Episode Report Card M. Giant: A- | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Run It Up the Pole and See Who Salutes
By M. Giant | Season 21 | Episode 11 | Aired on 12.09.2012
The goat farmers are approaching, and Brent frets, "This is a winner-take-all game, so it's either first place or nothing." But what happened to "come back with two million dollars or come back dead"? I guess they did come close a time or two. They're dropped off, and as they get out of their cab, Josh interviews, "I've lived in New York for years, and I've always driven by the U.N. building and thought it was one of the most beautiful buildings. So being able to walk through those gates for the first time, after living here twenty years? I was really impressed." Odd choice of words there, unless he's complimenting the production, in which case it's obvious why they used it. Josh is of course taking on the Roadblock, since Brent did the other one. Josh is led to a "flagpole station" while Brent joins Trey at the waiting area and observes to Josh that Lexi's only finished with one. Don't worry, the racers are prevented from seeing each other's work by temporary party tents that have been erected between each flagpole station, but they all seem to be visible from the waiting area where the partners are going to be watching. Trey admits to Brent that he'd be in trouble if he were the one doing this.
Brent calls admonishingly to Josh, "Come on, Josh, you're just going to have to run a little bit faster. You know you are in a race for a million dollars." Josh is also starting with the ones he knows, planning to use the process of elimination after that. He hoists his Spanish greetings up and gets that flag highlighted on the screen, even though a completed Dutch flag is also clearly visible right behind it. Lexi is attaching "Bon Jour" and "Au Revoir," to her French flagpole, just guessing because she doesn't know any French. Wow, I thought everybody knew at least that much French. But she guessed right, and she has two flags finished, with a flashback to Marie Antoinette saying both greetings. Josh also gets his French phrases posted as Brent tells us that Josh is both better at languages and more visual than he is. So I would imagine Josh spends a lot of time visualizing Brent shutting up and coming up with new linguistic methods for making it happen.
The Chippendales arrive in third place and run right in. Naturally James is taking this one. Jaymes interviews post-leg, "Every time we checked in, they always said hello and goodbye, and Phil would say, 'that means hello' and 'that means goodbye.' I just thought they were being cordial!" Yeah, oops. Seeing them arrive, Brent says it's now a three-way race. "Nobody's gonna know these," Jaymes assures James. Like the others, James starts with Spain and France, the ones he knows. Meanwhile, Lexi complains, "There's probably a thousand ways of putting these up correctly." Well, no, there's only one correct way, but I see what she's saying. And she doesn't have time to sit and do the math, but I do, and according to my calculations, the actual number of possible permutations, with four greeting flags already accounted for and fourteen left to go, is...more than 87 billion. Wow, I really hope I'm wrong about that. And that's only correct if there are no flags that don't go anywhere, which we'll see later there are. I guess the good news is that with each pair of flags hung correctly, the number of remaining combinations drops to less than one percent of that, so after she gets the next ones right she's only got 479 million possible combinations to go. Lexi interviews post-leg about how it was emotion overload and the words were all running together. "It's just hard, 'cause I can't control this," she complains to Trey, who encourages her to just keep guessing because that's all she can do.
Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30Next