That's The Way The Cookie Crumbles

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


If you haven't yet seen (and you intend to see) episode 9 of The Amazing Race Series 11 – All Stars Edition (TARAS), do not read any further!


--------------------


The last TARAS episode we saw here in Australia ended with Joe & Bill being the last team to reach the Pit Stop and the fifth team to be eliminated from the All Stars edition of the show. The Pit Stop was located inside the grounds of Pieskowa Skala Castle in Krakow, Poland.

The first of two Yields on the Race was located on the elevated walkway near the Kampung Baru Mosque.

The Detour for this leg was a choice between ‘Artistic Expression’ or ‘Cookie Confection’. In ‘Artistic Expression’, teams had to travel one third of a mile on foot to Dewan Lama. Once there, they had to use an ancient technique known as batik to exactly duplicate one of three patterns onto and then dye a 45 square-foot piece of cloth. In ‘Cookie Confection’, teams made their way on foot half a mile to Chow Kit Bomba and had to search through 600 boxes of traditional Malaysian festive cookies, by biting into them, and find the one cookie that had a black liquorice centre.

The Roadblock on this leg was a nod to Malaysia's eco-friendly practice of recycling. Team members had to choose a bicycle with a side cart attached and then scour the nearby Taman Sri Hartamas neighbourhood for residents willing to give them their used newspapers. Once they had collected enough newspapers to make a stack eight hands high, they would receive their next clue.

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. Oswald & Danny / Uchenna & Joyce
2. N/A
3. Dustin & Kandice
4. Charla & Mirna
5. Eric & Danielle
6. Joe & Bill


Note: If you're already ahead of this point in the series, please refrain from giving any spoilers in your comments. Thank you.

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



--------------------


1. Dustin & Kandice


Last week: 3
This week: Up two places

The first comment I’ve written down in my notes on last night’s episode for Dustin & Kandice is: “That monkey’s crazy!”. I wrote that line down because the girls were almost hysterical about how crazy the monkey was behaving, although we only saw it sitting on the handrail at the mega-steps and maybe running up a few steps alongside them. THAT’S crazy?? The idea that one of them then told the other one to push the monkey off the handrail as they made their way back down the stairs. What kind of cruel people ARE these chicks?! Still, they were probably the smartest team when it came to choosing the Detour task – there’s no WAY I’d ever have chosen the cookie task over the dyeing task (but perhaps it sounded better in print when you hadn’t seen images of both tasks, like we did). I don’t know what it is about these two that prevents me from liking them. I think it may be that they’re so purrrrdy (although they’re really not my type at all). Is it perhaps that they think they look great and call themselves the ‘beauty queens’ that gets me off-side? Maybe I’m just prejudiced against two blondes running around daring each other to push poor defenceless monkeys off handrails. Whatever it is, I know they’re often the smartest team in the pack, and they rarely do anything to get my blood boiling, but I just can’t bring myself to cheer them on. I must have lingering and unconscious ‘issues' with the popular girls from my high school days or something.




2. Charla & Mirna


Last week: 4
This week: Up two places

It took me a while – after the episode had finished airing last night and I thought back to the promo ads Channel Seven had run all week for it – to realise that the ‘dirty trick’ they’d supposedly played on Eric & Danielle that was meant to have cost one of them their position in the Race (or so the ad implied) was actually their minor run-in at the start, when Charla & Mirna were using the hotel computers and wouldn’t let Eric & Danielle use one of them. What an anti-climax (although at least they can’t be blamed for making it too obvious – as I certainly thought it was – that one of those two teams was going to be eliminated). These two are still hilarious to watch – even when they catch the best flight (by three or more hours) and stuff it up by choosing the cookie task to no avail. The images of Charla in particular biting into six cookies all piled on top of each other and spitting the crumbly mess out onto the ground was quite amusing. Not to mention the shot of them chasing down the bus as it turned a corner. Charla & Mirna were the first ones to give up on the cookie task (but not the last), and the newspaper Roadblock proved that Mirna can neither drive a car NOR ride a bike! Exactly how useless IS this girl?! It was all fun and games until Mirna’s “local fame” went to her head and she started advising the nearby children to “stay in school” and “don’t do drugs”, because they were apparently the next Charlas and Mirnas of the world. Blech! What self-indulgent rubbish. I think it’s about time they were eliminated, now. They’ve served their purpose, but they shouldn’t be in the top three teams, methinks.




3. Eric & Danielle


Last week: 5
This week: Up two places

When I saw Eric’s reaction at being Yielded in this episode, I haven’t laughed so hard since the good ol’ days of watching Charla trying to eat two feet of Polish sausage and falling on her face in a mini suit of armour! Eric’s outrageously inappropriate comment (”Those dirty, dirty hookers. Those dirty pirate hookers.”) was so unexpected and ludicrous that I broke up in laughter. I know I shouldn’t have – it certainly wasn’t a fair label to give the girls – but my surprise at hearing him say that was huge. And to be honest, I also thought it was kinda funny. Danielle was equally pissed off (in fact, I reckon she was ore upset about it than Eric was), and I look forward to seeing how this will affect their relationship with Dustin & Kandice next week. Eric tore up the beauty queens’ photo and then mimicked their voices with each half of the photo, but Danielle was angry about it all the way up to the Pit Stop when she spoke to host Phil Keoghan about the memories it brought back of she and her partner Dani being Yielded the first time they were on the Race, and how it ended up resulting in their elimination. I wondered if Eric & Danielle were going to be awarded a time penalty for catching a taxi to the cookies (when the clue clearly stated they must proceed on foot), but this seems to have been overlooked by the producers of the show. Eric was still in good spirits when they reached the Roadblock, laughing at how he always chose the ‘easy’ tasks and Danielle always chose the more difficult ones (remember, they have to choose who’ll complete the task before they know what it is – they base their decision on the very unhelpful ‘riddle’ they get asked in their clue – then once they’ve determined who’ll do the task, they open the second envelope and only THEN do they find out what it involves), and even Danielle seemed happier than when they’d been Yielded. I’m sure catching up to Charla & Mirna – and even beating Oswald & Danny to the Roadblock – must have helped make them feel better about their lot. When Danielle broke her bike on the gutter and then asked why her bike was so hard to ride, I yelled at the TV: “Because you broke it, dumbass!” I was quite suspicious about the amount of newspapers the residents of (what appeared to be) one small street had stacked up in their houses. I’d put money on the fact that the show’s producers had lined this up with the residents in question, and even provided them with the newspapers that they could bring out to the Racers when they heard them calling from their bicycles. The amount of papers that each of them collected from just a few houses each was ridiculous! What a fire hazard, having them stacked up in their houses like that! Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson would be very unimpressed.




4. Oswald & Danny


Last week: Equal 1st
This week: Down three places

I guess it had to happen, but I can’t believe how badly these guys went this week. It was a total wash-out for them, and if not for the bigger mistake made by Uchenna & Joyce when booking their flights, I think it’s fair to say that Oswald & Danny would have been given their marching orders last night. Thankfully for them, they decided to go with the safer flight option to Malaysia (which only landed about 40 minutes after Uchenna & Joyce’s connecting flight was scheduled to land), but thereafter, almost every decision they made was a poor one. They roamed the streets looking for the cluebox on the elevated walkway for what seemed like a pretty long time (Dustin & Kandice passed them, found the cluebox, Yielded Eric & Danielle, read their Detour options out loud, made their decision of which one to go with, and hot-footed it out of there before the boys even returned and found the cluebox for themselves). For some bizarre (to me) reason, Oswald & Danny also decided to go with the cookie task, but soon gave up after arguing over whether they had to bite into every cookie in each box (for the record, they DID have to do that, and Oswald was right – Danny could easily have cost them hours and hours by doing the task incorrectly and possibly missing the one liquorice-centred cookie they were searching for). While walking to the dyeing task, they continued to argue, then decided to return to the cookie task. They tried it again for a little while (still incorrectly), gave up on it for the second time, walked to the dyeing task, and proceeded to stuff up their first attempt by miscounting the number of times they had to apply the floral pattern print before dyeing the sheet. It really wasn’t their day. But it wasn’t over yet. When they reached the Roadblock (moments after the Yielded Eric & Danielle got there – and bear in mind the boys had collected their clue from the elevated walkway before Eric & Danielle had arrived and turned over their hourglass – and Eric & Danielle did the cookie task successfully!), Oswald told Danny he’s prefer not to do this task because he’s afraid of bicycles (no, really). This meant the already grumpy and exhausted Danny was forced to jump on one of those bikes and pedal around, calling for old newspapers. Because Mirna, Danielle and Dustin or Kandice (whichever one of the beauty queens it was – I still have trouble working out which of them does what, if the shot of their faces is too quick) had each collected so many more newspapers than necessary, Danny appeared to run out of newspapers, so he resorted to buying them from a petrol station (should this have resulted in another time penalty?). He got a drink from a resident first, and seemed to walk away with their glass. Then he used all his money to buy roughly seven times the amount of newspapers he required to complete the task (and a bottle of lemonade, apparently), leaving them with almost no money with which to pay their taxi driver for their trip to the Pit Stop. Or that’s what we were expecting to see. Who knows if it was edited out for time, or if Oswald had some extra money on him as well. His singing chant to Oswald while he was riding away on the bike was amusing but telling of his current state of mind: “Hating you … hating you …” Let’s hope his fury will have subsided by next week’s episode, because these guys are Wifey’s and my favourite to win (alongside Eric & Danielle).




5. Uchenna & Joyce: ELIMINATED!


Last week: Equal 1st
This week: Down four places

These guys took a massive gamble in risking a one-hour window in Frankfurt to catch their connecting flight to Malaysia. As expected (from all the conversations we were shown regarding how big a chance they were taking), they didn’t make their second flight and had to wait until the next day. Tey then promptly disappeared from our screens until the very end of the episode, when they finally landed in Malaysia and retrieved a clue that simply told them to proceed to the Pit Stop (they must have known they were out at this point, due to not having to complete any tasks on the entire leg). Was this their comeuppance for accepting the first place prize from Oswald & Danny in the last episode without first knocking it back? Who knows. The point is, Uchenna & Joyce have already won this Race once before, whereas none of the others in this season have been so fortunate. I think their positive outlook at the end – coupled with their honesty and integrity all throughout the Race – really showed them for the lovely people they are.



--------------------


Last week's tips:

First Team: Oswald & Danny. (Wrong)
Last Team: Eric & Danielle. (Wrong)
Yield? Yes. Correct!
Fast Forward? No. Correct!
Elimination Week? Yes. Correct!
Biggest Argument: Charla & Mirna. (Wrong) – Who woulda thought it’d be Oswald & Danny!?!
Smartest Team: Oswald & Danny. (Wrong) – Certainly not! Unfortunately it was either of the female teams. I’m leaning towards Dustin & Kandice for better decisions once they were in Malaysia (over Charla & Mirna’s better choice of flight to Malaysia)


--------------------


Next week's tips:

First Team: Dustin & Kandice.
Last Team: Charla & Mirna.
Yield? No.
Fast Forward? No.
Elimination Week? No.
Biggest Argument: Charla & Mirna.
Smartest Team: Eric & Danielle.



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


.