The Amazing Race: Can Someone Put Me In A Coma Please?

Hey, so this is going to be my shortest review ever! Woo hoo! The reason: nothing of any conceivable interest happens in this craptastic slog of an episode of a tired show in the even more tired reality television trend. I think I actually would have rather watched Desperate Housewives or a documentary on polka dancing than this thing. You know you’re not enjoying a television show when you keep continually looking over at your fire escape and wondering whether the fall would be high enough to kill you.

We open in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The teams have to find Tivoli Grona Lund, an amusement park, and find their next clue at one of the rides. Hey, I want to go to an amusement park! How about we change the show so that instead of me watching these degenerate numbnuts run around at an amusement park, the teams on The Amazing Race have to watch me ride the rides instead? I guarantee I’d be less stupid and more entertaining (it’s not hard, believe me).

Sam & Dan begin, followed by Meghan & Cheyne and then the Globetrotters. Flight Time tells us that today is his birthday! Hey, I know that the birthday boy is supposed to get the birthday wish, but all the same I’m going to wish that Flight Time gets a real name. Or agrees to let me beat him with a rubber hose and give him any name I deem appropriate.

At the park, the teams have to ride a drop tower ride. Good thing that Mika chick is out of the picture. At the top of the ride they have to look for an arrow which points to the location of the next clue. Is anybody actually reading this with keen interest? Okay, so from there we get a whole bunch of amazingly exuberant and oh-so-electrifying spectacle: gnomes, sandbags, explosions (though not very big at all), Viking alphabets, needles (er, ah flags I mean) in haystacks, brotherly screaming, crying, and yeah…that’s it. That’s all there is. And to ruin the suspense (if there is any), just because I feel like it, no one gets eliminated at the end of the episode, thus rendering the proceedings completely pointless. If I had the hour I spent watching this thing back…it’d be like gold in my hands. All that show did was try to eat my soul and my remaining IQ points, and also bring me one hour closer towards death.

For another take on this episode, read Haystacks, revisited. by Alana D.

Season 15, Episode 7: This Is the Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done in My Life (originally aired November 8, 2009)

For more on The Amazing Race, click here.

Sundays at 8pm ET/PT on CBS

Photographs courtesy of CBS