Episode Report Card M. Giant: B+ | 687 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Gratuitous Footage
By M. Giant | Season 14 | Episode 10 | Aired on 2009.04.26
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Going to Beijing, Tammy and Victor look forward to extending their linguistic advantage. Kisha|Jen and Margie|Luke claim to be ready to put things behind them, but there's still a lot of tension between the teams before they even leave Guilin. The Road Block is a torturous foot massage that takes everyone ten minutes, so all of the position changes take place with the taxis. Then the Detour is a choice between synchronized diving and a 400-meter swim relay. The swim is the option of choice for Margie and Luke and Team Go Team, while Team Family Law bails on the dive after multiple attempts. Both options threaten to be game-enders for the sisters, due to Jen's fear of drowning. But Victor's debilitating leg cramps might just allow them to catch up. At the Pit Stop, Jaime and Cara nearly shit themselves reaching the mat first for the first time, only to have Phil hand them the dreaded You Are Still Racing clue. To be continued! And, denied!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Welcome back to Guilin, y'all. "First settled in 100 B.C., this city is known throughout China for its breathtaking scenic beauty," Phil says. Too bad the race was there on such a dreary day, then. In any case, we're now at the ninth Pit Stop. The arrival clips from last week are oddly yelling-free (although there was plenty of that in the previouslies, which I'm still not recapping), and the next thing we know, Kisha and Jen are opening their clue at 1:48 PM. There is just literally no way of knowing how long these rest periods are any more, is there? Kisha is, for the first time I can remember, not wearing a bandana around her head. It makes her look oddly formal. As she reads that they must fly to Beijing, China, Phil's narration breaks in to tell us that that's over a thousand miles, and to remind us that Beijing was also the home of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Like even my four-year-old doesn't say "Olympics!" when he gets a look at the Bird's Nest stadium. But I'm glad to see the city will be getting a little extra use out of some of that stuff they built. Phil's voiceover gets almost conspiratorially quiet as he says that once in Beijing, the teams will need to go to...Jian? Gup...? Oh, fuck this, I'm turning on the closed captioning. Rewinding...okay, the "foot massage spa." Thanks for nothing, closed captioning. Anyway, in an interview, Kisha and Jen say that they're ready to move on from what happened with Luke and Margie during the last leg and that they're over it. I'll believe it when I see it. At least they're looking forward to the next leg, when there will be only three teams. I think that assumes that they'll be one of them.
Victor and Tammy are taking off at 1:49, and Victor comments of the instruction to fly to Beijing, "We can do that." Well, one would hope so. But what he actually means is that they can do Beijing, not just fly there. As they start dashing out of the park, they interview that they were just in Beijing for the Olympics, and they've both been to China several times before. "Having been here before, having a geographical knowledge of places, knowing how the streets work ["Wait for the bicycle!" Victor sings to Tammy, by way of demonstration, when more ignorant Americans presumably would have had to finish their race around the world with a tire up their ass], being familiar with the culture and language in China gives us a huge advantage." In other words, they have no excuse not to win this leg by several hours, right? With that, they've run all the way to a travel agency next to the park, where they learn that the next flight to Beijing is at 5:10 that afternoon. And judging from their conversations in there, clearly I'll be using the Mandarin-indicator italics again a lot this recap. Or should I say Mandarindicator?