Phil's Blog:
And then there were three. Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way. That was without a doubt the most expensive bathroom break in the history of The Amazing Race, right? Even as I sat watching the episode last night from my hotel in Maryland, knowing what was about to happen, I still couldn’t believe it. I know that it was really tough on Jen and that she felt truly responsible for their elimination…especially considering they had battled through the U-turn, the eating challenge and even moved ahead of the redheads and still came up several minutes shy of the final three. Both Kisha and Jen have competitive natures and I’m sure that elimination stung. But I have to say, Kisha really impressed me again with her stoic response to the entire situation. She could have easily lost her cool on baby sis but she didn’t. She never blamed her or even get that upset...she knew that Jen was doing enough of that on her own. Kisha held it together like a great big sister should. Kudos to her. I know that some people don’t like the eating challenges, but you have to admit they are an excellent test of a person’s will and determination -- especially at this stage in the game. If I were to make it this far in the race, I can promise you that a starfish or a scorpion wouldn't keep me from getting to the next leg. At that point I’m eating anything I need to in order to advance. But even I was truly impressed with the ease with which a couple of the teams handled those Asian delicacies. They blew through that challenge. Cara was a machine. Speaking of team Redheads -- I think it goes without saying that Jaime might need to work on her people skills, specifically with taxi drivers. Each and every week I am truly amazed at her impatience with the language barrier she faces in these foreign countries. Seems like Cara should have stepped in to assist in communicating with the drivers by now but Jaime is still doing all the screaming. Can’t believe we are almost at the end of this season. I feel like this is one of the best editions we've ever done. The cast was amazing, the challenges were creative and unique and the pace was unstoppable. I hope you guys feel the same. Here’s my quick tease for the finale episode: After 3 continents, 9 countries, and 40,000 miles, it all comes down to one final leg. The final three teams will square off in a leg that will test everything from their endurance, their memories, and even their sea legs. And one racer’s Karma may come back to haunt them. Two teams will put their friendship first when they set aside the Race and help each other finish a task, and the final three teams will find themselves racing neck-and-neck in their last task on the road to the million dollar prize. Final-Three Team Breakdown: Cara and Jaime: Fiercely tough competitors but you have to wonder if a local is going to lose their cool on them at some point with all the screaming. Having said that, they definitely have the strength to become the first all-female team to win the Race. Victor and Tammy: Seem to be coming on strong now. They’re focused, determined, and they feed off of each other’s tunnel vision. Definitely a stronger team heading into the final leg than they were when we first started this race. I love when team’s relationships grow on the Race. Luke and Margie: Communicate better than any team left in the Race, but do they have the strength to battle it out against two very strong teams. Guess we'll have to wait and see next Sunday.
Recap:
Damn you, H20! You have foiled Jen, not once, but twice in a row! Last week, your liquid trickery rendered her athleticism moot as she struggled to swim in a pool. Had you stopped there, you would have been merely evil, you watery bastard. But no, you just couldn't stop there, could you? You then took advantage of her need to drink you during a nasty food challenge, knowing full well that by using you she had made a deal with the devil. The wettest of devils! Masquerading as her savior, you then stormed her bladder like a Trojan horse (the soggiest of Trojan horses!) and inflated it to the size of a playground ball, thereby causing her to be eliminated. I know, water, I know: You're a giver of life, and 62 percent of my body, but we all realize that you're also a real douchebag when you put your mind to it. Water, why couldn't you have taken out all your aggressions on the cheerleaders, like machines do? Last night's episode of The Amazing Race began with a taxi door swinging itself shut on Jaime's head. This suddenly made me see the bright side of the crappy Stephen King movie Maximum Overdrive: If trucks ever do decide to gang up and target humans, occasionally we'll all get a laugh as they slam their hoods or doors down on the fingers or heads of shrill pains-in-the-asses like Jaime. Small price to pay! As evidenced by the breaking dawn when the teams rushed to their first clue box of the episode, the surprise double leg in Beijing had been going on for more than 24 hours, ideal conditions for intra-team squabbles. Margie griped about Luke, ''I don't want to hear him yell 'Mom!' one more time.'' (And I think she speaks for us all.) The teams then had to find a Travelocity roaming gnome with a clue on the bottom and lug it all over China. Just when you think product placement can't get any more blatant, The Amazing Race is there to remind you that it always can. At least in Survivor's Charmin Café, they didn't have to run around for the whole episode with toilet paper wrapped around their heads. Those gnomes are incredibly unwieldy branding opportunities; it's like if everyone had to run around giving the Burger King a piggyback ride. Jaime continued her love affair with the world's taxi drivers. Considering how difficult a time she and Cara were having even finding a cab, I'm even more convinced that there's an international dispatcher who has put out a worldwide APB to all cabbies to beware of and avoid two redheads in green jackets. One cabbie who made the mistake of picking them up looked terrified after he realized what he'd done: When Jaime leaned over the seat with her clue gnome, he recoiled as if she'd just produced a fistful of anthrax. Perhaps after this show the fear of Jaime will spread to all workers, not just cabbies, and long after the show has ended everyone will still duck when they see her coming. Jaime will not be able to so much as enter a Banana Republic without every salesperson leaping behind a rack of khakis and hiding until she goes away. The episode's first challenge was to ride past Tiananmen Square on electric bikes, though from all the pedaling, it didn't look like the Racers were immediately catching on to the ''electric'' part. I'd hate to see them face a Segway challenge; any trek is all the more exhausting when you've got a Segway slung over your shoulder. But even harder than riding an electric bike was pronouncing ''Tiananmen Square,'' which most people called ''Tine-amen Square.'' Hey, cut them some slack, the place doesn't look that familiar without a guy standing in front of a tank. 3 The bikes took them to the Detour: Beijing Opera, or Chinese Waiter. For Beijing Opera, the teams had to do each other's makeup to look like characters in an opera, and then get in full costume. For Chinese Waiter, they had to go to a restaurant and take a table's orders and then relay them correctly in Chinese to the chef. (Quick note: When Jaime ripped open the envelope to get the Detour info, the producers made sure to get a quick close-up of her littering the torn top on the ground: They are so careful to add subliminal reminders that Jaime is self-centered, lest we forget during the breaks between cabbie cussing.) Tammy and Victor were the only ones to try Chinese Waiter, a wise move, as they can speak Chinese. ''If we can't do this task, Mom and Dad will kill us,'' said Victor. ''Very shameful,'' said Tammy. These two live in fear of their parents the way a soldier in Iraq fears IEDs. It is said that in Chinese, the word for ''crisis'' is the same as the word for ''opportunity.'' Yet what is left unsaid is that the word ''opportunity'' is also the same as the word for ''opportunity to disappoint your parents, you worthless child.'' The food orders sounded scrumptious, though. Take ''Good Luck Squid.'' I love good luck, so imagine how good it is slathered all over squid! If it's half as good as Break a Leg Octopus, then I'll have seconds! Then there was New Taste Beef. Yum! I was getting really tired of the old taste of beef. It was so...beefy. Can they make it taste like shame? It's Tammy's parents secret ingredient for everything. It's kind of like paprika, only with more disappointment. It was entertaining watching Victor and Tammy do this challenge. Tammy was ostensibly going to be the speaker, but Victor coached her and corrected her through every order. At one point she said, ''Let me say it,'' which only made him say the words along with her in unison. He could not stop himself. They failed on the first try, and in round two, Victor even said, ''I'll let you say it all,'' and then immediately went back to speaking along with her, looking like he was a bad ventriloquist. It was like watching Jeff Dunham and New Taste Peanut. They scored on the second go-round, and quickly found the nearby U-Turn. Saying that they couldn’t beat Kisha and Jen in a foot race if it came to it, they U-Turned the sisters. Frankly, a lot has been made of Kisha and Jen's athleticism, but they haven't exhibited any of it. Wasn't it only last week that Jen practically drowned just trying to swim a lap? (Then again, Tammy just learned how to swim, so maybe to her Jen looked like Michael Phelps.) Frankly, I think Margie and Luke would have been the better pick here as the much bigger threat overall. Jen and Kisha had no idea they were being U-Turned. In fact, earlier in the show Kisha had said that she'd consider U-Turning Margie and Luke, a clever bit of false foreshadowing. They calmly made each other up at the Opera, a steadiness that was all the more evident when Margie and Luke arrived. They say that when you're deaf, all your other senses are heightened: Apparently, not your sense of Chinese makeup. Luke applied Margie's powder like he was painting a picket fence. And she got frustrated saying, ''Will you stop with the white?'' and ''He made me look like Alice Cooper.'' Actually, she looked like she had just head-butted the corpse of Tammy Faye Bakker. Ultimately, though, it didn't seem to matter. While the slightest mispronounced word in Chinese Waiter could get you sent back, you apparently could just shoot yourself in the face with a paintball gun and still get your clue. Meanwhile, Jaime and Cara seemed to still be a lost cause. They resourcefully told a cabbie to take them to the opera by pretending to sing...and then he dropped them off at the wrong opera house. Realizing their mistake, they yet again had to struggle to find a taxi, at one point yelling, ''Emergency! Emergency!'' into the window of an empty cab. This cabbie had gotten the warning about Back Luck Redhead, and drove away. When they finally got a cab, we got the first in a series of 18 or so shots of Jaime ranting in the back while Cara gazed out the window, attempting to find her Happy Place. Meanwhile, Tammy and Victor had arrived at the Roadblock. During the Chinese Waiter Detour, I had been grossed out by the sight of the chicken heads that Victor served. Yet that was like an ice cream sundae compared to what Victor would have to eat here: grasshoppers, larvae, scorpions, and starfish. He was a sport, however, biting them all off skewers in quick turn, giving such terse food reviews as ''Crunchy with the spongy texture of the larvae. Very difficult to keep down.'' Add a few extra quotation marks and that sounds like the worst Zagat's review ever. After polishing off the last of his starfish, Victor and Tammy quickly made it to the pit stop, easily landing in first at only 8:36 p.m., show time. That left 24 more minutes for the other teams to fight over who could get the most lost. The biggest obstacle was finding the U-Turn clue, which was so close (at the opera) that everyone missed it. All three teams wandered through town (still wearing their opera-challenge regalia), asking fruitlessly for directions and heading farther and farther away from the clue box. It seemed that no locals would help anyone, but I can't really blame them: If you were Chinese and saw two Americans approach you while dressed in full kabuki getup and trailed by a camera crew, wouldn't you be sure you were about to be on a wise-ass American prank show? Maybe they've seen Tom Green on the Internet: Would you want to volunteer to be a part of something that might well end up with someone waving some poo on a stick at you? Margie and Luke finally found the clue box, and took great pleasure in seeing that Jen and Kisha got U-Turned. Then the sisters arrived, and, faced with their U-Turn, had to finish the Chinese Waiter challenge. While they tried to pronounce the orders, we saw translating subtitles for what they actually ended up saying. For example, instead of ''Fried Chicken,'' they said, ''Monthly Use Taiwanese Chicken.'' For ''New Taste Beef,'' they said, ''Good Western Heads Lack Fish.'' Then their orders started to sound like they were translating porn titles, like ''Oil Comes Again to Please the Mouth,'' which I assume comes with pork. (One note: I was unnerved by the shots they'd use over and over again of the people ordering their dishes. One guy did it while staring stiffly into the camera. He looked like he had just been captured behind enemy lines and would only give his name, rank, serial number, and favorite beef dish.) Jen and Kisha finished the task (although, frankly, it just looked like the judge gave them a pass after they'd failed three times), and dashed after Margie and Luke. But what of the cheerleaders? They were still dragging around the town after three hours, searching for the clue. ''This is why I did not want to go to China,'' said Jaime. ''It sucks.'' (She should really try selling that slogan to the Chinese Bureau of Tourism. It's gold!) But as obnoxious as Jaime has been this entire trip, Cara has never turned on her. And as the search dragged on and Jaime got more and more negative, Cara finally said, ''If we're going to be defeatist, then why even bother?'' To which Jaime snipped, ''Oh, as if you haven't been acting that way the whole time, Cara.'' Cara delightfully broke the fourth wall, looking at both of her accompanying cameramen as if to say, ''Did I actually hear that right?'' I dig Cara, the way that she rarely loses her cool (except briefly on this episode, when she snapped at Jaime for implying that this leg was Cara's fault), and seems to be enjoying the Race and taking her pal with a grain of salt. The way she blithely waves away Jaime's obnoxiousness makes said obnoxiousness look like a put-on, which is the reason that I can find them entertaining rather than completely hateful. Without Cara, Jaime would be completely despicable, but with her, she's Jasmine Guy on A Different World. Jen and Kisha arrived at the food Roadblock first (after Margie and Luke had already come and gone), and Jen stepped up, probably wanting to atone for her swimming sins. But she was so grossed out by the food that she had to wash down every tiny bite with a giant swig of water. The cheerleaders managed to catch up, and Cara wolfed down the grossness. The sisters ultimately finished first, but the damage to Jen's bladder was done: After downing four bottles of water, she had to pee...and bad. When Cara finished quickly, they miraculously found a cabbie who not only knew where to go, but knew how to speed. We kept cutting between the redheads gleefully reveling in their fast cab, and Jen moaning about how ''I think I'm gonna ask Phil, can I pee before he checks us in.'' Usually, when the show tries to build suspense between the last two teams, it's the first team they've shown arriving near the Pit Stop who end up checking in first. This time we saw the sisters get out of the cab first, so they seemed destined to stay in the Race.... But then Jen stopped at a Porta Potti. It's a race for a million dollars and she stops to pee? I debated this with my wife at length after the show: I know what it's like to really have to go to the bathroom. It can get really, really uncomfortable. But this was for a million bucks! Hell, let your bladder rupture, you can buy a new one later! Or here's an easy solution: Jen, you were wearing a robe. Pee your pants, no one would know! There can be an ''anything to win'' dignity to such a thing, anyway. May I remind you of Will ''Dr. Evil'' Kirby peeing in the hammock in the penultimate Head of Household challenge in Big Brother 2? He did it and he was proud of it, and that was only for $500,000. But no, Jen had to stop. And as a result, the cheerleaders beat them to the mat. ''I'm sorry to tell you...you're gonna have to keep racing!'' said Phil in the go-to reality host switcheroo. (I'm sorry, hosts, but this kind of thing doesn't even make sense. Why are you sorry to tell them that they're still in a Race for a million dollars? This is like saying, ''I'm sorry to tell you that your family is dead...dead to rights on being alive!'') So, would you have stopped to pee? And Kisha said that she wouldn't hold it against Jen, but is such restraint humanly possible? And here's a question that I'll ask for the last time: Who do you think should win in the Hawaiian final three? I think I'm rooting for Victor and Tammy who, for all their upbeat intensity, I find quite likable. And as always, check out Phil's blog later on Popwatch: as a guy currently riding his bike across America, he surely has many thoughts on pee stops.
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