Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | 2 USERS: C YOU GRADE IT Smithing and Sewing
By M. Giant | Season 21 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.21.2012
There's a brief mention of a Fast Forward, which both teams decline to attempt, and then Ryan and Natalie decide to take this on. They proceed into the yard, which looks like a flayed-open Star Wars Sandcrawler, but with buses and dudes instead of droids and Jawas. All manner of welding and lifting and replacing is happening, on buses that are so bashed-up they'd probably be cubed here in the States. Probably a different insurance environment in Bangladesh, though.
Jaymes & James show up and also decide not to risk the Fast Forward, apparently by prior agreement. James is taking this one. "This is definitely a boys' challenge," Nadiya says while waiting on the sidelines with Abbie. We'll see. Ryan explains and demonstrates how the putty had to be mixed just so, with yellow stuff from a tube needing to be squeezed onto a metal palette that he's already smeared with gray goo. Natalie is already spreading the yellow stuff smoothly into place, using a putty knife that's essentially a metal rectangle. Nadiya says what I think is, "We're the only brownies, we have to win." I kind of hope not, though. James, meanwhile, is having trouble getting the lid off his putty can. Just pretend it's a shirt, James.
Rob & Kelley arrive in fourth place and also skip the Fast Forward. Which is just as well, because they do their own body work on the monster trucks back home, so Rob's got this more than covered. James finally gets his putty can open. "We took a long time to open it too," Nadiya says to Jaymes at the waiting area, accompanied by the Finger-Bells Of Bald-Faced Lying.
James and Abba are the fifth team to get to the repair yard, but the first to opt for the Fast Forward, which seems like it must be some kind of record. "Provide a vital service to the people of Dhaka," Abba reads from the clue, which sounds very noble and community-minded. And then a lid is disenchantingly taken off a bucket full of wet, dead rats. From another dump, Phil tells us that "in Bangladesh, rats destroy one and a half to two million tons of food each year." Yikes, who's giving rats explosives in the first place? Phil tells us that the team doing the Fast Forward will be "ratcatching assistants." Actually, they'll be rounding up the easiest kind of rats to catch, which is dead ones. James and Abba will have to travel around town visiting three different locations that serve as rat depositories, collect rat corpses from the buckets into provided sacks, and deliver them to the supervisor to get the clue sending them directly to this race's Pit Stop. I should also mention that Phil uses the word "e-rat-icated." Oh, Phil.