Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bavarian Creamed
By M. Giant | Season 20 | Episode 5 | Aired on 03.18.2012
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The racers take trains to Bavaria, Germany, with about an eight-hour difference between the first-place Border Patrol agents and last-place Team Kentucky. But most of the trailing teams end up together anyway, and catch up with Art and JJ at the German restaurant that opens at 8:30 in the morning. Once inside, they get gnomes bearing clues for the Detour, which is a choice between a complicated quest to the fairy-tale village of Oberammergau or styling some championship beards. Most lead teams opt for the facial sculpture, while Bopper and Mark have to yodel to complete their Speed Bump, with what is, fortunately for them, a very forgiving band. After using some of JJ's own hairspray to finish the Detour, he and Art are back in the lead and en route to Sleeping Beauty's castle in the next village. Team Big Brother and Kerri and Stacy, meanwhile, find themselves lost in the snow on the way to Oberammergau, and end up getting passed up by Team Kentucky before finding the trail. Thus Mark and Bopper are the first team to find the "witch's" cottage, where they have to glue the hunks of gingerbread they gathered along the way onto gingerbread houses. The palace turns out to be a way station to the next destination, a hockey and curling arena. But both Other Rachel & Dave and Nary & Jamie go to the wrong castle and wait through a whole tour of it before realizing they're in the wrong place, and Kerri and Stacy and Bopper and Mark make a similar mistake, although the latter teams realize it faster. Meanwhile, Ralph and Vanessa fall to bickering, while Brendon and Rachel spend some quality time in last place and avoid a meltdown for once.
At the ice arena, the Roadblock requires racers to participate in a form of ice-bound shuffleboard with their gnome. Art and JJ hold onto their lead and win their third leg in a row, meeting Phil in a cow barn whose humility fails to rub off on them. Joey "Fitness" and Danny come in second, with Vanessa and Ralph patching things up in time to come in third. Other Rachel and Dave come in fourth, and Brendon and Rachel fifth, although Brendon totally wipes out at the mat. Bopper and Mark, after also falling to last during the castle fiasco and exceeding Bopper's seemingly inexhaustible lung capacity, pass the two all-female teams at the Roadblock and make it in as the sixth-place team. Kerri finishes the Roadblock before Nary does, but she and Stacy predictably get lost on the way to the Pit Stop. They're Philiminated, but I still think a team made up of two Stacys would have done a lot better.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Over some shots of lovely Turin, Italy, Phil tells us that the city hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics. Which is probably not news to anyone but myself, who had a one-year-old at the time and thus was completely unplugged from any form of external stimuli that wasn't 24. "And in the heart of the city: Piazza Castella." I don't know why that has to be a sentence fragment every damn week for twenty seasons. But it's the start of the fifth leg in a race around the world, so let's keep this moving.
We're reminded that Art and JJ won the previous leg (which is going to be a macro soon, at this rate), and thus they get to start this one first. At 8:57 AM, to be precise. Remember that. The clue tells them, "Make your way to the oldest state in Germany: Bavaria." They both seem pretty pleased about this, as Phil tells us that the teams will have to travel by train to Ehrwald, Austria. From there, they'll drive across the border into Bavaria and to the Gustof Zum Rassen restaurant. There's a banquet table all laid out before a large party of Travelocity gnomes, and even worse, a yodeling polka band kicking up a hell of a racket. The bottom of each gnome will have the next clue printed on the bottom -- along with a large Travelocity logo, of course.
Before the leg, Art and JJ congratulate themselves on "dominating" two legs in a row, and JJ attributes this in part to their being friends. "There's a difference between two dudes running the race that work together than a husband and wife... Art's an idiot most of the time, and I'm gonna let him know." Unlike the couples on this race. We see them locate and board the train as JJ says that their goal is to win the leg. "Looks like we're gonna be traveling all day today," Art says as their train heads across country. So that means only one thing: plenty of time for the other teams to catch up.
Thanks to Art and JJ winning the Fast Forward in the previous leg, Other Rachel and Dave are trailing significantly, leaving the Pit Stop at 11:33 AM. They're also happy to be Bavaria-bound. Joey "Fitness" and Danny, who are wearing knitted caps that look like the faces of cartoon characters, start the leg at 12:11 PM. The goofy hats do make both of them look less toolish, at least until Joey "Fitness" opens his mouth to explain that his hat, which looks like a panda with its tongue sticking out, is "flirty." In the back seat, Danny shrugs at who Joey "Fitness" thinks he's trying to flirt with. Anything and everything, I'm sure. At the Porta Nuova Station in Turin (way to be on the ball there, subtitles -- this is only the second time we've been here tonight), Other Rachel and Dave are already on the train when they see Team Jersey walking past on the platform outside. They're not happy to see them. But then, is anyone, ever?