The Amazing Race Review: Reviewing Our Contestants

We remain in Shanghai this week, where Newsflash! people don’t speak English.

But I get ahead of myself.  Really, there are four fully capable, if not great teams here.  So let’s go ahead and discuss our remaining final three (sorry, Mike & Louie!), in order of most-to-least likely to see Phil first at the finish line:

Jet & Cord: Our cowboys are the clear favorites.  Despite being dumbfounded at the sight of tall buildings, these guys take to each city as though it were, well, a bull they’re about to rope.  This leg, they handled a needle-in-a-haystack challenge with remarkable calm, and without even snickering when Brent, who really had to go to the bathroom, kept saying he really had to go to the bathroom.  Me, I’d have picked that time to have a casual chat with my bro about how much I love Niagara Falls, particularly the whoooshing sound the water makes as it breaks free.  But Jet & Cord stay focused on the task at hand, which helped Cord when he had to count the number of golden statues at Longhua Temple.  Remembering to check his clue, and count the number of gold statues rather than just Buddhas, he finished on his first try, unlike Louie and super-smart Caite (more on Caite’s intellect later).

Sure, they lack some attention to detail, passing Brent outside the Temple without seeing him, which would have clued them in pretty quickly that they were in the right place.  And, yes, that was Jet saying “muy rapido” to their Chinese taxi driver.  Still, I’m thinking that the cowboys are just one leg away from getting that Amazing Race Champions belt buckle that Jet covets, because they keep their cool in frustrating situations, unlike. . .

Dan & Jordan:  I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised at Dan’s facial contortions in the back of the cab on Sunday night.  He’d warned us earlier that he didn’t travel very well. But it was a bit painful to watch him go into a complete hissy fit on a cab ride when it appeared his driver was not following Louie & Michael as the brothers had instructed him to.  Especially since it was clear to me that the driver did understand him, he just wasn’t going to run red lights for the hyperventilating flailing Americans making identical crazy-faces in the back seat.  Seriously, I thought for a second the cab driver might pull over and call an ambulance to report a customer having seizures.  At one point, Dan gets so worked up, he threatens to leave the cab altogether, almost jumping out of a moving car in the middle of the street.

And really, it was their fault in the first place.  The only reason they were following Louie & Mike’s cab is because they were stupid enough to give up on their search for Wàibáidù Qiáo, a bridge that Phil tells us translates to “Garden Bridge”.  The Racers were only given the translated name, and spent copious amounts of time asking strangers where the “Garden Bridge” was, never wondering if maybe the name of the bridge is, y’know, Chinese.  I mean, if a German man stopped me on the street and asked me where the Einkaufszentrum was, I probably wouldn’t know he was talking about the place with all the National Monuments. So this was really stupid on their part.

Dan & Jordan’s strategy was to wait for Louie & Mike, then overtake them at the detective-only speed bump.  Yet,  you’d think that Jordan, a self-proclaimed Race fan, would’ve remembered that Speed Bumps are never that complicated, and rarely lose that much time for the team that has to do one.  Indeed, Louie & Mike only had to toss a coin into a hole.  Okay, a hole in the middle of a statue that burns incense, but really, it was tossing coins into a pretty big hole.  They didn’t even have to travel to find the statue.

It came down to the bros. vs. the detectives in the needle-in-the-haystack challenge, and really, Dan & Jordan only came out ahead due to luck.  But it might take more than luck to beat. . .

Brent & Caite:  This team is young, and not as dumb as you’d think they are, or, at least that’s what they want you to think, which Caite spends a completely unnecessary amount of time telling me.  Um, Caite?  The best way to make people think you’re smart?  Is to quit reminding them how dumb you were.  Seriously, you weren’t the person on this race with the most dumb things to say (that would be Jordan) until you kept telling us that you can count and read maps.  I mean, you know we can actually see you doing these things, right?  You don’t need to narrate.

Anyway, if these two can keep their spirits up, and remember to read the clue, they’ve got a pretty good shot.  And since the last leg usually involves at least one very physical, adventurous task (which Caite is quite good at), I wouldn’t be shocked at a win for these models/boyfriend-girlfriend.  (Speaking of which, am I the only person who sees absolutely no chemistry between these two at all?  It’s not that they bicker, because they do so no more than Dan & Jordan, and, like them, also quickly forget whatever they were squabbling about, which is exactly the point.  I mean, they come across waaaaay more like siblings than they do like romantic partners.  But perhaps this is because I just find Brent completely and totally nonsexual.  I know I was supposed to cringe when he made reference to everything about him being “huge”, except I just couldn’t because he just doesn’t register to me as a physical presence, at all.  But, I digress.)

So that’s it, readers, these are my predictions.  Oh, I do have one additional minor one.  I predict at least one late-night phone call between Louie & Mike, reminiscing about those nights together in that full-size bed.

What are your predictions?  Leave ‘em below! Otherwise, I’ll see you next week at the finish line.

Season 16, Episode 11: They Don’t Even Understand Their Own Language (originally aired May 2, 2010)

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Sundays at 8pm ET/PT on CBS

Photographs courtesy of CBS.