The Amazing Race recap: Love Child

After a long, traffic-plagued drive back home from our Thanksgiving trip, my wife Christine and I finally got our kids to bed, and I prepared to watch and write about The Amazing Race. As I checked my e-mail one last time before starting the show, my wife was trying to plug in an extension cord, and in doing so, accidentally yanked out the plug for the cable box. When we replugged it, the box wouldn’t reboot correctly. I knew the Race was delayed by football, but it was coming on any second, and our TV wouldn’t work. Finally, after rebooting the box one more time, the picture flickered on, just as Phil Keoghan was recapping the previous week’s episode.

I recount this tale because while we were staring at the unresponsive TV, I found myself thinking, “If I miss the show, I’m gonna be so pissed at Christine.” And then I proceeded to watch a show in which, after a son made a careless mistake and cost his mother half of a million-dollar prize, she wept over how much she loved him and was proud of him. And I got in a snit over missing a few minutes of a TV show.

Needless to say, I retroactively felt like a d—.

Toni and Dallas: What a team. They made me unsure whether I was watching The Amazing Race or a really competitive Hallmark ad. And now they’re gone, leaving three teams that it’s really hard to root for.

Things started so well, with the mother-son team beginning the leg in first place. (Curiously, however, the producers didn’t announce at what time each team left, like they normally do. I have many conspiracy theories, but it was probably just due to the fact that Dan was so arrhythmic last week that it actually shorted out everyone’s timepieces.) The first task was to go aboard a nuclear submarine and find a man who played an officer in The Hunt for Red October. Does this actor have the lowest Q rating in the world? Not only was he not important enough to name, but neither was his character. The only thing notable about him was his 18-year-old film: He was one strata of interest below “the guy who played another guy in that movie about the thing.” At the final pit stop, Phil was on the mat with a guy in military garb with a goofy mustache; I thought that perhaps this was part of a theme, and I expected Phil to say, “I’m standing here with the man who played Bumbling Cadet Who Ogled Callahan’s Chest #3 in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.”

But the actor clearly was still aces at his craft, considering how realistically he pretended to be on the phone talking to Sean Connery as the teams approached him for his clue. (Considering Andrew had wondered earlier whether it would be Connery at the clue box, I was surprised he didn’t ask the actor whether he was on the horn with Alec Baldwin. “Uh, can you tell him that me and my frat brothers liked him in The Cat in the Hat?”)

I worry I’m over-mocking the frat guys, but there’s some cosmic force that commands everyone to do just that. For example, when everyone got their sub clue and dashed outside to look for a cab, there was a priceless scene of Dan and Andrew on the side of the road, getting doused by a passing truck driving through a puddle. Watching these guys is like watching a tightly-wound Ziggy cartoon. All that’s missing are bald heads and a cloud raining only on them.

NEXT: Dallas starts to fall apart

Everyone dashed to the roadblock, in which one teammate had to be “good at solving mysteries…literally.” As someone whose pet peeve is the overuse of the word “literally,” I will spare you the 812 reasons why the word made no sense here, even if the challenge was indirectly about a mystery writer. But suffice it to say, the repeated reading of the clue made tear my own head off and throw it at the TV screen. Literally.

For the roadblock, one teammate had to count the number of Lenin and Stalin statues, put the separate numbers together, then take a cab to a store where, if their numbers were correct, a shopkeeper would give them a book by the aforementioned mystery writer; at the book’s page with the same number as the statue total, there would be a clue to an address where the teammate’s partner would be waiting. This was such an incredibly convoluted challenge that I expected Jeff Probst to jump in and explain that you also had to untie a knot and free some puzzle pieces.

Dallas started to fall apart here; he wasn’t sure who was Lenin and who was Stalin, and mixed them both up. (“I paid a lot of money for his education, but I’m not sure he’s gonna know how to tell the difference,” said Toni. To be fair, he did major in hair gel, and Lenin was bald, so clearly he wasn’t in Dallas’ curriculum.) But the mistake didn’t look fatal. After all, Dan and Andrew went to the wrong park. And they weren’t even close: at the correct park, it was cloudy and raining, but at the frat boys’ park, it was sunny. They were so far off they had a completely different weather pattern. I’m surprised there was gravity where they were.

Plus, I expected a flameout from Ken and Tina, who were bickering throughout the leg. (When Tina demanded that Ken ask their cabbie to put out his cigarette, and her husband refused, she closed her eyes and pressed her finger into her forehead. This is a look I’m sure Ken gets so many times that he’s given it a number. “Uh-oh, it’s #14, which I call ‘Forehead Fury.’ But I gotta say, I prefer it to #23, which in large doses can cause infertility.”) Before the roadblock, Tina stopped to check her pack for her passport and money; as we’d been warned in the coming attraction that someone would lose those very items, I thought this was foreshadowing that it was Tina who would mess up. How sadly wrong I was.

Nick quickly solved the mystery roadblock (literally!), and then they were off to find the next clue, which would be given by a woman in fatigues with a Shetland pony. (This looked like the most obvious pedophile sting operation ever.) Starr was a little confused, thinking that maybe this would be a woman with a ponytail. So who paid for Starr’s education, and how pissed is he or she?

Dallas, on the other hand, was completely stymied by the roadblock, giving the shopkeeper wrong answer after wrong answer, collecting ten-minute penalties. He’d still be there now had Tina not told him the answer. It has always been Tina’s strategy (much to Ken’s chagrin) to share information with people, and I’ve never seen someone who looked so unfriendly act so generously. It’s a little disorienting, like having a Hell’s Angel offer you a brownie.

NEXT: The frat boys get down…again

We were still set up for frat-boy failure, however, as a wet Andrew proudly presented his number to the shopkeeper and was wrong, even though he had enlisted a Russian cabbie to help him count. I was convinced that this was the frat boys’ death knell. But then Dallas, trying to get back to his mother, watched his cab drive away with his passports and money. But here’s what bothered me: He didn’t seem to go to much effort to chase after the cab, did he? Everything we’d seen so far indicated that Moscow was choked with traffic; wouldn’t he have eventually caught up?

Still, I thought that not even the loss of cash and passports was enough to overpower the natural forces that don’t want good things to happen to Dan and Andrew. When Dan heard the news and smiled, saying, “It’s crippling. Hopefully Andrew will come here soon and we can finish this out,” I thought for sure it was going to cut to Andrew falling into an open manhole.

Toni and Dallas made a valiant effort, begging for money to stay in the game. But the errors kept piling up, like their taking the train instead of a cab to a clue and being forced to turn around by the pony lady. And then Dan and Andrew faced a Speed Bump completely tailored to their lack of talent: mastering a Russian dance. I would bet that there was a different Speed Bump planned, but once the producers learned it would be Dan and Andrew, they threw together a rhythmic task just to get some more laughs. It didn’t have the same magic, though. It seemed like Dan decided that if you combined an infinite number of spastic movements with an infinite number of epileptic seizures, you’d eventually come up with a perfect Russian dance, and he did. The judge was far too kind to him and let him pass, even though he just seemed to be doing a series of not particularly amusing drunken jumping jacks. It just goes to show: The sequel is never as good as the original, whether in movies or uncoordinated nerds.

Nick and Starr easily won the leg, while the frat guys just barely edged out Ken and Tina. It wasn’t as close as it seemed, though, as Ken and Tina were sent back to find the clue they hadn’t picked up; they had just spotted the frat guys and ran after them. For a few minutes the producers made it seem like this could save Toni and Dallas, but eventually gave up the charade, as the mother and son were so far behind that Phil had to track them down to give them the news that they were out of the race. (His mustached mat-mate, however, didn’t come along. He probably was already late to an audition for the role of Bumbling KGB Agent #4 in Larry the Cable Guy’s Git R Doneski!)

We were left with Toni and Dallas’ tearful farewell. He looked shellshocked and guilty as she kvelled over her beautiful boy, waving away his mistake by telling him, “This has been the best experience of my life, and I wouldn’t change a thing that we did. I have never been so proud of you, baby.” I had to wipe away a tear and not just because of the final three teams that we’re left with. Really, who do you root for now? I have nothing against Nick and Starr, they’re just innocuous and thus hard to get behind. And Ken and Tina? If they’re still bickering this late in the game, there’s no triumph in their winning. She’d probably just yell at him for not holding the giant check correctly. As much as I hate to say this, I think Dan and Andrew are going to win. Think about it: In nearly every leg, they’ve just barely survived by finishing second to last. If they keep that pattern up, then the only way to just miss being eliminated in the finale is to finish first. The same laws of nature that cause them to lose their shoes and get doused by a cab will see that they win. Granted, they’ll do it in some horribly embarrassing way, like they’ll tie their shoes together, fall off a cliff, and accidentally land right on Phil’s mat. But win they will, and I only hope Phil laminates their million-dollar check, because the ink will otherwise run when that rain cloud breaks above them.

What do you think? Frat boys for the win? And couldn’t a strapping guy like Dallas catch up with a cab? Do you think he threw in the towel?

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