Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Back to School
By M. Giant | Season 17 | Episode 3 | Aired on 10.10.2010
Brook and Claire's cab is out in the country now, and a herd of cattle (or "very large beasts," as Brook calls them) crosses the road. Jonathan and Connor, who have caught up with them (having passed Katie/Rachel and Chad/Stephanie while all their camera guys were changing their batteries, I guess), encourage Samson to pass them, and Samson blows right by. "That just made my heart drop," Claire tells Brook. "That's music to our ears," Jonathan tells Samson. Shut up, Jonathan. You're about to be music to Samson's foot. Which may not make sense. Let's move on.
Kat finishes the Road Block, and suggests on their way out, "Let's get a good cab this time." Solid plan, that. Will they be conducting interviews?
Jonathan and Connor are the first to find the "supply depot," which is basically rows of wheelbarrows, tools, and building supplies laid out waiting for them to pick them up. It's a "Route Info," which is a category I usually ignore because there's not a verb in there. Phil explains, "Teams must choose a pair of wheelbarrows and load them with construction supplies." That done, they'll take them to the nearby Asebi D/A Primary School and deliver them to the foreman (you can tell he's a foreman because he pretty much stands there the whole time), who will give them their next clue if they do it right. Jonathan and Connor load up their wheelbarrows with a bag of concrete mix, two big cinder blocks, two shovels, two brooms, two trowels, and two scrapers, and off they go. After we take a moment to check in with Brook and Claire (who are still in their cab, frustrated with their slow progress), Jonathan and Connor struggle up the baking, potholed road to the school, and get their clue in first place. "Time for a pop quiz," it reads. Does that mean pop music or that one of them is going to get popped on the head? And do we have a vote?
Over shots of mountains, savannahs, deserts, and lions, Phil informs us, "Covering more than eleven million square miles, Africa is the second largest continent on Earth." Wow, Phil's normally a little more specific than that. Suddenly he's standing at the front of an outdoor classroom next to a map of the continent, telling us, "In a place this big, our team's greatest challenge could be figuring our exactly where they are." Which wouldn't be news, but let's keep going. He claims this will be an African geography quiz, and if they get it right, the class monitor will give them their next clue.
Approaching the school, Jonathan and Connor see a table covered with African country names and the unlabeled outline map ahead as they take seats and realize, "Oh, geography's tough." Now, I'm the first to admit that I didn't know exactly where Ghana was off the top of my head -- or plenty of other countries on other continents, for that matter -- but I flatter myself that if I had a six-hour flight from London in which to investigate it, I might have taken a peek at my in-flight magazine or something. Anyway, with Jonathan and Connor having joined the class for this exercise, a student correctly places the Ethiopia label, and Connor raises his hand when the teacher asks for a volunteer to show them Ghana. Connor goes up to the board and confidently places the tag on...Nigeria. "No, no, no," the kids chorus, and the singers make excuses in an interview about how African geography wasn't their major. Turns out Ghana is also not Cameroon or Côte D'Ivoire, or Cameroon again. And yes, I wrote this paragraph with Google Maps set to Africa in the background. Shut up.