By M. Giant
The final four leave Cochin for Japan. There's a lot of frantic dashing around Hiroshima by night, and Other Rachel and Dave miss the last ferry of the evening. Which unsurprisingly ends up being for naught, as everyone else had to wait overnight for the clue anyway. In the morning, everyone undergoes a little forced contemplation of the tragedy of Hiroshima before getting on a bullet train to Osaka, where they participate in a fake Japanese game show. It's simple enough; they just run along a treadmill to try to catch chickens dangling overhead. But remember that Vanessa hurt her ankle in the leg, so a running challenge is nearly a deal-breaker for her. After Art, Brendon, and Other Rachel are long gone, she's still there, but she sucks it up and manages to finish.
The other teams proceed to a spectacular observation deck atop a skyscraper to choose their Detours. Other Rachel and Dave are the only ones to select the one where they take pictures of passersby posing behind cutouts of sumo wrestlers, while the rest of the teams opt for a complicated sushi-based game of Bingo. Which turns out to be the right call for Other Rachel and Dave, because they win their seventh leg of the race and are looking forward to their eighth. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol and Team Big Brother muddle through the sushi task with varying degrees of bickering, then have trouble finding the Pit Stop on the vast grounds that host it this leg. Vanessa and Ralph smoke the Detour and have good taxi luck, but the damage is done; Art and JJ and Brendon and Rachel will be the other two teams in the final three.
In the second hour, the remaining three teams fly back across the Pacific to Honolulu. They're supposed to find a pair of twin towers going only by their nicknames, which proves to be not enough information for Art and JJ. While the two Rachel teams reach them quickly, use ascenders to climb 45 stories to their rooftops, spot their destination from there, and "rappel" back down face-first (actually they "dangle" more than "rappel," but that can wait), Art and JJ engage in a classic final-leg flail before getting back on track. Soon Dave, and then Brendon, are hard at work making 14 quarts of shaved ice. Other Rachel and Dave hold into their lead, then get to hop into a helicopter to be flown to the task. Art and JJ catch up to Team Big Brother just before Brendon finishes, but then the latter team misreads their clue and takes a cab all the way to Aloha Stadium instead of going on foot to the helicopters right there in the park. Cue meltdown.
On the other side of the island, Other Rachel and Dave use a Wave Runner and a rescue sled to fish a swimmer out of the surf, just like a real rescue but with no actual danger. Then they take a taxi to what they think is their stop. Seeing an Amazing Sign instructing them to ride stand-up paddleboards across a pond to the dock on the far side, they do just that. Once again they're the first team to reach the mat, but it's not what they expected; Phil tells them they missed a Roadblock and have to go back.
Art and JJ, however, are already at that Roadblock, having hired a better cab driver. Art has to ride a narrow sled down a grassy hill, but it's just not happening. He and JJ think they're out of it anyway -- until Other Rachel and Dave show up. That means they're still in the race -- until Other Rachel successfully rides her sled on the second try. She gets to move on to the second part of the Roadblock, a rock-rolling challenge, which she completes while Art is still plowing up that poor hill with his elbows. Looks like all they have to do now is paddle back across the water and check in at the Finish Line for real.
Art is so miserable at the sledding that even Brendon and Rachel catch up with them, and Rachel succeeds on her second try as well. But Art finally manages to tame the sled before Rachel succeeds at the rock-rolling -- and he succeeds at the rock-rolling too.
But this is all a formality, because despite having to loop back around on the course, Other Rachel and Dave get to the Finish Line first again. That makes them the record-holders, with eight victorious legs under their belt. Which says more about casting and leg design than it does about them, if you ask me, not that anybody did. Art and JJ come in second, and JJ has to walk back a lot of his big talk about winning, and finally Brendon and Rachel drag themselves in at third. And then there's the celebration and the hugs and the farewell from Bopper and Mark, who after all were the only team on tonight's two-hour show that anybody was still rooting for.