The recaplet for last night’s AWESOME double episode:
Wait, am I high, or did that really happen?
Okay, this two-hour extravaganza starts out in South Africa, where Ray and Deana gut out a Fast Forward and Rob and Amber chase it in vain, putting the latter in the back of the pack temporarily. A Detour sends a couple of teams through a fairly cushy scavenger hunt and sends the rest into a cave, where Gretchen manages to fall and cut her head. And as head wounds do, it bleeds a lot, which is pretty scary. Ray and Deana win that leg, and win cars, which will bother me endlessly, and the injured Gretchen and Meredith pull up in last place.
Fortunately, it’s non-elimination, which seems kind of good, since medical emergencies are not a good way for victory and defeat to be decided. Oh, and they take all of Gretchen and Meredith’s stuff, which seems kind of harsh.
In the second leg, the teams head to Botswana, where the stupidity of the nonsense between Lynn and Alex and Rob and Amber only intensifies, and all are reminded that alongside Rob’s appealing streak of Playful Scamp exists a very unappealing streak of Sniggering Asshole that has a particular tendency to come out when things aren’t going so well.
And then it gets awesome. Brian and Greg wreck their Jeep, resulting in a pretty scary injury to their camera guy (that’s not what’s awesome). Lynn and Alex, to their credit, stop to see if they can help, and then Rob and Amber, to their non-credit, don’t — they at least should have slowed down and rolled the window down or something. They don’t, however, and so Lynn spends the rest of the episode telling everyone who will listen that the boys wrecked their car, but THAT’S NOT REALLY THE IMPORTANT THING, because the important thing is that ROB AND AMBER DIDN’T STOP. Basically, everyone is an idiot about this particular thing. But that’s not the awesome part either. The awesome part is that the boys have to wait around a long time for a replacement Jeep to come, but when they get to the Detour, they find that some teams are still there, including Ray and Deana, who apparently cannot work together long enough to complete a simple task, so intense is their dislike for each other. The teams finish different Detour options at about the same time, and they take off for the pit stop within sight of each other. Jeep race! And then they’re at the pit stop, and they get out, and Brian and Greg smoke Ray and Deana in the foot race, and Brian and Greg are saved and Ray and Deana are eliminated and I think I need to lie down. That was the awesome part.
It’s being voted up as an A+ episode, and everyone at work was talking about it nonstop all morning. All of us reported yelling at the boys during that last sprint: “Go! Go boys! RUN! RUN!”
Oh, and how awesome was it that Brian, on ripping the clue to start the first leg, says “And we’re going… home for a big hug from Mom, and a big plate of her chicken enchiladas…” I have to watch that part again tonight, it cracked my shit up all over. Thank goodness for St Tivo. They’re starting to call the boys “The Brothers Awesomov” on TWOP now. Definitely the favorites in popularity, they are. They may even take Bald Snark ‘s place in the “favorite teams” stakes, but for GOD’s sake please no more photo finishes! And NO “fourth team curse!”
I forgot to say more about the terrible accidents last night – Gretchen looked like she’d been through the wars after she cut her head, and she did the ROADBLOCK and everything with her head wrapped in a bandage reminiscent of the headwrap on the guy in that painting with the fife, drum, and tattered American flag. Man, she rocks. And while the medical guys were patching her up and asking “how many fingers am I holding up?” she tells Meredith to go find the clue. Which he does, and the task helps him focus on something else and not worry so much about his wife. Who I had previously thought was pretty annoying (she has an unfortunate pitch and rasp to her voice) but who I now think is a worthy Racer and a woman to be emulated in life. No learned helplessness for this lady: she gets it done. She chose to do the Roadblock because it was an easy non-physical shopping-type task, and she did all right with that shopping for ingredients in Chile, so no problem for her at at all.
The thought that she’d have to go through the next leg wearing the filty, bloodstained shirt she had on in the caves was distressing, which was another reason it was so kind of Uchenna and Joyce to stop by with a bag of clothes, unasked. They also rock.
As for the rollover – man, that cameraman gets my vote for the “Get The Shot” award. He looked to be in a lot of pain. I ran across something on another site that reminds me that the cameramen get switched around from team to team, so there’s a very good chance that he had been Rob and Amber’s camera dude at least once. This week I’ll be checking out the Insider videos a little sooner than usual to catch up on the part of the saga that didn’t get air time.
But again: Cameradude, you rock too. I hope you’re all healed up and the other drunken reeling cameramen buy you beers.
The good folks at TWOP are happily posting favorite, not-so-favorite, and anti-favorite quotes and cuts from the episode now that the boards are back. One poster lists among their faves, “Phil giving Romber the baboon ass on the mat.” BWAH!!
The recap for the previous episode is also up: What A Gaucho You Are.
That’s two weeks in a row for Gretchen to get the “title quote” credit. She may be screechy, but she’s got spunk.