The Amazing Race: Greetings from Big Poppa

Looks like I’m going to have to start applying a  two-drink minimum to Amazing Race viewings, cause I gotta tell you, I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the rest of the season sober.

First of all, Ken and Tina are turning out to be. . .good.  This is the third leg where they finished first.  This time around, they beat Frat Brothers Andrew and Dan to a fast forward, where Tina overcame her fear of heights to climb an excruciatingly high tower when I thought for sure she was going to chicken out and then find a way to blame Ken.  But she defied my expectations.  Cynicism be damned!  I’m starting to root for them.  Not to win the race or anything, but I am starting to hope that they don’t divorce, and that’s like Grinch-heart-growing-3-sizes-too-big for me.

Or maybe it was the wine.

Speaking of wine, let’s talk about kiwis.  (Like that transition?)  This week’s detour had the teams choosing between stomping on kiwis to produce multiple quarts of juice or assembling some sort of bike with a windsail attached (please don’t make me look it up) and using this bike to speed around a raceway three times.  Every team chose what I would have – the kiwi stomping.  So imagine my disappointment when I realized that I, too, would have made the wrong choice.  Turns out kiwis are surprisingly tough, and apparently must be layered atop jagged shards of glass to get the juice out.  Virtually every team complained about rocks cutting into their feet (except Kelly and Christy, whose feet must be as hardened as their souls), and several teams, including Toni and Dallas,  Aja and Ty, and Nick and Starr give up and do the putting-together-a-bike-with-windsail option.  Starr still manages to get injured when her bike-with-windsail thing (still not looking it up) topples over on the side, apparently crushing her arm.  At first I thought her injury was overblown – those did not sound like real tears – but she appeared to be nursing the arm on the drive home, causing Nick to take the wheel.

I hoped that Phil’s Dad, who made a guest appearance at the pit stop in Auckland, New Zealand, would maybe hug her and make it all better (he looked like the type who could make that happen) but no…apparently Phil’s Big Poppa was saving all his love for the team that came in last, which luckily enough for him was the follicly-blessed Blonde Southern Belles.  Unbeknownst to myself, I’ve apparently gained some affection for them over the past few episodes, because I didn’t begrudge them that Big Poppa hug.  Or maybe. . .

Or maybe I’m just terrified that with another team out of the way that is not Terence and Sarah or Kelly and Christy, Terence and Sarah or Kelly and Christy become more likely to actually win this thing.  (This is the fear responsible for the second drink.)  Terence and Sarah, while not doing anything overtly annoying this week, still managed to grate due to his insistence on having to be touched at the oddest times.  Two weeks ago, she had to kiss him before completing a road block; this week, she had to ruffle his hair while he was driving.  Terence is that guy who pulls his girlfriend onto his lap while she’s trying to have a conversation with other people.  Terence is needy, pushy, and surprisingly slow for a guy who trains runners for a living.  And Sarah is the girl who indulges him because it makes her feel special and above people like Nick and Starr.  Ugh.

Meanwhile, Kelly and Christy also suffer from delusions of their own superiority.  It’s not that I blame them for noting that being last in line to get on a computer to book a flight gave them the advantage of letting others figure out the best flight for them.  But do they have to be so obnoxious about it?  Kelly and Christy seem to think that they are really on an episode of Gossip Girl – that the more they snicker about how other teams are beneath them, the more entertaining we will find them.  Yet all they are really doing is increasing the number of e-mails sent to their ex-husbands with “You must be so relieved!” in the subject line.

I do hope that friends of Ty don’t get a similar e-mail.  While I find Aja a little too snippy when things aren’t going her way – did she have to make Ty feel worse about blowing out a tire when he ran up a curb on the road to the marina? – I suspect that somewhere in the back of her brain, she is aware that stress doesn’t exactly bring out the best in her.  Still, it became obvious this episode that Aja and Ty have largely only been together through “good” times, a fact which will only hinder them going forward.

Still, I hope they manage to do so, for the sake of my sobriety if nothing else.

P.S.  I’ve watched Fear Factor, Survivor, and The Real World: Las Vegas.  Still, only Amazing Race has ever made me actually want to vomit.  First, it was a few seasons back, when teams had to eat a spicy soup which many vomited up, only to have to eat the regurgitated portions.  Then, this episode, watching the teams drink kiwi juice they had just stomped on with their nasty, funky, having-run-around-all-day, enclosed-in-socks-with-maybe-a-30/70-chance-of-being-clean, feet.  GROSS.

Season 13, Episode 4: I Wonder If They Like Blondes in New Zealand? (originally aired October 19, 2008)

For another take on this episode, check out Next Door to Down Under by Paul Secrest.

For more on The Amazing Race, click here.

Sundays at 8pm ET/PT on CBS

Photographs courtesy of CBS