Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The one with all the eating
By Miss Alli | Season 7 | Episode 3 | Aired on 03.14.2005
As morning comes, Rob and Amber are driving along a winding, zig-zaggy path up into the Andes, and Amber comments for the camera that there's apparently a Yield coming up, and she has the strange sense that there are some other teams who don't like them too much. Not without cause, of course. As if to prove their point, Lynn says in his car that "everybody said the first chance they get, that they were going to Yield Amber and Rob. So let's see if people have huevos around here." Okay, it really doesn't take "huevos" to Yield a team that's practically at the front of the pack this early in the leg -- it takes stupidity. Had Lynn and Alex beaten Rob and Amber to the Yield here and used it, that would not have been brave -- it would have been stupid, as it would have had no conceivable benefit in terms of keeping them in the race or getting anyone else out of the race. They would have been better off, strategically, using it on anyone else in the leg, but they want to use it on Rob, out of spite. And using it for spite on a team in a situation where you're not imperiled is just plain foolish, and this very exchange goes to show that for all the proud crowing they do in this episode, Lynn at least is being totally undone by Rob's screwing around. He's so focused on how badly he wants to do something to get back at Rob that he's got his eye off the ball, game-wise, because he is well-prepared to do a stupid thing just to try to prove a point -- to actually put himself at a disadvantage in the game because he can't remain above the fray when Rob starts winking and screwing around. If you're going to be above a guy's game, you kind of have to start by not letting it work on you in exactly the way he intends.
Anyway, the teams continue up the hill, and a panting Meredith complains about the elevation. "Easy, Meredith!" Gretchen rather unkindly snaps from the back seat. "I'm getting sick!" She certainly does have a streak of the grump in her. She advises him to "take [his] time." "I've got to watch the roads," he says. "And contend with me," she adds, as if it's funny, when it isn't. In that way, you know, that people do that. She laughs.
Rob and Amber hit the Argentina border, followed by Lynn and Alex, Meredith and Gretchen, blah blah blah, big giant wad o' teams.
Patrick and Susan, rather shockingly, are still stuck in Santiago, and it's now light outside. Patrick notes that it's 6:49 AM, so they've been wandering around downtown Santiago for almost two hours. Just...wow. You can't take two hours to find the highway if you want to stay in the game. You just can't. "We need to figure out how to get out of town," Susan says. Man, I'll say. "I just hate not seeing an end in sight," Patrick adds. I have to say, I feel their pain, because I tend to drive around endlessly when I don't know where I'm going, which is fairly often, because I have about as much natural sense of direction as a Roomba, and about the same tendency to just drive straight until I run out of room and then turn largely at random. But there has to be more than one gas station in Santiago where they give directions, doesn't there?