Static Zombie

I don't care which team wins - the Linz's or the Bransens - as long as it's one of those two. If the Weavers win, guaranteed Ma Weaver will say that it was God's will.

I know schadenfreude is wrong. But I couldn't help thinking, "So Weavers - does this mean God hates you? Or does he love you less than the Bransons and Linzes, but more than the other teams? Phil probably has made more than $1 Million from this show - does God love him the most? Or does he love the producers the most? Where does the CBS network fit into the God's Love heirarchy?"

Gah - those people make the veins stand out on my head. Have to admit they generally played well.

For one harrowing hour, it looked like the Weavers might actually pull off the win. My gut was tight the whole time.

What really annoys me about The Amazing Race-- and I've said this before-- is the producers' insistence on bunching people up DURING a leg. I understand it may make better television-- the final leg of season one was pretty anticlimactic when team Guido was left far behind in Alaska, a day behind everyone else (through their own cockiness). But it lends an air of futility to the proceedings. Natural bunching occurs at airports. Do we really need to send teams to locations with fixed hours of operation to bunch them up again? In this episode, after the Weavers got off to a great lead, teams were arbitrarily bunched within 10 minutes of each other by the charter flights. This actually turned out to be to the Weavers' advantage, since their performance at the stadium was horrendous enough to put them much farther behind the other teams than that. But the point remains that had the Weavers not self-destructed, all their great performance in the leg up to that point could have been wiped out. Note, not even preserved by being the first in the queue for the next day, but potentially utterly wiped out. The random nature of the flight times really rankles. Teams should know what the range of starting times are, so that when they find one they can make an informed decision about whether or not to keep it. Built-in random chance on the final leg of a $1,000,000 race is poor design. Viewers want the best racers to win, not the ones who happened to get lucky.

I also didn't like the final task of the race being a one-person roadblock. At that stage of the race, it should have been an activity that forced players to work as a team to be able to move to the finish line, not something that only one player could do while the rest look on from the sidelines. That said, the map puzzle was highly thematic, well-constructed, and appropriate for this season.

But what were the Bransens THINKING when they chose SHOE instead of SHIP? If there's one rule players should follow on the race, it's NEVER choose a needle-in-a-haystack task over a brute-force task. It's just a recipe for disaster. As it turned out, they arrived at the power boats very soon after the Linzes, but they got to the detour at the same time so their choice lost them ground.

I think they were thinking, "Hey, we're girls, we know shoes!" But yes, a poor choice...although there have been times it's paid off, it's about 3:1 that you are better off with the non-search task.

While sometimes I like the departure time searches, because it can separate the smart teams from the dumb, in this case it was crazy. They should have just had it be that the first team to find a box got to go first, and so on. As it happened it worked out fine, but I was terrified that the Weavers wouldn't go out last...not that it ended up mattering.

Overall it was by far the worst AR yet, although the last episode was exciting, the geography puzzle was great, and good triumphed in the end. It turns out that Lena (tall blond mormon girl from AR5...haystack girl) cast AR9 and she's very excited about the season. Let's hope she knew what she was doing!