Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The program gets a little buggy
By Miss Alli | Season 4 | Episode 12 | Aired on 08.13.2003
At the Woolshed, as the clock ticks from 5:59 AM to 6:00 AM, the gate opens and the teams run in, Pantheon-style, in the order in which they arrived -- Who, Jon and Kelly, and the Chipsters. Some scenic and contractually-required kangaroos hop in the foreground as the teams scamper across the grass and then onto a paved path. When they hit the pavement, they take off running. We cut to the big shed, where there are three huge stalls, all piled many feet high with wool. David and Jeff don gloves and are the first to plunge in. Kelly wants her gloves, too, but Jon tells her to forget it and start digging. "This is a lot of wool," Kelly observes, demonstrating that she is no dummy when it comes to identifying natural fibers. In no time, the teams are making quite a mess here, because they're dragging the wool out of the stalls in order to go through it, and basically they're each forming a new big pile of the stuff they've already sorted through outside the stall on the ground. "It's warm and sticky," Jon says of the wool as he's knee-deep in it, "and it smells like..." "Ass," Kelly finishes. David remarks that they expected the clue to be easy to find, but it wasn't. Where would they get the idea that they'd find it easily? From their previous successes? Yeah. Congratulations on the groundbreaking investigations, Geraldo. A crop of sheep wanders up, intrigued by the piles of wool lying outside the stalls. I sort of half-expected one of them to nudge a particular hunk of wool and go, "I'm fre-e-e-eezing! Can I have this ba-a-a-a-ack?" Furthermore, apparently part of the challenge here is playing a game called Hit Your Camera Guy With Sticky Wool That Smells Like Ass, because there are about six shots of wool wads flying directly at the camera. Teams continue flinging wool at everything in sight, and the first person to locate a clue is Jon. "Here it is, here it is," he says. They bolt the stall and stand a bit away to tear away a bunch of wool that's seemingly stuck very stubbornly to the clue envelope. Jeff spares a moment to look at Kelly and Jon a little wistfully as they run off. He wants a clue, too!
The clue tells the teams to fly to Cairns, where they'll choose a marked car outside the terminal. When they get the car, they'll drive themselves to the Wild World Zoo. Goodness, there certainly have been a lot of goofball animal tasks involved in these last couple of legs. I swear, if we see the Crocodile Hunter, I quit. Kelly and Jon get in their car and go, and Jon comments that there's nothing that feels better than being out in the lead, ahead of "the two boy teams." I swear, he's more preoccupied with Kelly's only-girl-ness than she is, even. I would be a lot more comfortable with these remarks if I didn't have the feeling that Jon wanted to win with Kelly in part so that he could have a t-shirt made that said, "I Won A Million Dollars...And I Did It Dragging My Wife!"