Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | 6 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT Not-So-Great Scots
By M. Giant | Season 22 | Episode 10 | Aired on 04.28.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Even though this leg takes place in Scotland, it's won and lost in the Berlin airport. That's where the alliance of Joey & Meghan and Mona & Beth get tickets on a flight that arrives in Edinburgh at 1:00 PM, thinking none of the other teams will land until 4:00. What they don't know is that Bates & Anthony and Caroline & Jennifer have no interest in accepting a three-hour lag, so they find seats on a 10:40 flight instead -- the same flight Max & Katie booked seats on even before they got to the airport. And with a Double U-Turn in play, this division of alliances is going to prove significant.
Upon landing in Edinburgh, the three lead teams drive to Gosford House, a stately old manor where a Roadblock requires them to march while playing one continuous note on the bagpipes. Max and Bates kilt up and do pretty well, but Caroline's mouth rebels and it takes her seven tries, causing her and Jennifer to fall behind. The hockey brothers and Team Newlywed proceed to the remains of an abandoned castle where they find clues hidden in the chimneys of its many fireplaces.
From there, it's off to Dunnington Village, where a Detour allows them to either roll eight large barrels of whiskey uphill to a festival, or make and taste some haggis. Bates & Anthony are the first and only team to voluntarily choose the whiskey task, whereupon they finish the Detour first, U-Turn Joey & Meghan per the plan, and head to the Pit Stop. Max & Katie enjoy their haggis, U-Turn Mona & Beth (also per the plan), and make it to the Pit Stop before the brothers, who got a little lost along the way and come in second. The country singers end up happy to be in third.
Meanwhile, the last two teams, who spent the whole flight over the North Sea thinking they were in the lead, get a rude awakening at the Edinburgh airport when they find only two cars left. Knowing that one of them is now doomed, they scramble through the rest of the leg with the derby moms in fourth place most of the time. Mona finishes the bagpipe task well before Meghan, but the Speed Bump that requires her and Beth to perform a bowling task means the two teams end up pretty much neck-and-neck through to the Detour. However, the derby moms prove much faster at not only making haggis, but at transporting whiskey barrels, once they discover they've both been U-Turned. The only cause for suspense is when Mona & Beth run into more navigational troubles of the kind they encountered back in Berlin, but even that isn't enough to allow Joey & Meghan to catch up. We have the two-hour finale next week, and Team YouTube won't be in it.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!"Berlin is the capital city of Germany," Phil newsflashes. He adds, "Much of the city had to be rebuilt after World War II, including Kurfürstendamm." Okay, I'll say it before anyone else does: gesundheit. Phil is standing on Berlin's Fifth Avenue at night as though he never left since the end of the previous leg, saying it's now the start of the tenth leg in a race around the world. We get to see Max & Katie dorkily celebrating the new cars they won at the end of the last leg, and then they rip their clue to start this leg at 2:02 AM. It tells them, "Fly to the city of Edinburgh, Scotland." Cool, someplace I've been to! That hardly ever happens. Phil says they'll fly across the North Sea to Edinburgh (the capital of Scotland), hop into Ford Fiestas like so many American Idol finalists, and drive out to the countryside to find Gosford House and their next clue. Gosford House is not to be confused with Gosford Park, which of course is to Downton Abbey what The American President is to The West Wing. Katie also reads, "Caution, U-Turn ahead," and as they leave the mat she wonders if the airport is even open. Berlin certainly does seem like a sleepy little one-horse town that way. So they decide to go into the business center of the nearest hotel and Katie gets on the Internet as they VO about the importance of the next two legs and how optimistic they are. Which, by the normal rules of race editing, means they're doomed.
Joey & Meghan open their first clue in a distant second, at 2:49 AM. They're pretty motivated not to get U-Turned again, and are hoping to grab an early lead. Well, there's a first time for everything.
Caroline & Jennifer are even further behind, starting out in third place at 3:44 AM. They get in a cab for the airport, where they each joke about how the other one will U-Turn their race boyfriends, Bates & Anthony. Yes, I am sure they're joking.
Joey & Meghan get to the airport and are unable to find any open ticket counters this early in the morning, just as Katie speculated. So I stand corrected. Worse, the overhead schedule boards are saying that the earliest flight into Edinburgh will get them there at 1:00 PM. The country singers make the same two discoveries when they arrive at the Lufthansa counter, which apparently opens at 5:00 AM. Meanwhile, back at the hotel business center, it looks like Katie has successfully used her Internet-fu to find tickets for her and Max on a flight that gets to Edinburgh at 10:40 AM. If true, that's going to make them tough to catch. They print off their passes and get into a taxi to the airport. "Everybody knows you go to a business center to get all the information you can," Max declares complacently in the cab, even though everybody clearly doesn't.