Episode Report Card M. Giant: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Cultural Ignorant Americans Make Little Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
By M. Giant | Season 13 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.16.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The five remaining teams head to Almaty, Kazakhstan via three separate flights, but an enforced full bunch up outside the gates of a chicken factory puts the laggers (Dan and Andrew, obviously) back in the game. While Andrew, Toni, and Tina rummage through live chickens for golden eggs, Nick|Starr and Terence|Sarah race each other to a sheep-ass-eating Fast Forward. Which is going to be tough for Terence, since he's a vegetarian. Maybe he shouldn't have insisted on going for it, then. He ends up bailing, allowing Nick and Starr to zoom ahead to their fifth win.
Meanwhile, the other three teams face a Detour where they have to either busk for tips or wander the streets in a cow costume (everyone chooses the latter). And Ken and Tina seem to have taken over Kelly and Christy's role as designated non-clue readers, which allows Toni and Dallas to pull ahead and come in second again, while the separated couple land firmly in the middle of the pack. The Frat Boys get lost, abandon their shoes, fall to sniping at each other about how fast they should walk, and take an illegal cab ride that they have to return and then walk back to the Pit Stop from. But they still check in ahead of Terence and Sarah, who wind up getting Philiminated. How are the Frat Boys lasting this long? I've never seen a team circle the drain so many times without its orbit decaying.
See how we rank this season's competitors. Come back on Friday for our full detailed recap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Hey, remember Delhi? Phil does. "Founded more than 2200 years ago," he informs us, "it is now one of the most populated cities in the world." We're at Pit Stop number seven, Humayun's Tomb. Phil asks us, "Having claimed four first place finishes, can anyone stop Nick and Starr?" Can anyone edit that line? The object and the subject are all janked up. Anyway, because Nick and Starr arrived at the Pit Stop at 10:14 a.m., they're leaving the Pit Stop twelve hours later, at 10:14 p.m. I'd just like to pause and recall that Nick and Starr began their leg at 8:55 the previous morning, which means they finished the entire thing in under an hour and twenty minutes. I've had showers that took longer than that. But two legs will do it for India this season, so now the teams will all have to fly one thousand miles to Almaty, Kazakhstan. After they land, they'll take taxis to a certain chicken factory to find their next clue. And they're getting $403 for this leg, so that doesn't sound like a very short taxi ride. Nick interviews that every week he gets more pessimistic at the start of a leg: "I just keep waiting for our luck to run out [or] some other team to zoom in front of us and blow us out of the water." But for now, they're off to the hotel to do some computer research.
Toni and Dallas are leaving ten minutes behind them, at 10:24. As they walk to the hotel, Dallas admits, "The only thing I know about Kazakhstan is Borat." "And we're not going to mention that to anybody," Toni says firmly. In an interview, she says that they've been "under the radar," which she sees as an advantage. Yet as they arrive at the hotel business center, Starr's radar goes off quite visibly. While uniformed concierges help Toni and Nick search for flights, their partners sit behind them flirting, to the accompaniment of romantic piano music. Starr asks Dallas if he's shy, and he denies it. "You didn't make any eye contact with me in L.A., though. I tried so hard!" Starr points out. "I was on the race," Dallas explains. That's a better answer than saying he was staring at the Southern Belles instead. Toni breaks up the little party by reporting what she's found: a Lufthansa flight that transfers in Frankfurt -- that's Frankfurt, Germany, several time zones ahead of where they're going -- and lands back in Kazakhstan at 11:50 p.m., presumably the following evening. They can reserve their seats from here at the hotel, but they need to go to the airport to actually buy the tickets. So that's where they're off to, in their separate cabs. Dallas remarks that he wants to help Starr, but he also wants to win a million dollars. "If I win a million at least I'll be able to pay for dinner." Good point. Tell her that and maybe she'll convince Nick to hang back.