S26.E01: Great Way To Start A Relationship (Tokyo, Japan)

[Miles]

Was the intent possibly to refer to Dan Savage?

Whoops, yeah not the mythbuster host. I have problems with names, it seems.

[Skittl1321]

I miss the days when money was a factor in decision making.  "Faster but more expensive, slower but cheaper." They seem to get way more than enough money now.  Of course, a cab was more expensive and slower. (I wonder if part of the amount of money they get is because racers weren't eating before, and this way they don't need to skip meals between pit stops. If it is, maybe they should get a per diem for airport meals- so they can't go unlimited, but it doesn't come from the same race fund their non-airplane travel does and they can go back to money being scarce.)

Edited March 2, 2015 by Skittl1321

[chaifan]

This is from Blair's official Race bio:

What famous person reminds you of yourself? If Ryan Gosling had a miracle baby with Brad Pitt then that child was tutored by Stephen Hawking, mentored by the late Maya Angelou, and trained by Bruce Jenner in his prime...I would be that person.

 

I'm just not sure what to say about that...

[Special K]

This is from Blair's official Race bio:

What famous person reminds you of yourself? If Ryan Gosling had a miracle baby with Brad Pitt then that child was tutored by Stephen Hawking, mentored by the late Maya Angelou, and trained by Bruce Jenner in his prime...I would be that person.

 

I'm just not sure what to say about that...

 

That is so ridiculously over-the-top that it strikes me that it must be a joke.

 

OTOH, a wise (male) friend of mine once said:   Special K, no matter how large you believe the male vanity to be, it is in fact infinitely larger than that.

 

So who knows?

Edited March 2, 2015 by Special K

[backformore]

This is from Blair's official Race bio:

What famous person reminds you of yourself? If Ryan Gosling had a miracle baby with Brad Pitt then that child was tutored by Stephen Hawking, mentored by the late Maya Angelou, and trained by Bruce Jenner in his prime...I would be that person.

 

I'm just not sure what to say about that...

I think it's hilarious.   There's no way to answer that question without comparing yourself to someone great, and therefore looking like an egotist, so he pulled out all the stops and compared himself to everyone awesome.  

[Skittl1321]

That answer made me like him more.

[kingshearte]

Kurt, honey, if you've never had a boyfriend, please don't go into this thinking "this might be the one."

I chose to believe (hope?) that by "the one," he really meant "the one who will become my first boyfriend." And I did like how realistic they were about the situation at the mat (too soon to know if this is going to go somewhere romantic, but we seem to like each other well enough, so we'll probably be friends, at any rate).

 

I wonder if production put a stop to task jumping -

I wondered that too. The fact that not only did no one switch, but I don't recall anyone even raising the idea, seemed really odd to me. I started wondering if there was a new rule we haven't heard about yet, maybe something along the lines of only being able to switch detour tasks X number of times throughout the race. I can't quite decide if I think that would be interesting, or just another stupid complication to add to a concept that really doesn't need further refinement.

 

Overall, I agree with the general consensus that the blind date concept is pretty stupid, but seems OK so far. I reserve the right to change my mind about it later.

 

Also agree that Blair's very obvious lack of interest in Hayley is rather amusing. But I also agree with whoever said he could eventually come around. She, I think, has the potential to be surprising. Her overly bubbly nature is very likely related to the fact that she works with kids, but the fact that she's a pediatric trauma nurse, of all things? There is very likely some competence, calm-under-pressure, quick-thinking, etc. in that woman. When it comes out, I wonder if Blair might start to see past her ditzy-seeming exterior.

 

Maybe this is mean, but for a roller derbying engineer, I feel that Rochelle has thus far shown very little in the way of either toughness or competence.

 

And after 10 years, if he's not even saying "maybe someday," and is in fact saying straight-up "no," then girlfriend, he's not going to marry you. If marriage is what you want, move the heck along.

 

Haven't picked a favourite yet.

[Ottis]

Why was the first location spoiled in the topic heading?

 

 

The location is a spoiler? Can't you tell what a lot of locations are from the opening credits? I'm not sure how knowing that they will go to, say, Japan vs. Kenya, spoils anything.

[Whimsy]

Time to move on from the "locations are a spoiler vs locations are not a spoiler" discussion.  I feel like both sides of the topic have been hashed out.  We are going to continue to use the standard format for episode titles. It just so happens that the locations are part of the episode titles now.  Live with it.

 

Thanks and happy posting.

[suedehead]

Being annoyed that someone miscalculated your age and being condescending in thinking one's profession is beneath you automatically makes a person gay...okay then. 

 

I'm a 50 year old gay man that has encountered guys like him many times. I was playfully checking off some of the boxes that would stereotypically point to him being gay. Just playing around like I would with a buddy. It was a joke.

 

Mid thirties and tells ma he "hasn't found the right gal?"  Check

Gets annoyed someone miscalculates his age by 4 years and in his 30's. Check. That's practically dead to some in the community, so I can see him being upset, if he's that kind of guy. I can't think of one straight man I know in his 30's that would be annoyed or even think twice about an "older" guess. That's just my experience.

 

And...

 

Having spent the last 7 years in and out of doctor's offices, hospitals and a nursing home with a partner with Stage 4 Renal failure, I found that many doctors are condescending to the nurses and basically ignore or appease anyone else they encounter. Joe passed away in August and while their billing departments still remember me, I never heard a peep from his doctors expressing condolences. These men have known us for 22 years and I wasn't excepting much, but how about something acknowledging he was your patient for decades and that he mattered?  Maybe I'm projecting just a tish, but many doctors are assholes.

 

Anyway, I was just kidding around and didn't want others to think I was a DB. 

Edited March 5, 2015 by suedehead

[Netfoot]

Maybe I'm projecting just a tish, but many doctors are assholes.

 

No, generally doctors are assholes.  Except one, who it took me 50 years to find. 

 

None of this makes Blair gay, nor precludes him from being gay.  We'll have to see.

[InDueTime]

After 90 minutes of Survivor, the first 30 minutes dedicated to the mud challenge just bored me.

 

I wonder if Jeff and Lydia slapped their foreheads after finding out how laughably easy the samurai Detour was.  I also thought they would have to send a different sake to all ten tables.

 

A minor nitpick, but one thing I like about TAR is the use of scenic spots as the Pit Stops.  The Pit Stop next to the graffiti-tagged garage wasn't cutting it for me.

 

Well, this season isn't starting as awful as I thought it would be, but the selfies and "Are you in love yet?" questions need to stop sooner rather than later.

Edited March 7, 2015 by InDueTime

[aradia22]

I completely forgot that TAR was coming back and I forgot the dating premise until I started watching. This is a good thing and a bad thing.

 

Jelani was so nice to Jenny at first (especially with the editing comparing them to the RxForLove team) that I chose them as the first team to root for. I wanted to like Hayley and Blair as the medical team but it clearly wasn't love at first sight. I sympathized with Hayley though. I sometimes find myself as that person who talks too much and is eager to please and entertain while not getting much back from the person I'm talking to. I also feel like I know a lot of guys like Blair. I have the misfortune to be attracted to a lot of guys like Blair. 

 

The dating angle actually wasn't as annoying as the awkward insertion of the selfies which grated by the second one. 

 

Sinking Steps seemed like the easier challenge from the clue. I can't believe they only had to identify one bottle of sake. That's not much of a memory challenge.

 

Laura, this is not The Bachelor. He doesn't have to be your future husband. Just try and tolerate each other for the rest of the race. Lowered expectations, you know?

 

With almost everyone at Sinking Steps why did no one think to switch detours? I mean, if you know you're not great at dancing, the sun is setting and everyone else also sucks at the detour, why not switch? I felt bad for the dancers who were doing the routine over and over as well. I know they weren't all out there at the same time but still, they were doing that routine many, many times.

 

Poor Libby and CJ. They were a mess.

[anhydrite]

I tried to channel my inner writer and started a recap for this episode, but it was so long that after three hours I stopped half-way in the episode and just watched the rest without recapping. Maybe if enough people insist (and if I manage to find the episode online somewhere), I'll finish the rest.

 

Spoilered because it's huge and my file uploader doesn't work for some reason.

 

Here we are for a brand new season of The Amazing Race as some footage of past dating/engaged couples rolls out, as an introduction for the theme of this season: the most extreme blind date EVER. And if the previous footage we just got is a sneak peek of what's to come, I could just close my TV right now, except that 1- I'm watching online and 2- it's still the Amazing Race, and whatever crappy theme CBS imposes on TPTB, I'm not going to stop wtaching. Ever. We than go through some singles telling us their current romantic situation, and Phil helpfully asks if it's possible to find love on a 35 000-mile journey around the world or something. Given what we know if intra-team relations throughout the history of the Amazing Race, I doubt it. And after all this rambling, we finally reach tha starting line, where five people are standing alone among six couples, who presumably already know each other.

Firat dating couple is Harley and Jonathan, the latter being member of a boy band I know absolutely nothing about, probably because I'm half the age of Jonathan, as well as living on the wrong country. And since thay don't have a nickname shown on-screen (at least for now), I'm going to dub them team Boy Band. So original, I'm proud of me (not).

Second team is Matt and Ashley, two hairstylists with an unusual backstory, with him originally dating her best friend, and her telling said best friend that Matt was gay. Nothing much to say about them, except that I wonder if Ashley is still friends with that girl whom she stole the boyfriend.

Third team is Jeff and Lyda, an older team consisting of an airline pilot (so coool!) and a flight attendant (slightly less cool, haven't we gotten like three of them last season?), that I'm going to appropriately dub “Flight Crew”.

We wont get to know the other dating couples yet since Phil introduces the five single men standing in the middle, who are going to be paired with another single for the Most Extreme Blind Date Ever®, and for some reason the already dating couples seem more excited about this whole thing than the single guys.

Now forgive me if I skip through some foortage because I don't feel like going through everyone one by one so I'm just going to list the blind date couples:

Tyler (mobile app developer) & Laura (talents booker)
Blair (Navy surgeon) & Hayley (pediatric trauma nurse)
Bergen (human resources) & Kurt (pageant consultant, whatever that is)
Jelani (lawyer) & Jenny (also lawyer)
Jeff (sales (sic)) & Jackie (Las Vegas showgirl)

I just want to point out two details in this whole sequence: first, having the women (and one men) running towards the men reminds me a bit too much of patriarcal traditions, and second, Hayley says she's tired of arrogant guys and wants someone who'll like her hype. SPOILER: she's going to be dissapointed.

Then we go through some reactions “I like my partner” yada yada and since the teams' introductions are weirdly made, I don't know where to list the witty nicknames I found for the teams. But that's not actually a big problem because only Bergen and Kurt have this honour for now, hereby being dubbed “Team Sweden” (even though Bergen is a town in Norway), because they have scadinavian names and hair, regardless if they actually come from Sweden or not.

Funny detail: in the following sequence, Blair is visibly receding from Hayley. This doesn't bode well for them. But not for us.

A surprise starting line challenge awaits the contestants: they will have to run through a muddy obstacle course and try to grab one of the eight tickets for the first flight, then drive to the airport in product-placed Ford cars. And I just noticed that we never got to know where the starting line was, because of all this romance bovine waste. And “somewhere around Los Angeles” isn't a satisfying answer. Back on topic, the winners of this leg of the race will win the Express Pass, and apparently only one. So I guess that with the blind date theme going on, the quota of gimmicks has already been reached. No wait, actually there's going to be a U-Turn on the first leg of the race. My bad.

The race finally starts (I can't believe I have one page of text for six minutes of show), and three teams still haven't been introduced, so I'll try my best: an Afro-American couple with a Tuskegee shirt, a bearded guy and her girlfriend who both kinda look like goths, and the last team whose name may or may not have been shown on screen. Way to make things simple for your recappers, TPTB.

Teams jump head first (not quite literally) in the mud course, and some guy says “this is miserable”. He doesn't realise he haven't even left the country right? Blair blathers while we see the racers crawling under cables of some sort, and Hayley complains that she doesn't like being muddy and wet and cold. Am I the only one who would actually do this willingly?

Ah, here comes the missing regular dates. Libby and CG have been dating mostly off for 10 years, after meeting in high school. I intially wanted to dub them “team Libya” (and boast about my awesome geography skillz), but since Lebya goes by Libby, I'll call them “Team Tuskegee” instead. Less snarky, but also most straightforward. And speaking of nicknames, CBS got the same idea as I did about Jeff and Lyda, since they're labeled #Flight Crew. I don't know if I should feel flattered or dissapointed.

Goth team turns out to be Mike and Rochelle, dating eight months. He owns a truck stop and a voluminous beard, she'a an engineer who likes roller derby and broke someone's femur before. Mike seems to think it's a sign of toughness, I think it's more a sign of dangerosity. But if they love each other, so be it.

At the end of the course there's also a pool of freezing water and ice cubes, either to wash them off or chill them off (or both).

Aly and Steve are the last dating couple, both of them Olympians. She's a speed skater and he's a bobsledder. He says that he went home with two bronze medals, but found gold by meeting Aly. Cute.

Back to the mud race, Matt/Ashley, Jeff/Jackie and Laura/Tyler grab flight #1, while Hayley seems dissapointed that Blair doesn't help her (she's not totally wrong. And what's that blue thind Jeff has on his back?) Wild credits suddenly appears out of nowhere, after all this time.

Back from the commercials, Kurt dosen't like cold water, Aly/Steve, Harley/Jonathan, Jeff/Lyda and Team Sweden get flight #1 (and if you watch carefully, we can sneak a cameraman in that sequence). Blair made it in eighth place, but Jelani and Jenny (that I'll call Team Law because it's shorter) outrun Hayley and nab that last place on the first flight. Tuskegee, Truck Stop and Blair and Hayley (no witty nickname yet) take off the rear and are on flight #2. Teams are provided with showers and make quick work of the mud on themselves, except Hayley who says she looks like she has diarrhea. Way to reassure your partner there.
Teams then start driving themselves around California. Jackie telss us that she's a professional dancer (I kind of doubt it), and Hayley gets stormed by Blair for guessing his age wrong by four years. We learn that they also have “selfie cams”, for whatever that's worth (I hate selfies), ans Hayley decides it's the right time to make a funny face for the (selfie) camera. Blair doesn't look impressed. Neither do I.

In their car, Laura seems to regret not packing an engagement ring in her backpack, while she chats with Tyler. Back to Team Health (because Blair and Hayley is too long to type), Hayley babbles from the backseat, with an uninterested Blair who seems like he's doing a great effort in containing his distate for her. I wonder how long they'll last before either of them flames out. Team Law discuss how they became laywers: Jelani was a sports paralegal and loved it so much he became an attorney, and Jenny was semi-forced by her parents to have a good job, and didn't like the sciences, so lawyer was the way. I feel for her, because I know what it is to have your brain washed overly academic parents. Meanwhile, Jeff and Lyda summarize everyone's thoughts about this season: “These newly dating couples? I don't think that's going to last.” On a completely shallow note, I think these guys are the best-looking of all the contestants this season.

At the airport, Blair still acts like it's some sort of sin to date a nurse, while Hayley fangirls over him. Jonathans arrives and he and Hayley starts chatting, with him being modest about his career, saying that he's a signer from the 80s who sings “Step by Step”. Hayley promptly guesses who he is, and states that he's much better than the BSBs anyways. Elsewhere in the terminal, Kurt, who never had a boyfriend before, seems to have high hopes about this one. I wouldn't be so confident if I were him, but hey, it can't hurt to dream.

Tuskegee is chatting with a team dressed in purple (probably the one with the Vegas showgirl or the hairdressers), who asks them about their plans for the future. Libby wants to get married, while CJ shakes his head silently and says “don't count on me”. I can see why they have been dating “mostly off” for ten years.

The eight first teams board the first flight to Tokyo via Taipei at 10:25, Pilot Jeff missing a golden opportunity to rent an airplane and fly himself and Lyda to Japan, providing it's not forbidden by Race rules, but 1- it probably is, and 2- since these flights were spoon-fed, it's a moot point anyways.

Teams eventually reach Japan almost twenty minutes into the episode, and rush around the airport either to the taxi gate or the Skyliner train. Jenny states that the taxi is the fastest way to reach a 2700-year-old shrine where their next clue is waiting. She doesn't seem to consider the cost aspect of driving around Tokyo in a cab though. Flight Crew and Team Sweden end up in a different train, the Narita Express. It's selfie time in Jeff and Jackie's cab, and I'd like to know why the show steals five seconds to show us the selfies everytime. Right after that, Jackie freaks out by some insect that is walking on the roof and asks Jeff to be a man (#BeAMan) and kill it. They incoherently gesticulate on the backseat until Jeff decides to not be a man and just swats the bug outside. The taxi driver gives him a thumbs up, either because he got rid of the bug or silenced the wimpy american woman.

Flight #2 lands forty-five minutes later. Tuskegee takes a taxi, while Truck Stop and Team Health opts for the Skyliner, the latter of which barely misses the train, sor they're in last for now. One commercial break later, they embark in the next train.

Team Law arrives in first at the shrine, so they were right after all, and Phil pops out live to explain the two detour options: Synching Steps requires teams to join World Order dancers and learn a slo-mo, robotic danse routine. Samurai Sake requires teams to memorize ten bottles of sake and bring the correct one to a table of random people disguised as samurai. Team Law chooses Synching Steps. Jeff and Jackie (team Vegas, and I don't care anymore about the quelity of my team nicknames) arrive next and go for the sake. It's selfie time for Truck Stop in the train, and Rochelle still haven't introduced her 7-year-old son to Mike after 8 months. Now I'm curious to see what kind of excuses she tells her son when she leaves for the night. Tuskegee takes it easy and marvel about the scenery of metal and concrete while Team Vegas arrives at the #Detour (what's up with the hastags everywhere?). The samurai master quickly enunciates some Japanese name as well as a bit of trivia before telling them to go take as order, which is a bottle of kanbe. Problem is, the bottle of sake are stored in a big shelf full of similar bottles, including some that weren't mentioned by the master. They try a random brown bottle with two symbols on the label and hand it to the table. After a bit of suspense, the samurai draws a cross with his arms. At least this part of the challenge doesn't require knowledge of the Japanese language.

Team Law makes it to the danse challenge, which seems quite a long way from the shrine, and are greeted by some well-suited men dancing around robotically. Wow, I'm a dancer and I wouldn't want to do this one. It looks freaking hard. They choose an instructor wearing a yellow jumpsuit and start walking around like robots.

Matt and Ashley (the hairdressers?) arrive a the shrine in third, followed by Laura and Tyler and the Olympians. All six of them choose the synching steps. Boy Band arrives shortly after, but opt for the sake task, Jonathan telling us that it takes him a week to learn a danse routine. Wise choice.

The Narita Express wasn't as Express as it seemed, since Fligth Crew and Sweden are only now making their way to the shrine. Team Health seemed to have taken the wrong exit and are arguing over which direction to go. Blair ends up imposing his decision, being “fairly positive” about what to do.

Jackie tells us that her brain is not as strong as most people's but that's ok because she has everything else or something and honestly I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. This time, the samurais asks for zaou. I like how the show tried to shuffle things up a bit, but what's stopping them from just serving the same bottle over and over? Anyways, they get a diferent bottle that looks exactly like the first one and handle it to a samurai holding a katana for whatever reason. For a moment I thought he was going to slash the bottle like champagne, but no, he just says “wonderful”, has a toast with the team and handles them their clue. They leave in first place, to Wakaba Higashi Park, where a blind date double U-Turn awaits.