how it took the earlier teams so long to get to the airport. Jelani & Jenny left around 4:40pm, yet by the time they got to the airport it was dark and the counters were closed? That makes no sense. How long would it take them to get to the airport, and how early did the counters close?

That's Sunnydale, in Buffy.

"Groceries for a year" is a pretty standard prize on The Price is Right, also CBS. There, it basically consists of being given a set amount of money to buy your own groceries for the year, I think this is probably the same. I'm not sure of the money value, on TPIR it's usually given as a group of prizes including housekeeping for a year and gas for a year and totals at around $8000. I'd guess the groceries is around $3500, possibly more. So a fairly decent prize.

Yeah, they seemed like nice people, but poor navigational skills annoy the crap out of me. I would have much preferred they go home.

Ah, thank you! I kept looking at the list of contestants and thinking "ok, I just don't see a Whitney on here this season...."

Who is Whitney?

Interesting that they both said Thailand was the place they'd most like to visit. Maybe there's hope for them yet!

Ok, why the hell didn't she take the blonde wig off? I mean, I guess otherwise there would be no fight between her and the FBI, but that made no sense whatsoever. They never would have stopped her at all without the blonde wig.

I want to ask about the airport at the beginning. How exactly did Maya and Amy end up on the earlier flight? I know they called from their cab, but they were nearly an hour behind the dentists. Singapore isn't that big, and their hotel appeared to be in the downtown area which at most is half an hour from the airport in bad traffic. It seemed odd to me. Glad it ultimately didn't matter, though.

Yes, that made no sense to me. Why not switch sides? I can only guess they thought they would lose too much time, but I can't imagine that it would have taken more than a couple of minutes to rearrange themselves.

I looked up where Philpott Dam is, and it's nowhere near Mount Weather. So there doesn't seem to be any plausible way that they could do any maintenance on the dam, plus I doubt that the infrastructure to get power from the dam to the mountain still exists. I guess they wanted to put in a real place and just did a random Google search for dams in Virginia.

That's La Grande Jatte by Seurat. I don't remember seeing it in the episode, but I remember it from Ferris Bueller. I saw it several years ago and that thing is HUGE. Even more amazing that he did something so large just with dots of paint.

How can Mount Weather be getting hydro electric power from the Philpott Dam, since they're roughly 200 miles apart?

I could not believe how many teams had to ask. And they didn't even need to name all five, just the three in the poster!

You know, the Dentists started out annoying and all, but I like them. Jim didn't get upset with Misti at all, he supported her, and he complimented other teams as well. Coming in last and struggling all day was a wake up call for them. Should be interesting to see how they do the rest of the race. How did Amy and Maya end up in fourth when they left the restaurant in second? I'm guessing they got lost and it wasn't shown. Glad that Kym and Alli won - they did a great job this leg. And also glad that it was finally a leg where they had to get their own flights! I was worried they were going to have spoon fed flights all season. And a roadblock finally! I don't know what was going on with Shelley and Nici. What a horrible thing to say to your daughter (in the talking head). I liked them to begin with but I kind of hope they go home next week. Loved the setting too - I've been to Malmo and Copenhagen (and rode a train over that same bridge!). I wish they were going further into Sweden next leg.

I have a question about the information - so it was downloaded onto the laptop and then burned onto the thumb drive, correct? That was destroyed during the fight with the bad guy. And the laptop hard drive was destroyed when the bomb went off. When Walter made Paige leave, when he was trying to put the stuff around the bomb to minimize the explosion, why didn't he give Paige the laptop to take with her? Or did I just miss something? (or am I thinking too hard about this plot point?)

I read somewhere that the entire first season is supposed to happen over the period of three weeks.

I just said the same thing in tonight's episode thread. It's a ridiculous plot point (that was equally ridiculous in Broadchurch). It doesn't happen. Bodies are not kept for months on end until a killer is found, the idea is absolutely laughable.

I hated the part about the police keeping the body for evidence reasons. That is absolutely untrue, no jurisdiction would do that. The evidence is collected, the body is examined and photographed, and after a day or two it would be released to the family. Otherwise, morgues across the country would be teeming with bodies, as it's unlikely that a killer will be caught quickly and in many cases no killer is ever found. The guy taking fingerprints was also terrible at it. I don't know if it was supposed to show how new he was and just out of training, or if it was just typical of TV. Additionally, I am completely unimpressed with the actor playing the father (Michael Peña). Something about him bugs the crap out of me. The actress playing Beth is good though. I also like the innkeeper, more than the one in Broadchurch.

"maybe have the mechanical pitch be off-target and flatten someone (off-screen) instead." I thought that's what they were going to do - have it lay out the catcher. And then if the Angels don't win the World Series, a future episode could have a subplot of how the city of Los Angeles blames Howard for taking out their star catcher right before the playoffs. The rover with no arm was just painful in execution.

I never realized that Caltech was a private university - I always assumed it was a state school (side note: I thought the same about MIT, whoops). Never really put a lot of thought into it, but thought that. Anyway, when I searched Caltech I came upon their "Did you know?" section, and in addition to them mentioning that TBBT is set there, it says that "Every Thursday, Caltech's physicists and their students take a cookie break." That should totally be in an episode. That was my biggest problem with the first two episodes - nothing was really resolved or even explained about Penny. Did she and Leonard decide not to live together? She quit the Cheesecake Factory to focus on acting full time, yet gives up after two months with no mention of why? Why did she decide to get a job as a pharmaceutical rep? It just seemed kind of sudden and strange after last season's focus on her deciding to give 100% to her acting career.

I didn't take the comments from the students about DNA to mean they were trying to destroy the body's DNA, but any DNA that they had left on the body (ie, hair, blood, etc).

I thought the younger ones were a little 'tv kids' in the bit about their classmate, but I loved the part where the family was at dinner discussing that Obama was the first black president and they didn't know. Kids, especially that age, are like that - I still remember my father being amazed that I didn't know the Pope was Catholic when I was 6. I barely knew who the Pope *was* - I knew he was a religious figure at least (though I apparently thought he was Baptist - I just knew he wasn't *our* sect, Methodist).

Good episode. I was glad to see the Realtor sisters go first - though I do wonder if they'd gotten to the mat before the others if they would have been assessed another penalty for ripping the pen out of the Firefighter's hand (and writing their own name on the line when he had already been writing on it). I didn't really dislike anyone else yet - the wrestlers were far less annoying to me than their intro would suggest, and while Mr. Dentist is creepy I liked that he helped Bethanny's husband with the compass. I'll admit it, I don't know that I've ever seen a floating compass before (or never realized what it was if I had seen one). Though I think that I would have been clued in by how it worked by the setting sun. Although with them being so close to their actual chests, I wonder if the bigger problem was their measuring out the distance correctly with the shovel handles than with the compass itself? I like quite a few teams already - the mother/daughter flight attendants, the college sweethearts, the surfers, the scientists, I even kind of liked the dating couple. So glad this show is back!!

Thanks so much for this thread! I hate knowing in advance who has been eliminated/won (found out unintentionally about last season, ruined the last few episodes) but I love knowing where they're going. Especially if they're going somewhere I've been or want to visit.