Season Four, Episode Nine: "We're Not At Charm School..."
A.K.A. Millie's Heart Of Darkness
Millie and Chuck, promoted more for their clichéd, ho-hum characteristic ("Virgins") than for their truly weird one ("Dating 12 Years And Kind Of Still Thinking About It"), were a gender reversal of the typical type-A couple, in that Chuck was mellow and not particularly cutthroat, while Millie would open your chest and remove your heart with a knitting needle while insisting that she was a nice person. Her freakish devotion to victory manifested, in part, in a habit of spending her pit-stop time eschewing sleep (and apparently showers) to study maps and guidebooks. As you can imagine, this led Millie deeper and deeper into exhaustion, ill temper, and -- yes, we'll say it -- filth.
In Malaysia, with five teams left, having skipped all sleep for two consecutive nights, Millie and Chuck ran into the one thing they couldn't afford: a leg that didn't start with a long plane flight they could sleep through. What's more, the leg forced them to do all their own driving and navigating, rather than allowing any reliance on cabs or trains. They got lost during a 145-mile trek to a coconut palm plantation, and then they got even more lost when they left, so Millie and Chuck were clearly doomed.
Meanwhile! Millie and Chuck's mortal ultra-enemies -- the Sharks to their Jets, the Simpsons to their Cosby Show, the "tastes great" to their "less filling" -- were the snotty, self-involved, sometimes spitefully entertaining Kelly and Jon. And on this leg, Kelly and Jon made a series of early mistakes themselves, leading to a quite reasonable decision to go for the Fast Forward. Except! Studly (then-)couple Chip and Reichen accidentally stumbled across the Fast Forward before Kelly and Jon could get to it, so, having wasted the entire trip to the Fast Forward, Kelly and Jon were...clearly doomed.
What happens when two teams are clearly doomed? In most cases, one of them is stunned to arrive at the pit stop and learn that they aren't last. In this case, however, a producer's wet dream came true, and though they'd followed very different paths to get there, Millie and Chuck and Kelly and Jon managed to run smack into each other at the last task of the leg, a Roadblock featuring a wild ladder-climb inside a cave. The tension was close to unbearable, complete with Millie madly sucking her inhaler as Chuck and Jon did the climbing. The teams wound up bumper-to-bumper driving to the pit stop, where Kelly and Jon grabbed just enough of a lead that they got to the mat before a dirty, used-up, utterly miserable Millie and Chuck, who were eliminated.
Like most truly fabulous episodes, this one seems almost charmed in retrospect: the botanically accurate but nevertheless hilarious word "nutbunches," the hapless Team Who walking right past a clue over and over while post-production relentlessly mocked them with gongs, and ultimately, that sweaty, desperate, animosity-fueled finish. Kelly and Jon later lost in one of the show's dullest finales, and overall, Season Four is widely considered one of the show's weakest. But this episode is practically perfect.
Season Five, Episode Eleven: "It's Okay, Run Them Over!"
A.K.A. Colin Versus The Ox
From the moment you first saw him throw the hook-'em horns, you knew that Colin, self-professed "extreme" bossypants and shrimpola, was something special. He was intense. He wanted you to know he was intense. He was so intense, in fact, that he came very, very close to being the only racer to ever take an unscheduled Detour to a local jail after taunting a local law-enforcement officer and offering to throw down with "the president of [the] whole country."
So when, with four teams remaining, Colin and his beauty-queen partner and girlfriend Christie got out to a big lead heading from New Zealand to the Philippines, they could only gloat and preen and preen and gloat about how well it was all going, and how sure they were that things were going to be just nifty now. Might as well start filling out that million-dollar check. But when they missed their connecting flight in Singapore, Colin began to seethe with frustration, especially since they wound up on the same flight as everyone else. When the entire group fled the Manila airport together, Colin and Christie somehow wound up at the back of the pack, which positioned them to be Yielded by Chip and Kim -- the historic first use of this irritating device, which had been introduced into the race that season.
As Colin sweated and panicked and waited to do the Detour, his brain began to develop a series of tiny short-circuits. By the time he and Christie were able to go forth and complete said Detour, he was in full meltdown. And by the time they arrived at the task...well, the task required the team to steer an ox and plow around a muddy field until the plow plowed up a clue. Unlike all the other teams, who cooperated with one person holding the ox's rope and pulling it from the front while another person followed behind with the plow, Colin and Christie decided that he would do all the work while she stood delicately out of the mud and took him through a psych-tacular tour of all his worst fears: she insulted his manhood, made like a disappointed mom, and basically gave the guy every reason to believe that he was not going to escape without his own girlfriend running his underpants up a flagpole.
As this became clear to Colin, he began to panic. He yelled; the ox didn't respond. He insulted the ox; the ox was unimpressed. Finally, he reached the only conclusion he possibly could: "My ox is broken! This is bullshit!" And in that moment, Colin passed into history, and no matter what else he did, then or ever, he would always be Broken Ox Guy. Did the show know what it had when it saw that footage? Probably. Did the rest of us? Ohhhh, yes.
Season Three, Episode Eleven: "Don't Try To Play The Moralist Now!"
A.K.A. The Wonder Twins Run Out Of Luck
The third season of Race is widely thought of as "the Flo season," so it makes sense that its greatest episode marked the beginning of her spectacular meltdown. This is the leg where she pushed Zach so far during a fateful taxi ride that you could tell he very nearly told her once and for all to go fuck herself, pulling it together only at the last minute to prepare himself to bodily carry her through the rest of the race and across the finish line.
But what makes this episode a standout is not Flo or her extravagant ridiculousness, or even Zach's apparently limitless patience. It isn't the unexpected flashes of personality, like Derek and Drew exchanging Mr. Burns-ian "Eeexcellent!"s, proving that they aren't at all the dull hunks they could have been. It isn't even the affecting scenes of veteran Ian returning to Vietnam for the first time since the war, which alone pack more punch than most shows would give you in a full season. What makes it a standout is the sweet -- ultimately, the bittersweet -- end it brings to the story of the warm and unexpected friendship between hot model twin brothers Derek and Drew and fabulous wiseacre brothers Ken and Gerard, which developed very early in the race and continued until literally the last possible minute.
At the close of the leg, with only four teams still in it, the two pairs of brothers were running in third and fourth place, with one of them likely to be eliminated. In a frantic sequence set at the edge of the Saigon River, Ken and Gerard received a critical tip-off from Flo, which they instantly realized they simply couldn't pass along to the boys, even though the teams had been working together for almost the entire race up to that point. They had to hide, and fool, and sneak, desperate to edge out the team they liked the most. A confused Derek and Drew, successfully misled, wound up going through the always painful routine of trying to check in at the pit stop, only to realize they hadn't completed the leg, and had to take an entire ferry ride across the river to backtrack to the last task. Getting on the ferry, they ran into Ken and Gerard, who were about to finish the leg ahead of them. Without rancor, the teams exchanged greetings, and Gerard prodded the boys -- with a sincerity to which you earn the right only by running an entire race without being a dick -- to run out the leg, because it might be a non-elimination.
Exhausted, Derek and Drew endured the long, almost certainly futile ferry ride back across the river and then back to the finish line, at which point the glimmer of hope of non-elimination was extinguished and they were sent home. But the voice-over in which Ken and Gerard explained, with great warmth and a gratifying lack of bullshit, how difficult it was to abandon an alliance based on true friendship and affection -- something they knew had to happen sometime, and still dreaded -- lent a surprising and poignant grace note to an episode packed full of the opposite. The fact that Flo inadvertently put the hosing to her own putative boyfriend Drew, proving that indeed Flo Ruins Everything, was only the spiteful, petty icing on the warm, gooey cake.
Season Two, Episode Thirteen: "Follow That Plane (II)"
A.K.A. Wil And The Blowtorch
Some episodes are great because of their finishes, some episodes are great because of the personalities they display, and some episodes are great because one single thing in them is so heart-bustingly awesome that you feel like you have to call your friends and talk about it on its anniversary for years to come.
Most of the last hour of the second season was unremarkable. Evenly matched pieces of crap Wil and Tara began the leg having lost a clue they needed desperately, but it all came to nothing when they were able to follow the other teams until they got back on their feet. They then spent the evening grousing at each other around a campfire, during which Tara's giddily spiteful declarations that she'd almost rather not win the race at all just so that Wil wouldn't get any money set the stage for quite a bit of future controversy. Even the ending, a closely contested footrace in which Boston bouncers Chris and Alex passed Wil and Tara -- well, Tara, really -- with about thirty seconds of running to go, wasn't as compelling as you'd think, because...who really cared about any of them?
No, the genius of the episode isn't found in that down-to-the-wire ending. The genius of the episode is found in the Roadblock, in which the chosen team member had to use a hodgepodge of hardware-store tools to retrieve a clue from the middle of a globe of ice probably a foot and a half across. Wil first whacked at the globe with a hammer, making absolutely no progress whatsoever. He then went for a blowtorch, trying to melt it into submission. This also accomplished nothing, although he did manage to set the bag of tools on fire. He picked a power drill and put several very long holes in the globe. Nothing. More hammering. A chisel. Wil got the clue eventually, but for some reason, the sight of his hapless, beleaguered self -- set up early as a bully, but later revealed as also a victim of a partner who was equally bad -- madly assaulting a block of ice with a blowtorch and a drill like a pissed-off cartoon character was the kind of bizarre physical comedy act that transforms the pedestrian into the transcendent. Oh, Wil. How we miss you.
Season Seven, Episode Five: "I've Been Wanting A Face Lift For A Long Time"
A.K.A. Smoked!
Many legendary endings are the result of the patient, slow-burning development of relationships between teams. The battle of Millie/Chuck versus Jon/Kelly; the battle of Charla/Mirna versus Rob/Amber; the battle of Wil/Tara versus Alex/Chris; the battle of Rob/Brennan versus Frank/Margarita versus Guido. These are endings that capitalize on the show's ability to develop team-to-team dynamics in which you invest.
But then there are endings that are about flat-out hauling ass and the unadulterated smoking of some damn fool. Sometimes, a show called The Amazing Race must end with frenzied arm-pumping and hyperventilating as two teams -- ideally, one you love and one you hate -- puff out their chests and their cheeks and try to transport themselves across a given stretch of space before somebody else does. That's what happened at the end of this two-hour episode.
This episode is perhaps most famous for the moment when lovable teddy-bear brothers Brian and Greg, who had endeared themselves to everyone, right up to a scene early in the episode where they effortlessly and joyfully bonded with the kids at a South African children's home, got a little crazy with the driving and rolled their SUV. The crash injured the boys' cameraman, but it's not the rollover that's notorious -- it's the fact that, unlike the other teams, Rob and Amber chose not to slow their car, roll down the window, and ask whether everyone was all right before going ahead. Despite the fact that production swarms around and watches over these SUVs, to the point where a couple of professional reality-show contestants pulling over to offer their help would have been nothing but a formality and Rob and Amber (as professional reality-show contestants) undoubtedly knew it, it's a formality that it would have been both wise and decent to observe, and the failure to observe it earned them an exaggerated, but not surprising, dose of enmity. (That's on top of the enmity Rob had already earned by being lucky, smart, smug, and mouthy, and by genuinely not giving a rat's right ear what anyone thought of him -- a trait that's both a blessing and a curse.)
But the critical fallout from the car rollover, and what makes this episode the stuff of legend, was that the rollover put Brian and Greg in a dead heat with Ray and Deana -- the typical bickering couple, here in the form of an older, burlier, angrier dude and a younger, quieter, constantly berated woman. The teams took different Detour options within sight of each other, with Ray and Deana melting down while desperately trying to pound corn into meal and Brian and Greg playfully but determinedly cooperating to fill eggshells with water and bury them. It was a dead heat as the teams arrived at the pit stop location and leapt from their cars to run for the mat. As a foot race, though, it was over almost before it started, with Ray and Deana instantly and awesomely demolished as Brian and Greg flew by on the way to the mat. Breathlessly, the boys learned that their camera guy would be all right, and finally, Ray and Deana went home. This was an episode to make you leap up from the couch or collapse on the floor, thrilled and sated.
Season One, Episode Thirteen: "End Of The Line, Part II"
A.K.A. The First Ending
When The Amazing Race started, it seemed fairly likely to get thumped, airing against NBC's well-regarded The West Wing and similar in concept to Lost -- not theLostyou know, but theLostyou've totally forgotten, in which people were plunked down in the middle of nowhere and challenged to find their way home. But by the end of the season, Race had established itself as a ratings-challenged but critically praised "reality show for smart people," and it managed to efficiently whittle the teams down until the truly best three teams -- pretty, unobjectionable, gym-hardened L.A. attorneys Rob and Brennan; bickering semi-estranged couple Frank and Margarita, and wonderfully bitchy "evil" couple Joe and Bill -- cruised into the finale.
The episode opened with some snowshoeing and sled-dogging in Alaska, followed by an icy polar-bear dip, and then it was time for the long trek back to New York. Margarita ecstatically explained that she would be on her home turf in Queens, where the clue was sending the teams. Frank and Margarita quite understandably assumed that knowing the city would give them a big advantage, and Rob and Brennan did as well. At Newark Airport, the basically clueless Rob and Brennan jumped into a yellow cab and begged their cabbie to get them to the address as soon as possible. Frank and Margarita, meanwhile, negotiated with a gypsy cab, then bailed on that for a yellow cab, also taking the time to dictate the route to avoid surface streets. Rob and Brennan's driver, on the other hand, took them right through the city. Whether because of the time lost switching cabs or because surface streets don't treat you so badly at 6:00-ish on a Sunday morning when the race was ending, Rob and Brennan made it to the train station with a couple of minutes on Frank and Margarita. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your outlook, those couple of minutes straddled the arrival of the train that Rob and Brennan made and Frank and Margarita didn't.
Of course, Frank and Margarita didn't realize that the know-nothing L.A. boys had beaten them going through the city, so when they didn't see their disliked rivals at the train station, they figured they were well ahead. Margarita, in particular, was sure it was in the bag, and all the way from 52nd Street to Shea Stadium, she marveled at the fact that they had actually won -- and, no doubt, fantasized about how much easier that million dollars was going to make everything for them and their daughter. Meanwhile, the triumphant music followed Rob and Brennan off the train, up the path, and to the finish line, where the rest of the teams were waiting to greet them -- not a surprise now, but a surprise then. This wasn't a nail-biter of a finale; there was no footrace, because Frank and Margarita were an entire train behind, and suffered quite a blow when they realized they hadn't won after all. But it was somehow satisfying, not because a couple of hunky dudes sharing a Hollywood apartment were going to win anybody's version of Queen For A Day (oh, quiet), but because they'd outrun everybody and outplayed everybody, and they deserved it.
Oh -- and as congratulations went out to the winners and to Frank and Margarita for their second-place finish, we abruptly leapt to the whistling winds of the icy Alaskan landscape where the "villainous" Team Guido learned, via a note, that it was all over. You're just not going to get a better ending than that. ["Six years later, that '…meanwhile' cut to an Alaskan mountain range reigns unchallenged as the best in reality-TV history." -- Sars]
Season Two, Episode Five: "Welcome To The World Of Being Human"
Race seems to have special relationships with two countries: one is India, and the other is Thailand. The India episodes are well known for their often jarring images of extreme poverty, but the Thailand episodes are more varied. While plenty of use has been made of pretty parts of Thailand, this episode is basically a day in the city.
Starting at the airport, where the always wacky Blake came up with yet another wacky plan -- this time, to bribe the ticket agent with a statue of a rhino (just...don't ask) -- the leg moved on to Bangkok, where one of the race's most egregious instances of cheating occurred when the producers inexplicably allowed Wil and Tara and Chris and Alex to ignore a clue instructing them to travel by bus, instead taking a van-type taxi they declared was "a mini-bus." But things really kick off when the darling Danny and Oswald adopt a young woman who ditches school to take them around town: she is the now-famous Fern; first among Ferns, she is the one true Fern.
The Detour involved either finding your way to a bird market, which kind of turned out to be boring, or burning a paper car as an offering to your ancestors, which turned out to be the best. Blake and Paige went from shrine to shrine, unable to find the right one, burning car after car until their ancestors were undoubtedly quite confused. At one point, Blake even attempted to take back a car he'd already thrown into an allegedly holy fire. This was, of course, after the usually unobjectionable (if ridiculous) Blake prayed aloud for the salvation of all the misguided Buddhists of the world, a fine example of the show exposing goofball xenophobic nonsense for what it is.
After a hair-raising Roadblock in a cave full of bats, it was surprisingly likable ministers Russell and Cyndi who were eliminated. But the elimination itself isn't why this episode is so lovely; it's because it's one of the best examples of the way you can sometimes peek in on the ways, both good (Danny and Oswald) and bad (Blake), that people respond when you plunge them into unfamiliar territory where they have little choice but to interact.
Season One, Episode Ten: "To The Physical And Mental Limit"
A.K.A. Climb, Paddle, Swim
Between the personality conflicts, the tense finishes, and the transportation maneuvering, it's easy to forget that this show also works as a hell of a travelogue. For the most part, with the exception of the second season, which was the first post-9/11 run and seemed overly conservative about keeping the teams in isolated, artificial surroundings much of the time, Race has done a good job of plunging the teams into settings both urban and natural, giving people a much better idea of what Brazil and Tanzania and Sydney and especially India (the India episodes, as a set, could honestly have an entry all their own) look like than they'd have otherwise. If you watch this show and you don't travel a lot, I'm willing to bet that when people say "Buddhist temple," what you see in your head is, consciously or subconsciously, a product of this show. Ditto what you see when you hear "Russia," "South Africa," or "nutbunches."
Non-elimination episodes have a terrible reputation for being boring, and the producers appear to have been so dismayed at the way the final four teams in the first season wound up in two widely separated pairs that they've tried like crazy to make sure it never happens again. Despite both of those things, though, the Thailand-based non-elimination episode of the first season, which involved no long-haul traveling and took place almost entirely in a close-set area of lagoons and cliffs of gorgeousness, is enduringly appealing. This is the case not in spite of the non-elimination and the distance between pairs of teams, but because of it.
The episode opened with Rob and Brennan and Frank and Margarita leaving the pit stop nearly twelve hours before Kevin and Drew and Bill and Joe would be able to leave. Barring some enormous feat of screwing up, these two teams didn't have a lot to worry about in this leg, and they knew it. Both teams seemed to relax and enjoy the leg, which allowed the often emotionless Rob and Brennan to have a little fun, and the often loud and pushy Loud Pushy Frank to act more like an excited cheerleader than a punishing coach. There was rock-climbing, and then a trip to the aptly named Chicken Island (which looked...just like a chicken), followed by some snorkeling in the impossibly blue water. When the two lead teams finished the leg on the lovely Pai Plong beach, they high-fived each other with genuine good nature rarely seen between these particular people, and Margarita simply ran around plotzing with joy about all the great things she'd done. All four of them agreed that they had a great damn day, despite how tired and homesick they have to have been. And, poignantly, the show continued to serve one of its best purposes -- the shrinking of the world -- when the 2004 tsunami devastated parts of Thailand not far from these glorious beaches.
Season Eight, Episode Six: "I'm Sick Of Doing Stuff I Can't Do"
A.K.A. Ban Red Beans, Indeed
Wait. Hear me out.
Yes, this is from the despised Family Edition. Don't get me wrong; it's a dumb, boring season with almost nothing to redeem it. Almost nothing. What's more, it's a tragically sad episode in which the upbeat, lovable, hotly parented Gaghan family -- Papa Bill, Mama Tammy, and kids Billy and Carissa -- was done in, beaten out by the execrable Weaver family, precisely the kind of result that makes viewers gnash their teeth and weep and throw shoes at the television.
But with luck playing the role that it does for so many teams starting out the race, the fact is that most teams lose. Most good teams lose. Most beloved teams lose. Thus, in most cases, the story of a great team on this particular show is, in a larger sense, the story of how they lost.
As the teams ran around Costa Rica, they encountered the Roadblock that will live in infamy: one team member had to search through a huge pile of coffee beans (like, a small-room-sized pile -- 800 pounds, specifically), looking for a single red bean. This is the kind of task that introduces an enormous element of luck, because as much as we'd all like to think there's a methodical way to search 800 pounds of coffee beans, in reality, all you're doing is spreading them out as best you can and hoping you stumble across the red one. Of the six teams still in the race, the Gaghans arrived in a five-way tie for first. The chosen Roadblockers started hunting for their beans, and everyone found them...everyone but Tammy. Nightmarishly enough, even though the despised Weavers arrived at the Roadblock last and had to wait out a Yield before they could start looking, they still managed to find the bean before Tammy found hers. ["Again, for the record: not my doing." -- God] While the Gaghans eventually found their bean and finished the leg, they just couldn't catch up.
It sounds horrible, right? Well, it was horrible, kind of, in that it's not what anyone wanted to see. But in a trio of fabulous scenes, the show -- so blunderingly off its game all season long -- painted a really nice picture of how this one family ignored all the cynical rules about the importance of turning into a spiteful asshole when things don't go well. First, while Tammy hunted for the bean, Papa Bill discussed with young Billy how difficult it was to watch and not be able to help. They managed to share immense frustration without assigning blame, and if every team on this show could master that skill, you'd have a hell of a lot less fighting. Second, in the car after the bean debacle, Bill worked to buck up the kids while Tammy stared out the window, wrestling with guilt and embarrassment and everything you know you'd be feeling if one of those needle/haystack tasks went bad on you. And on the mat, of course, as Phil broke the news of their Philimination, everyone in the family coped just the right way -- Mom and Dad praised the kids and smooched, Billy went big-brother, and Carissa pressed on her cheeks to will herself not to burst into tears. It was horrible, but it was also great, because the battle is the game show and the war is not sucking, and if the team you love can only win one of the two...well, you know.