Lynn and Alex, the Happy Boys

For some reason, late in the season of Amazing Race I run out of steam as far as putting up posts and listing all the teams and how they did. This is the third season that has aired since I started blogging, and every time it’s the same. It’s not that I lose the love for my show, it’s that trying to keep track of all the teams in the confusing first 3 weeks or so is part of the charm. There’s a lot more wild-card onscreen drama and comedy, and it’s a lot less predictable, when you have the unique reactive potential of 8, 9, or 10 teams than when you have 5 or fewer teams.

Be that as it may, after the second part of the India two-parter ended, it was Lynn and Alex who were ultimately unlucky in Lucknow.

They seemed to be having a nice time, but they’re gone. And then in the next episode, Ron and Kelly ended up getting mugged, but they won a whole bunch of airline travel and the Race went retrograde all the way to Turkey. Depending on which side of the Bosporus they’re on, they were back in Europe after Africa and India. That’s way too many subcontinents for me!

Anyway, the finale will be May 10, so that leaves just one week – this week – for them to get to some sort of jumping off point somewhere within striking distance of the US.

The recap has been up for a while for the Happy Boys’ departure episode.

And here’s the recaplet for the most recent episode, where Ron and Kelly get mugged. Free Ron! Free Ron! He’s a prisoner of not-love!

“Who’s there?” “Rob’s karma.” “Rob’s karma who?” “Rob’s karma THIS.”

Yes, this is the night when we learn that you can get away with a lot of grinning and tough talk about other teams until the moment when you egregiously screw up, at which point every self-satisfied thing you say — and particularly every dismissive thing you say about people who are, unbeknownst to you, ahead of you — takes on a delightfully ironic flavor.

This lesson is driven home to one Rob Mariano after he makes one too many playful jabs to scare Meredith and Gretchen and Uchenna and Joyce, and winds up scaring them into…investigating a flight they never would have found without “help.” When he gets entirely rotten information from a ticket agent, Rob concludes that he’s in the clear, and he and Amber and Ron and Kelly have a brief moment of peace in Turkey before realizing that they’re actually fighting for last place this time.

Despite Gretchen’s lengthy sojourn up the side of a tower and the trouble she and Meredith apparently have finding clue boxes in fairly unchallenging situations, they finish second behind a surging Uchenna and Joyce. Rob and Amber beat out Ron and Kelly for third place, and all of a sudden, it’s a whole new ball game as the pageant queen and the POW lose all their loot.

Oh, and Kelly basically does accuse Ron of using his POW status as a cheap way to avoid his commitment to the military. It’s almost unbelievable, but her comment to this effect is actually more offensive than it looked in the preview. I know — it seems impossible. It isn’t. Oh, and — did you know Travelocity was a sponsor of this show? I bet you do now.

Yeah, I probably think about this show too much. I think “Why the hell don’t I get my ass to the gym and get in shape and apply?”