Episode Report Card M. Giant: A- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Turin About
By M. Giant | Season 20 | Episode 4 | Aired on 03.11.2012
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The teams have to go from the Asuncion Pit Stop to a local travel agency to book flights to Turin, Italy, but Bopper and Mark make the mistake of going directly to the airport first. This leads to all of the other seven teams getting on a plane that leaves an hour and fifteen minutes earlier than Team Kentucky's flight. Once they get there, the main pack struggles with Italian traffic and a spiral run uphill, where Art and JJ attempt a Fast Forward in which Art has to try to land a remote-control helicopter on JJ's head. The other teams take on the Roadblock, where they have two minutes to rappel down the atrium they just climbed up and grab a clue halfway down. Vanessa and Jamie have trouble with the task, while Other Rachel and Dave have trouble with each other. On the way to the next clue, we see that even the magical self-parking feature on the product-placed cars they're driving can't keep Brendon and Rachel from screaming at each other over parallel parking. At the Ford museum, each team finds a 0.02-Euro coin that depicts their next destination, but Team Big Brother are still in full meltdown mode, overthinking the clue and then threatening to quit the race and each other (Annoying Habit #14).
Having completed the Fast Forward, Art and JJ win their second leg while the other teams proceed to the Detour: cleaning statues or tasting salamis. Most teams opt for washing statues, and end up knocking the heads off their statues with the power washers, at least temporarily. Despite a leg full of sniping at each other, Other Rachel and Dave finish the Detour and the leg in second place while Brendon and Rachel have their second meltdown of the day during the salami task. Joey "Fitness" and Danny are third, Vanessa and Ralph are fourth, and Nary and Jamie are fifth. Brendon and Rachel come in sixth and save their relationship. Again. Kerri and Stacy do the salami task faster than Brendon and Rachel did, and make it in as team number seven. Bopper and Mark are never able to catch up, and come in last. But they won't go home empty-handed, because Art and JJ generously split their ten-thousand-dollar prize with them. And because it's a non-elimination leg this week, they're not going home at all yet.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Phil welcomes us Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. "And on top of one of the city's seven hills," he tells us, "the famous stairs of Antiquera." Wow, that hill looks a lot bigger in the aerial shot than it did with the racers running up it last week, probably because they were already most of the way up. Of course, these allegedly famous steps are also the start of the fourth leg of the race. Border Patrol agents Art and JJ, having won the previous leg, get to leave first at 5:10 PM. Looks like a bright, sunny afternoon at the start of a leg for once. Art rips the clue and they seem pretty excited about getting to fly to Turin, Italy. Phil tells us that's a 6,000-mile flight to "Italy's motor city." The irony is that he says this over shots of exotic cars, but when they get there, they'll just have to pick one of the regular old Ford Foci waiting at the airport. Each team will drive one to the Lingotto building, an odd-looking structure topped by a glass dome and a huge round cantilevered helipad sticking out next to it on one side, so it looks like a giant robot waiter buried to its armpits. That's where they'll find their next clue. Art and JJ hop into a cab and head for the travel agency. "We really don't think that we should be anything but number one every leg," JJ boasts. "There's nobody that has the intellect and strength that we do to win." They're going to be one of those teams that goes down so hard. They arrive at a travel agency, where Art busts out some of his Spanish to ask about flights to Turin. The agent tells them in subtitled Spanish that the next flight leaves at 9:15 in the morning and arrives in Turin at 10:35 the morning after that. Not counting the four-hour time difference, that's more than 21 hours of travel. What is this, Buddy Holly airlines? I can only assume there are one or more connecting flights along the way that we don't need to know about. The Border Patrol agents are bummed out, clearly having expected to hold onto their multi-hour lead into the next leg. By the time they arrive at the airport, it's getting dark. "There's another team!" JJ cries out in alarm. "Where?" asks a shocked Art, but. JJ was just messing with him. Okay, that was a good one.
In fact, the second-place team, Brendon and Rachel, doesn't even leave the Pit Stop until 9:59 PM, nearly five hours after the Border Patrol did. In the cab to the travel agency, Brendon says that maybe the race can serve as a preview of their honeymoon. Normally I'd call out the dickishness of assuming that any post-wedding trip they might plan could compare to racing around the world, Big Brother prize money or no. But we'll be finding out later that his preview theory is probably truer than he realizes, just in a completely different way.