Episode Report Card Miss Alli: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Head wounds and foot races
By Miss Alli | Season 7 | Episode 5 | Aired on 03.28.2005
Lynn and Alex come up on this scene, and they pull over and hop out. They go over and ask how things are, and the boys fret over how bad they feel, and Lynn and Alex are like, "It's okay, it's okay." Brian immediately starts telling them to leave, and that he doesn't expect them to hang around. And then the Decision That Launched A Billion Forum Posts occurs, because wouldn't you know it, Rob and Amber come upon this scene. "Oh, car flipped over," Rob notes as he drives by. Emphasis on "drives by." Of course, if you can believe that what we're seeing is what he sees, there are solidly six or seven people standing around by the time he gets there, who are clearly not doing anything. And nobody is waving to them, and nobody is flagging them down, and nobody is paying any attention to them. "This is a competition, but we don't want anybody to get hurt," he notes. "That's not fun for anybody." Back at the crash scene, Alex and Lynn and Brian and Greg are all standing around gossiping, and Lynn says, "That was Rob and Amber, wasn't it!" They all nod. "That's just so typical of their game," Lynn spits. In the car, Rob comments, "There's no way we're stopping. It's still a competition, let's not get crazy." And then he turns, I suspect to the camera guy who just asked him whether he thought they should have stopped, and gives a nervous smile that I suspect accompanies an attempt to see if the camera guy is giving him the stink-eye. It's just a guess, but that's what I diagnose.
Should they have stopped? Yes, probably, out of politeness. It's definitely the nice thing to do to slow down long enough to say, "Everybody okay?" But the odds that there was anything they could do were, in my opinion, essentially zero, and they undoubtedly knew it. They've done this before -- they know about the machinery of safety people and emergency personnel and the rest of the huge entourage that accompanies something like this, and they could see a bunch of people meandering around by the time they went by. Moreover, if anybody had been in a bad way and emergency help had been needed, there wouldn't have been six people standing around while cars were driving by -- somebody would have been waving at them or something. I genuinely don't think what they did put anyone at risk, or could have put anyone at risk. But should they have pulled over, taken the window down, and been like, "Everybody okay?" Yes, they should. It's the better thing to do. After all, what are the odds that the game will come down to the thirty seconds you might lose doing that? Wait, don't answer that yet.
Up at the next clue box, Ron and Kelly pluck a Detour clue calling for a choice between Food and Water. In Food, you use a traditional container and two sticks to grind corn. Some local ladies will be checking the corn to make sure you have it ground properly, and once you have enough to fill a basket up to a line, you'll be done. In Water, you use straws to suck up water from a spring, and then you fill up 12 ostrich eggs and bury them (for storage) to get their next clue. ["I can't tell you how relieved I was that this did not involve a choice between eating seventy ears of corn or drinking two gallons of water." -- Sars] Ron and Kelly choose food and start on pounding some corn. "Pour it in there, and then we've got to beat the crap out of it," Ron notes, giving a not-unreasonable description of the task. They pound. Or, if you will, "beat the crap out of it."
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