After last week’s kick-ass TAR7 episode, we get this week’s suck-ass TAR7 episode. Although there was much, much, much that was great, well done, well edited, well raced about this week’s entry, a new kind of play has been introduced: “Bend Ze Rules.”

Rob and Amber continue in their quest to be the most polarizing team in Race history: once again, half the fans at TWOP and half the people in my office (the show has finally become a workplace hit) thought Rob’s use of an obscure rule to get out of doing an unpleaseant eating Roadblock task was smart play. The other half thought it sucked, that it means the end of TAR as we know it, and that cheating quitters should be eliminated.

There are also dark mutterings about Phil’s phawning treatment of Rob and Ambuh every time they hit the mat.

There was much complaining online about the continuing trend of high-volume, high-risk eating tasks, which started with the infamous “2 pounds of low-grade caviar” incident and the ostrich egg omelet in TAR5 and the horrific Hungarian paprikash-begosh soup Roadblock in TAR6.

It’s strange to me how on the one hand I detest and deplore Rob’s Survivor-style tactics, and then I have to admit that he’s got almost everyone dancing to his tune and focusing on his behavior rather than concentrating on the race. I hated how he quit the Roadblock, and gave him grudging kudos for correctly working out that taking a 4-hour penalty in a nasty task that is taking everyone behind him more than 4 or 5 hours to complete is a smaht move.

I hated how he cajoled two other teams into buying in to his “quit and wait out the penalty” strategy so he was guaranteed to have some cannon fodder behind him on the way to the Pit Stop mat. The penalty timer started as soon as the next team arrived at the Roadblock site, and it worked out that the next two “sheep” teams to follow his lead and quit would be racing each other after their penalties ran out, and Rob and Amber would have a comfortable lead on them.

Yet still I had to admit it made for entertaining television, as instead of heading to the mat to wait out the time as happened last season for a lost clue penalty, the Quitters had to wait at the Argentine barbecue gulag for their clocks to run down. And the watching, waiting, and commenting was… strangely compelling.

As was the groaning when someone new would arrive and sit down to their repast of 4 pounds of campfire-roasted cow, including an entire slab of ribs, kidney, intestine, and “saliva gland.” And be greeted by miserable competitors balancing dripping, greasy boards on their knees piled high with roast beast yet uneaten. And clouds of hungry flies. And the now-inevitable buckets.

“Deana. Oh, Deana” they would moan. Or, “Debbie. Debbie’s going to do it.”

Which was another reason I thought Rob was a puss – Debbie finished her cow and still got eliminated. Which wouldn’t seem to be fair, unless you consider that she and her kissy-face teammate congratulated themselves for their mad Spanish skillz about 2 1/2 hours in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter if you can speak the lingo if you can’t also read the map-o.

Miss Alli has her mini-recap up already:

Well, this is confusing. Two things antithetical to everything this show should rightly be about — volume-based eating challenges and abandoning tasks — collide when the teams go to Argentina and are confronted with a Roadblock that involves eating four pounds of meat. So it’s not an “eat unfamiliar food; mind over matter” challenge, it’s just an “eat until you throw up, and then after you throw up into this bucket, eat some more” challenge. Apparently the sight of Freddy eating his own puke last season made somebody think that nothing goes as well with what should be a classy show like people being forced to eat until they’re sick. It also turns out that the show has informed the teams of the way the four-hour penalty works. Rob makes a run at the meat-eating, but ultimately concludes that in all likelihood, he’s not going to finish, and given his early arrival at the Roadblock, he gambles that he has a better shot at staying in the race by taking the penalty than by taking the time required to finish the food. Booo, quitting! On the other hand, he immediately goes into desperately-trying-to-stay-in-the-game mode, which takes some of the sting out of the quitting, and he convinces two other teams to abandon the task as well, meaning that he’s got company in whatever bad position he winds up as a result of taking the penalty. Moreover, all the teams have a nice bit of insurance based on the fact that Debbie and Bianca open the episode by driving two hours in the entirely wrong direction, having no idea where they’re going. Ultimately, Debbie and Bianca are so far behind that even after the other teams take the penalty, and even after Debbie ultimately eats the four pounds of food (supposedly), they still finish last.
Is it a good development to have people who abandoned a task — albeit because they thought it increased their odds of staying in the game, and not because they reached an “I don’t care if we lose anymore” point, as have past quitters — finish ahead of people who did the task? It is not.

Would it have been a good development to have people who drove two hours in the wrong direction like total morons stay in the game because somebody else wasn’t capable of eating four fucking pounds of food? Not to me. Volume-based eating challenges are stupid, and they create no-win situations, and they have nothing to do with racing, and they should be done away with immediately. BAH!

There were lots of great edits in this episode. Lots of great lines. My hunky dorks the Stackomatic-Beefeater Brothers redeemed themselves into third place. Brian jumped up and down like it was Christmas morning when he learned that his brother Greg had to down a couple of kilos of cow, because apparently Brian had been on a Fear Factor episode where he failed spectacularly on an eating challenge and it was apparently payback time.

Poor Debbie and Bianca. They tried so hard to be the cute smart girls who were going to be the first all-female team to win it all, but they turned out to be navigationally challenged. Also, Rob stole their taxi in the beginning of the leg, when they were actually getting directions at the hotel. Perhaps they got rattled by the theft (they never realized another team poached their ride) and that’s what threw them off, but they blew right by the exit from Cinco Norte (clearly marked “Los Andes,” and the clue said they had to drive over the Andes, too).

Two hours later, after stopping for directions several times, not getting a clear answer, and assuming that they were still headed the right way anyway, they finally realized the horrible truth when they got to the ocean. The Pacific one, that is. Ooops.

There were great edits – one of the best was Susan and Patrick getting directions at a gas station. Almost as navigationally challenged as Debbie and Bianca, they couldn’t find their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone Santiago Chile. You can see the Debbie/Bianca SUV in the background (and the cameraman spotted it and swung around to keep it in frame) while Team Motherboy is in the foreground, getting pointed to the route in the totally opposite direction. Oooops again.

There’s another good one after the girls finally get turned around and voice their hope that somebody got a flat or something. Cut to the Brothers, who get a flat on the mountain-bike detour and have to walk the rest of the way, dragging packs, bikes, and a flimsy looking helmet-cam rig to the clue box.

Heh. At least they didn’t give up and start hollering “My bike is BROKEN.” They just walked it off, dealt with the meat gulag, and pulled off a decent finish, much higher than “Currently in last place!”

But in spite of all that, the episode left a bad taste in the mouth. Oh, yes.

I had a beef taco salad today for lunch, and then started reading up on the TWOP episode thread and suddenly felt intense regret for the vegetarian lunch item I didn’t choose.

So instead of a standings list, here’s just a few short observations for fun:

Phil: Don’t have a cow, man – where’s the beef?
Rob: Somehow, he figured out how to cow the sheep. What a smaht-ass.
Deana: Baaad decision.
Meredith: …got Rocky Mountain Oysters?
Greg: Mmm. Juicy brains.
Ron: Mmm-hmmm. Way better than prison camp brains.
Alex: “(during) an eating challenge, the last thing I want to hear is ‘you can barf it up.'”
Uchenna: “Daaa-yummm!”
Hungry Argentinian Fly: “You gonna eat that?”
Charming Argentinian Bucket: “Hello.”
Patrick: There’s a difference between having a cow, and eating it too.
Debbie: Would you like a side of crow with your side of cow, Team Bi-Lingua Carrera?