Episode Report Card Miss Alli: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Weeping and whaling
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.12.2002
Firecop and the twins head off on their bikes. It's hard to tell who's in the lead, but they go off trying to follow the arrows so they don't get lost in all the sand they're kicking up.
Ken and Gerard, meanwhile, begin to dig in the sand. It appears that they've been assigned a square of sand to dig in, a few feet on each side, marked off with strings like a section of a garden. They hunt for the clue. "Here's something," Ken says. "What is it?" Gerard asks. "A beautiful rock," Ken says, putting it aside. Hee.
Unsurprisingly, without Gerard to read the map, both Firecop and the twins wind up going the wrong direction on the marked course, so they decide to work together to try to see if they can find where they're supposed to be.
Ken and Gerard, still digging. Gerard adopts a canine stance, digging by throwing dirt through his legs with his hands. Heh. "Go, Fido, go!" Ken yells helpfully. Yeah, they are having no luck with the digging. To their credit, one of them mentions that it's like "looking for a needle in a haystack," without managing to throw in the word "literally," as most people do these days when they use hackneyed similes. They decide that the digging sucks, and they bail in favor of the bikes. As you know by now, I am normally extremely opposed to switching Detour options in the middle of the task, but this one was a little less troubling because the two Detours were right together, so they lost almost no time actually going from one to the other. This is very different from, say, the Thunk decision to leave the mine and drive to the golf last season. The Bald Snark cuts its losses and scoots, leaving the clue at rest wherever it is in the sand.
Back on the bikes, Derek and Drew and Andre and Damon locate the clue. They do the rubbing. (Yes, yes, it's all very suggestive. Settle down.) Several wild and wacky shots of the clue rock then lead us to a sequence in which Phil explains that the teams will first have to have the clue translated, because it's primarily in Arabic. And this is after they finish the rubbing. Yay, clues that require at least minimal effort to solve! At any rate, the clue will lead them back into Marrakech to the roof of the Café Glacier, which won't be open until 4:45 PM. Firecop and the twins grab the clue and get going, just as Ken and Gerard start out on the bikes (or so it appears, though I'm not sure I believe it). Andre and Damon don't know what to do about the fact that they don't know where the café is and they don't know how to read the Arabic, so Andre says in an interview that they just decided to follow Derek and Drew. Sigh. This is getting very tiresome, the constant following. Anyway, the twins take off with Firecop in tow, believing that Ken and Gerard are out in front of them. Ken and Gerard, however, are shown just now getting the rubbing of the clue.
In town, Firecop and the twins have the clue translated, and they head for the café.