Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Wonder As I Wanda
By Miss Alli | Season 9 | Episode 4 | Aired on 03.20.2006
MoJo pays a visit to a counter where they learn that the first flight to Frankfurt is leaving at 7:00 in the morning. Others learn the same at other counters. "Crap," Lori remarks.
Commercials. Okay, I can buy last week's Play Hard team as Wanda and Desiree. If it had been Fran and Barry again, I would have been like, "Who's counting the damn votes? Diebold?"
Moscow airport. All the teams deal gradually with the fact that they're not going to be able to leave until morning. Everyone else heads for a hotel, and MoJo sacks out on the floor. It's good to at least see willingness to sleep on the floor, considering how freaking soft people have gotten in the last couple of seasons. It used to be that sleeping on the floor of the airport was just assumed, and now it almost never happens. Your father and I used to walk to the airport in the snow, uphill both ways, you know.
Yutz meets up with a German guy on the train and asks him whether there are "pretty ladies in Germany." Is there any way the show doesn't know by now how boring this becomes when there isn't anything witty about it? I try not to go all "I only love the first season!" on you all the time, but do you remember how they all got on that train in India and Drew played cards with those guys, and Rob chatted with that one dude, and they were just sort of being among people? And how when they did get hot for the locals, it seemed to emerge from the situation, rather than from anyone running around trying to look like a stud? Even when Chris and Alex would flirt with girls, it wasn't like this. This is just so…stupid. This, just like some other teams in other seasons, is a casting failure. There isn't anything entertaining about these guys. They're not villains; they're not anything. If you want to see these guys, all you have to do is go to TGIFriday's on a Thursday. No one fucking cares.
This dumb team of boring fools gets off the train in Stuttgart. They get a cab to the Mercedes factory. There, they find a clue box telling them to take a test drive to receive a clue. As Phil explains, this won't be open until 8:30 AM, at which point the teams will get in a car driven by someone else and act as ballast during a fast drive around a test track. As was pointed out in the room where I watched this episode, this "task" is a great example of the difference between things that might be exciting to do and things that are exciting to watch people do. Being driven around at high speeds might be cool, but when you watch it, it's just a lot of "WOOO!" The boys retire to a hotel for a few hours until the thing opens.
The second train arrives carrying Lake and Michelle and BJ and Tyler. These teams cab it to the Mercedes factory and find the clue. They disperse for the night.