All Stars Fade Away

... Spoiler Alert! ... Spoiler Alert! ...


If you haven't yet seen (and you intend to see) episode 13 of The Amazing Race Series 11 – All Stars Edition (TARAS), do not read any further!


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The last TARAS episode we saw here in Australia ended with Eric & Danielle being the last team to reach the Pit Stop but the third team to be saved from elimination on the All Stars edition of the show. The Pit Stop was located at Umatac (Fort Nuestra Señora de la Soledad) in Guam, an organised unincorporated territory of the USA. The Finish Line was located inside the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, back on the mainland.

In the Detour for this leg of the race, teams had to choose between ‘Under’ or ‘Over’. In ‘Under’, teams had to swim underwater to gain access to a cave where their next clue was anchored to the cave’s floor. In ‘Over’, teams had to use a paddle board to reach a buoy to which their next clue was fastened.

Photos on the official CBS website suggest that the unaired Roadblock involved jumping off a cliff into the water below (because Mirna and Danielle were shown doing this task in the photos). The location of the Roadblock was most likely in Hawaii near the Detour, though the exact location is unknown.

At the San Francisco Mint (in the Race's final task), one team member had to answer four questions relating to their opinion of other teams on the Race. Their answers corresponded to a four-digit code. The other team member then had ten minutes to guess the answers and enter the code into a safe containing the last clue. Success meant that the lucky team could get a head start on the other teams, but if they failed, teams were still allowed to proceed once the ten minutes had passed.

For the record, this was the order in which the teams reached Phil on the mat last episode, and the order in which they started this leg of the Race:

1. Dustin & Kandice
2. Eric & Danielle
3. Charla & Mirna
4. Oswald & Danny


Note: As always, I’ll provide my thoughts on each team in this episode, listing them in the order in which they arrived at the Finish Line (hence the 'Spoiler Alert!').



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1. Eric & Danielle: WINNERS!


Last week: 2
This week: Up one place

Well, well, well! Look who’s a happy boy, then! (Me, not Eric – when it’s all said and done, who cares about Eric?!) I hoped from the start that he’d win, and was almost surprised (yet very, very glad) that he did! Especially considering the dead weight he had to drag around with him (no offence, Dummielle). I’m not going to gloat (much) about Eric & Danielle’s win, although I will repeat what Wifey said last night as we watched it … they were definitely the underdogs this season. They got Yielded twice, were pulled off a flight, got stranded at an airport twenty-seven hours behind the lead team, arrived in last place twice (once at a non-elimination leg and once when Joe & Bill were right in front of them but had a half-hour time penalty, spearing E+D at the last second, argued, were ganged-up against by the other teams, hadn’t had the benefit of working together as a team before, and so on. So I thought it was the most satisfying outcome that they overcame all this and won. Between that, and Eric’s highly amusing (and often inappropriate) wit, I enjoyed them the best out of all eleven teams. Interestingly, the Race was filmed in November / December 2006 (last night’s final episode aired in the US in May 2007), and Eric & Danielle have since stated that they’re no longer a couple (due to the geographical distance between their homes), but apparently they’re great friends. I’d wonder if the intellectual distance also played a part in their break-up, but that’d just be me being spiteful again. But when looking at the events of this final episode, I was interested to see how Eric & Danielle and Dustin & Kandice were walking the aisles of their first flight out of Tokyo, looking for Charla & Mirna. What, you guys are friends, now??! Ain’t it funny to see how fickle the concepts of betrayal and friendship really are. Just last week these two teams couldn’t bear to speak to each other, but now they’re so concerned with not being at the back of the pack that they’re confiding in each other about the whereabouts of the third team. I was actually quite surprised at how well Eric & Danielle were doing, up until their flights to San Francisco. They were going from strength to strength, and overtook the other teams on the beach and in the kayaks. When they got to the final task, using the safe at the San Francisco Old Mint, I was humoured by Eric’s comment that Danielle likes gossip, so they should be okay. In truth, Danielle was the only person to break their partner’s code and retrieve the clue – unfortunately for them this only gave them a two-minute head start on the others, who were given their clue when the ten-minutes had run out. Personally, and I’d say this regardless of which team had succeeded at the task (or if none had succeeded at all), I thought this sucked that they were simply given the clue when the time ran out. I understood the resulting tension and drama at having all three teams close together, but no teams is aware of any other team’s placement once they’ve left each other’s company (for all the other teams knew, E+D could have gotten lost after leaving the Old Mint, D+K could have left the Old Mint just moments after E+D, C+M could have taken a faster route to the Botanical Gardens and beaten both other teams, etc), so just handing over the clue rather than making the two team members swap roles at the safe cracking task seemed weak and unfair (and almost cheated us out of extra tension and enjoyment). But that being said, Eric & Danielle were fortunate enough to reach host Phil Keoghan at the Finish Line first, winning $US1 million. Eric then phoned his former teammate Jeremy, who seemed to think that he was now rich (interesting theory), and promised to give Eric some ‘spankings’ when he returned home. (Clearly Eric’s the sub.)




2. Dustin & Kandice: ELIMINATED! (2nd Place)


Last week: 1
This week: Down one place

Although I was happy to see Eric & Danielle win the Race, if I was being fair (and in my mind’s eye, at least, I was being fair), Dustin & Kandice would have been the most deserving team to win. When you consider how well they continually played this game and how frequently they were either in first place or at least the top half of the pack, you’ve got to give them their dues: They did very well throughout the season and played the smartest game all up. However, the winner isn’t about the team who won the most prizes throughout the Race or whoever was the most ‘clever’ in legs past … they had to be the first ones to reach the Finish Line, and they weren’t. Non-elimination legs, Yields, Fast Forwards, Intersections … these things are all elements to the Race as much as the Roadblocks and Detours are, so there’s no use complaining about them or saying they’re not ‘fair’. Every teams begins the first leg of the Race equal to every other team, and whatever happens from there is up to how well they do from leg to leg. Seeing that Dustin & Kandice had been so ‘tight’ throughout the Race and never seemed to argue at all, it was sweet justice to see them have such a major meltdown on the kayak and in the car afterwards. Although they made up and became “besties” again, it became a pretty bitter disagreement between them and Kandice was particularly hurtful to Dustin out of frustration and embarrassment. However, it must be acknowledged that she had a point – Dustin had made some stupid decisions while they were in the kayak, like getting out and walking it (it’s so incredibly difficult to get back into a kayak once you’re out in the water). When the heat truly was on, these girls turned nasty (both towards each other, and towards other teams – although they’d been doing the latter all along). When they arrived at the airport to buy tickets to San Francisco, one of them asked the gold-plated question: “I wonder if there’s a place to buy tickets?” Yes darling, that would be called a ticket counter. I realise it must be a bad feeling to finish the Race in second place (Eric stated it was the hardest disappointment he’s had to deal with in his whole life, further cementing the guy’s shallowness), but you can’t feel too bad for these beauty queens turned reality TV show contestants. They walked away with a swagful of freebies, including their own catamarans. (“What’s a catamaran?”)




3. Charla & Mirna: ELIMINATED! (3rd Place)


Last week: 3
This week: No change

Imagine the uproar these two would have made about dwarfs being able to achieve the same things as normal-heighted people if they’d won! They preached enough about it just for coming in third place. As far as I’m concerned, Charla & Mirna were only ever comic relief on this Race, so it’s a good thing they didn’t fluke it in the final leg and win the big bucks. They were too hypocritical about the integrity shown by other teams to gain any credibility at all, for mine. They made an exceptionally smart move by checking the United flight out of Tokyo, which ended up getting them to Hawaii almost an hour before the other teams (after landing twenty minutes earlier than expected). But it was all for naught when the other two teams had a couple of hours to catch up to them. When they asked C+M what flight they were on, their answer that they were sitting right behind them was quite funny. Choosing the ‘Over’ Detour task meant having to paddle on a surfboard, and they seemed to struggle a little with this challenge (although they still finished it before the other teams completed the ‘Under’ task – in fact, they’d left the area before D+K even arrived!). Charla’s instruction to Mirna to “just stay low” was easy enough for her to say! On the home stretch, the weird thing to note about Mirna was her insistance on calling the Botanical Gardens “the Botarrnical Gardens”. What a strange pair.



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Last week's tips:

First Team: Dustin & Kandice. . (Wrong)
Last Team: Charla & Mirna. Correct!
Yield? No. Correct!
Fast Forward? No. Correct!
Elimination Week? No – one team will win, and the other two will not. (Big prediction, I know!) Correct!
Biggest Argument: Eric & Danielle. (Wrong) – surprisingly, it was Dustin & Kandice!
Smartest Team: Dustin & Kandice. . (Wrong) I guess this was Eric & Danielle.


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My Predictions For TARAS:

Correct: 41
Wrong: 43
That’s pretty average (certainly the worst I’ve done since I started making predictions two seasons ago). This is the first time I’ve gotten more Wrong than Correct. But oh well – they’re all complete stabs in the dark, anyway. :)



If you haven’t already done so, check out the review of this same episode that Javatari posted on his blog (once it’s up).


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