The Amazing Race: Ah, Phuket

What a gloriously entertaining hour of TV The Amazing Race provided this week. Phuket, Thailand, made a beautiful backdrop, the racers were brimming with hilarious quotables, and I will never ever forget images like a one armed tiger tamer or an elephant taking a precarious squat over every contestant. But much like the first season of 24, it was a thrill ride building to an unexpectedly depressing ending that somewhat tainted the pleasure of what came before.

All 6 remaining teams found themselves on the same flight from India to Thailand guided to their next destination by nothing other than a picture of a gorilla statue. Everybody more or less clustered together until stumbling upon their target, the Phuket Zoo. Everyone, that is, except for Mike & Mel. Leave it to one stupid wretched vile wicked god-accursed cabbie to pretend to know where he’s going, leaving my favorite team completely in the lurch while the rest of the pack walks on the wild side. A quick glamor pose with a fierce looking kitty warranted this fantastic sound bite from Kisha; “I took a picture with a tiger and I didn’t pee on myself. I’m so pleased.” and an extremely close encounter with a very well trained elephant left everyone verging on speechless. Except for Jamie, who chose this particular leg to really let her xenophobia come out to play. Nice going, cheerleader. I knew you had more bitch in you than you were letting on. Mike even made a specific point of saying he likes everyone in the race other than you. Burn.

Case in point, a quick stop at an herb shop where the most patient herbalist in the world put up with what had to have been an hour of Jamie barking orders at him trying to find a clue in one of 99 drawers that he had to open one by one at the racers’ command. It made me so happy to see most teams edge past the cheerleaders at this point. Detour options this week were a straightforward 2 mile rickshaw pull or helping a fishing boat gear up by filling dozens of barrels with drinking water and tossing dozens more empties from the lower deck to the upper. Margie & Luke, Jamie & Cara, Tammy & Victor, and Mark & Michael (now less than affectionately dubbed “The Tweedles” by Jamie, of course) took the rickshaws, which gave Margie a moment to express a very realistic but previously unseen occasional frustration with Luke’s deafness, gave M&M an attempt to hamper the competition by messing with the available support gear, and gave Victor the chance to make an ever bigger ass of himself by declaring, mid-trip, “I don’t like saying this, but my sister’s a little heavy.” Well I do like saying this, Victor: You’re a little weak.

Mel & Mike managed to push hard and narrow their gap at least to the point of working on the boat challenge at the same time as Kisha & Jen, who made me smile and proved that the dynamic father/son duo really must be as cool as they seem when they declared a secret happiness at seeing them catch up. Like some sort of Industrial Revolution productivity expert, Mel found several ways to burn through the challenge at a faster pace than the sisters, but in the end their persistent efforts just weren’t enough to conquer the cab snafu and they were eliminated. Oh, and Mark & Michael’s little act of tampering, in addition to getting more directional assistance than the rickshaw challenge allowed, bought them an hour delay at the pit stop and a trip from 1^st to 3^rd. You know what they say about how often cheaters prosper.

Allow me to close my column this week with one last priceless exchange from Mike & Mel (who are already making me hope for a 2^nd edition of TAR All Stars).

“Dad, do you know any Thai?”

“I know Mai Tai!”

*crickets*

“That was a pun.”

“I know, dad.”

Season 14, Episode 7: Gorilla? Gorilla? Gorilla? (originally aired March 29, 2009)

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Sundays at 8pm ET/PT on CBS

Photographs courtesy of CBS