Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Big Mozambique
By Miss Alli | Season 11 | Episode 5 | Aired on 03.17.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.After hunting in the snow for beacons using technology that flummoxes Oswald and Danny to a surprising degree, the teams head to Mozambique. The Roadblock requires them to commune with land-mine-sniffing rats, and if you don't believe that's for real, you underestimateâ¦well, the usefulness of Mozambique's rat population, I suppose. Everyone winds up bunched a few times, and in reality, your finish in the leg comes down to which Detour you pick. It's the second week in a row where choosing the wrong Detour seals your fate in terms of front-of-the-pack and back-of-the-pack, because it turns out that they asked teams to earn such a small amount of money for street manicures that they could have picked up that much in coins out of the gutter before the punishing coal task was completed. Mirna and Charla pick the manicures right away, and they take first place in what's clearly the only way they were going to. The BQs are a bit behind, but they come in second, and they're followed by Teri and Ian, who come in third despite having screwed up, gotten lost, and stumbled on the manicure task while looking for the other one. That's sort of how you can tell it's tilted. Anyway, the rest of the teams head for the pit stop covered with coal dust, and Oswald loudly threatens that he's going to hug Phil. Phil actually runs from the mat, leading to a most delightful chase scene in what's usually not a chase-scene kind of show. Finally, Oswald settles down, and they get checked in. Then Guido and Eric and Pink battle it out for what they believe to be last place, and Guido emerges victorious by outrunning Danielle, whom Eric will now torture forever based on, he says, the fact that she lost to "queens." This really happened. Uchenna and Joyce come in last, but they are not eliminated. They are "marked" next week, so tune in to see whether God decides to give them more miracles. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on This Isn't What He Meant By "Not Peaking": Rob and Amber had won three consecutive legs, but a combination of a little bad decision-making, a very lopsided Detour, and the difficulty of concentrating on a needle/haystack task when things are going badly combined to send them home. In other news, Mirna continued her quest to be a part of the most abstractly moral team in history, Uchenna disapproved of Amber's not being as good a person as he was, and Teri and Ian liked each other all of a sudden. The internet struggled to rally after Rob and Amber's elimination, trying to remember what else it used to talk about.
Credits. Dustin and Kandice go skating, just like you and me! I feel like a beauty queen!
Commercials. I sometimes think I'm not fully appreciating yogurt, based on how much the women in the commercials seem to be enjoying it. You just open it and eat it, right? I mean, that's the whole thing? I'm not leaving something out?
Ushuaia, Argentina. "Last stop before Antarctica," Phil explains. Well, I think the bathroom would be a smart actual last stop before Antarctica. Just so you don't have to befoul the ice floes right away. Anyway, we're here, at the overlook that is referred to as "the end of the world" in general, and certainly was the end of the world for Rob and Amber and those who love them and now have to wait another 39.8 seconds to see them on TV again. Phil wonders how the frontrunners' departure will affect everyone else. ("But enough about Rob and Amber! How are you affected by Rob and Amber!") Ian says the ouster was "a shocker," Joyce says she was relieved (probably because it's taxing to be around bad people), and Mirna, of course, interprets the other teams' relief that the better team was eliminated as an endorsement of her as a human being and a competitor. She somehow concludes that she and Charla had a greater role in beating Rob and Amber than everyone else did, which is fairly ridiculous, considering that everyone else also beat Rob and Amber to the pit stop, as all teams had to do for Rob and Amber to be eliminated, and she and Charla beat them by the least. Why would you get the most credit for being the team that barely beat them, rather than one of the teams that handily beat them? Well, you wouldn't, unless you are Mirna and you are talking about yourself and very nearly puckering up and kissing your own ass.
12:02 AM. Danny and Oswald. The clue tells them to take a taxi to a chain of mountains, where they'll go to a glacier and use an avalanche beacon to search the glacier for another beacon. The beacon depends on some of that crazy navigating technology, so I know I would immediately be in the weeds. I need things simple, you know? The best rental car I ever had was one of the ones that tells you whether you're headed north or south or whatever. (Yes, I know what the other two are, smart-ass.) Getting to the glacier will involve a chair lift and a half-mile hike once the teams get to the taxi stop. Oswald interviews that he and Danny respect all the teams in the race, because the race isn't designed to be won by a team with any one particular strength (like smarts or strength), but is open to any of these teams, all of whom are "contenders." At this point, I don't think any of them are laughably not contenders, in the sense that all teams have at least some apparent merit and/or proven history, with the exception of Charla and Mirna, whom I am smart enough not to count out because of the universe's taste for irony.