Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Over Before It Even Staah-ted
By Miss Alli | Season 11 | Episode 4 | Aired on 03.10.2007
Navigating teams take off. As Rob and Amber look at a map of Magellan's voyage, she thinks they're supposed to start with Guam, which is at the far east of the map, but Rob knows that Magellan started and ended in Seville. I have no idea why Rob knows this, but I suspect that there's a dirty song about Magellan, yellin', Seville, and thrill. It's just a guess. Uchenna and Joyce, however, conclude that the first city is indeed Guam. Wrong! They don't know the melody.
The navigating teams tear through their Detour. They find the sailor, they walk south. This is the easiest thing I've ever seen.
The BQs read the instructions. Rob spells "Philippines" with two Ls, so that's a problem. That's a pretty understandable problem compared to the fact that he also throws an "e" in there, and the word kind of comes out looking like it's a type of legume.
The Big Kahunas follow their compass. Eric and Danielle find the Nautilus Building, making that, as stated above, just about the easiest Detour of all time. It seems like they kind of half-assed the navigating, because it seemed way too easy. The clue they receive from the guy at the building tells them to make their way to a nearby airport, where they'll sign up for one of two charter flights that leave three hours apart, which will take them to Ushuaia, Argentina. Hey, at least we're out of Chile, finally. When they land, they'll go to Playa Larga. Oswald and Danny finish the Detour right after Eric and Pink, so both of these teams are on their way. In the car, Pink says that they're on the way to the airport to get a charter plane to "Australia." Eric corrects her that it's Argentina, not Australia, then wryly adds, "We'll get a charter to Australia. We'll have to stop for gas 8000 times." She's so dumb that it's not that funny, except...okay, it's pretty funny. The thought of a charter plane going fifteen minutes at a time...yeah, it's funny.
Rob and Amber pick up their sign and show it to the judge, and...I have to say, I don't know if the clue said spelling counted, but this would seem to cast doubt on their claim that the clue said the arrows had to face the right direction. Because all their arrows point the same way, and logically, if it's a trip around the world, the ports of call wouldn't all be in one direction. (Except in the sense that the earth is round, which is kind of not the point of the sign with the arrows in the first place.) But the sign says "Phillipeans," in any event, so that's that, and it doesn't matter. There's a disembodied voice of Rob that says "it better not be a spelling thing," but there's no indication of the context, so I'm a little wary of putting too much faith in that clue. You might well wonder aloud if it could possibly be spelling, even if you weren't told spelling counted. In fact, that kind of makes the most sense to me, that they weren't told it was spelling, and this question was a form of, "You don't think spelling would be a problem, right?" I think they assume the task is putting the right cities on the signs in order, not spelling the cities correctly, necessarily.