Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Two Men, a Bad Plan, A Canal, Panama
By M. Giant | Season 19 | Episode 11 | Aired on 12.04.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The race is really in no hurry at all to get out of Belgium, is it? In addition to their clues at the start of the leg, racers are given wacky costumes and are expected to dress up as characters from Tintin and wander around the streets of Brussels in the wee hours of the morning, trying to find a Tintin-looking dude and figure out who they're supposed to be. After completing this bit of cross-marketing (which the snowboarders do more slowly than anyone else), they finally get out of the country.
Everyone hops the same train to Amsterdam and flies thence to Panama City, Panama. A long taxi ride later, they find their way to longboats that carry them to a village under cover of darkness. Once they arrive, they sign up to get tattoos painted on their arms at specific times early the next morning, twenty minutes apart. The tattoos turn out to be clues sending them back to San Francisco Bay Towers in Panama City. So it's back to town, with the snowboarders in the lead as usual. The towers are the setting for a "tightrope-walking" Roadblock 35 stories up. Andy does well and Sandy faces her fear of heights, both with the help of ample harnesses and safety cables.
From there, they have to get to a certain statue, which most of the teams' cabdrivers collaborate on finding. For the Detour, they have to either distribute seafood among vendors at a fish market or go make sandals out of leather and straps. Cindy and Amani also handle the Roadblock well, and everyone save Amani and Marcus chooses the shoemaking Detour option. Team NFL ends up there anyway, much to their chagrin, especially given that they're already in last place. Yet they insist on going to the other one anyway and carrying large amounts of raw seafood by hand.
Andy and Tommy are still in the lead after the Detour, and their next clue sends them to Cathedral Square. There, dancing women are wearing elaborately decorated dresses, one of which has the words "Panama Viejo" printed on the skirt and a picture of the aforementioned site on their medallions, not that the racers know this. Andy and Tommy misread the clue and try to go to "Balboa," and wind up at the canal before being sent to the statue of Balboa, neither of which is in sight of the Pit Stop.
Meanwhile the other three teams find themselves stumped by the dancers. Jeremy and Sandy are the first to head out to the right place, based mainly on Jeremy's drawing of the building from the costume medallion. And then their driver also calls the other two teams' cabbies to tell them where to go. Andy and Tommy return to take a second crack at it, while the other three teams race to the Pit Stop: Jeremy and Sandy win their first leg ever, followed by Ernie and Cindy, and Amani and Marcus. They're all really happy to be in the final three together. And Andy and Tommy's sixth win was their last, as they get Philiminated. That's got to hurt.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Phil tells us, "Belgium has hosted the World's Fair ten times." Which makes me think that Belgium is pretty much the only country still keeping it afloat, like the one still-childless couple in a big group of friends who are so desperate to maintain the annual Oscar party tradition that they have it at their house every year now. Sad, really. Phil's standing under the Atomium, a giant model of an iron atom that failed to melt after the shindig like a proper ice sculpture of an Academy Award statuette, and now it's here to serve as the start of the eleventh leg. It was also the overnight digs for the teams, who bedded down in large spherical shells somewhere inside the structure while Andy and Tommy, who won the last leg, got online and customized the Mustangs they won at the end of the last leg. They're going to miss that sleep tomorrow, I'm thinking.
Worse yet, it's barely even tomorrow at all, as they start their leg at 3:46 AM. For some reason, Andy's holding the clue envelope while Tommy holds a big cardboard box. When Andy opens the former, it tells them to put on the contents of the latter: the costumes of "two favorite comic strip characters." Uh, whose favorite?
Cue shots of public art all over Brussels depicting the inexplicably popular Belgian comic character Tintin, which Phil says has sold more than 350 million books and been published in 80 languages. And I'm sure it's a total coincidence that there's a Tintin movie coming out soon. Anyway, the costumes are for a pair of detectives who look like a cross between the Men in Black and Hercule Poirot. In the books, these characters are apparently known by one of three names: Dupont & Dupond, Jonson & Johnson, or Thomson & Thompson. What, the author couldn't make up his mind? He got sued and lost the rights -- twice? I'd look into it, but if Tintin were really as popular as Phil seems to think he is, I'd already know these things.
Anyway, after figuring out who they're supposed to be, the racers then have to find an outdoor, multi-story Tintin mural, in front of which a guy in a Tintin costume (complete with a sandy, towering forelock) is holding a dog (given the books' apparent affinity for repetitive names, it's probably named something like Pup-Pup). He'll hand the racers their next clue in exchange for hearing what they've learned. As the snowboarders hurry into their suits, hats, bowlers and false mustaches (Andy's has been thoughtfully equipped with a strap that goes around his head so he doesn't have to glue it to his real mustache), they interview that they just have one leg left to make it to the finals. In a cab into town, they puzzle over the clue they've been given, which is simply a photo of the Tintin guy in front of the Tintin mural. "Sweet hair," Tommy points out. "Three o'clock in the morning and we gotta solve a riddle," Andy says. "Comics were never my specialty." They hop out of their cab downtown, looking jaunty enough with their canes and bowlers, but their only resources for solving the riddle is the kind of people who are out on the streets of Brussels at four in the morning, which does not appear to be a demographic that overlaps a great deal with Tintin fans. Some guy thinks they're dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, so they figure they'd better write that down. Uh-oh.