Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT In the Crap
By M. Giant | Season 18 | Episode 7 | Aired on 04.10.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The remaining seven teams fly across India to Varanasi, although Jet and Cord end up landing an hour behind all the other teams. After a harrowing taxi race through the city, re-racers have to search through the noisy, crowded streets for specific holy men and pieces of a sentence that supposedly leads them to the next clue even though it's actually a total non sequitur. Most teams do fine, although Ron goes on walkabout long enough for the Cowboys -- and everyone else -- to pass him. After the Road Block, they have to either deliver a bale of hay from across the Ganges or stoke a fire with poo, and Jen and Kisha quickly get tired of each other's crap. The Globetrotters go from last to first, and the Cowboys claw their way back up to fifth place. While trying to get to the Pit Stop, Vyxsin first leaps into the Ganges and then throws someone out of a tuk-tuk. But they still get there ahead of Ron and Christina, who are the first non-TAR14 team to get Philiminated this season. Now Christina will get married and they'll never see each other again.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Phil welcomes us back to "this," this of course being Kolkata, India. "Bursting with more than fifteen million people [over half of whom appear to be on the screen in this overwhelming opening montage], it is one of the most populous urban areas in the world." Phil's at the park known as Maidan (thanks for nothing, closed captioning) in the middle of the city, apparently umpiring a cricket game, as he says that the park's greenery "has been called the lungs of Kolkata." But of course that was before Mallory got there. Oh, and it was the sixth Pit Stop.
We get to witness Gary and Mallory having a little Indian dinner in a hotel room filled with dancing Bollywood wannabees (and, of course, Snapple). Phil again makes a callback to the Snapple slogan by referring to their meal as "the best stuff in India," but it doesn't look like the table is exactly groaning under the weight of dishes. In fact, they seem to be having a TV dinner in more ways than one. But once that's dispensed with, we see them leave Maidan in first place, at 1:18 PM. "Ow!" Mallory howls as one end of the tear-strip from their clue envelope brushes her head. The former Lungs of Kolkata are like, "Fine, we give up." The clue is telling them to fly to Varanasi. Phil doesn't tell us how long a flight that is, but he does say that it's "perched on the banks of the sacred Ganges River," and is "the religious heart of India." After they get there, they'll have to go to a Tonga Stand, whatever that is, to find their next clue. Gary and Mallory grab a cab to the airport, very happy to be "leaving in first place for the first time ever," I guess not counting the Pit Keep Going in Australia at the end of the first leg. Mallory interviews they want to be the first parent-child team to win, and thinks they have what it takes. Well, there are two fewer parent-child teams for them to compete against than there were at the beginning. And the episode is just starting.
The Cowboys are leaving at 1:52 PM. "Peace out," Jet says, like he's a secret hippie. While we watch them taxi to the airport, Jet interviews that their plan is to minimize mistakes. Minimize in this context could either mean making as few as possible, or not making a big deal of them when they occur. They're certainly good at one of those.
You'll recall (or maybe not, it was two weeks ago) that the second- through fifth-place teams all arrived more or less simultaneously at the end of the last leg, so now they're leaving a minute apart. Ron and Christina, the other parent-child team still in this race, leave at 1:53, and Zev and Justin take off at 1:54. "Sounds like more India," Justin remarks of Varanasi. Zev isn't pleased to hear it, describing India as "a little too much for me" in an interview and saying he's ready to leave. "But I'm racing for a million dollars and that's the main goal, so I'll just have to suck it up." Good on Zev; more racers' complaints should end with some variant on that theme. He declares Kolkata "Kol-crowded." Is it a symptom of Asperger's to use bad humor as a coping mechanism in stressful situations? Because if so I might be on the spectrum.