Orange County Register

With two more episodes of “The Amazing Race” still to come, we weren’t buying the sad music accompanying Brian & Ericka’s arrival at the Pit Stop Sunday night. The odds were heavily in favor of the leg ending without an elimination, and our suspicions proved correct.

Miss America and hubby were saved, although for how long? With next week’s episode taking place entirely in Prague, the couple will not benefit from an airport equalizer and must complete the Speed Bump. That means one of the other three teams will need to make a mjaor mistake for Brian & Ericka to catch up.

Non-elimination aside, Sunday’s episode was an excellent one, with cab-stealing, alliance-breaking, a challenging Detour and an amusing Road Block. Anyone unclear on who is the brains in the Meghan & Cheyne pairing?

And we learned another “Amazing Race” rule: Never take the subway.

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For a few minutes Sunday night, I thought “The Amazing Race” would finish the season without Nate “Big Easy” Lofton, who seemed to be sinking irretrievably into the bogs of Estonia.

And it was a good metaphor for the season, which seems to be sinking into a bog of boring Detours. The teams finished the bog Detour in pretty much the same order in which they arrived, with no hope of catching Megan & Cheyne and no hope at all for Matt & Gary.

And don’t even get me started on the 15-hour wait for the ferry from Stockholm to Tallin. There may have been production reasons for it, but to the viewer that layover made no sense. Why not just start the teams mid-morning or early afternoon?

The Roadblock was a little better, although all of the teams were able to decipher the blank scroll in reasonable time. (Any time you’re confronted with invisible ink, your first instinct should be to heat the paper. Just be careful not to set it on fire.)

It’s too bad, because we are left with an excellent final four: Megan & Cheyne are strong; Meghan is one of the most impressively athletic women we’ve seen on the show. Flight Time & Big Easy are one of the most fun and likeable teams ever; Sam & Dan’s brotherly feuding is entertaining; and Brian & Ericka seem perpetually doomed but keep scratching to stay in the game.

For the second week in a row, we were treated to a less-than-thrilling episode of “The Amazing Race” Sunday night - until the contestants rolled into rural Sweden for a second visit to the fateful hayfield of doom.

We first met the field in season six of “The Amazing Race,” when sisters Lena & Kristy were eliminated after Lena spent eight hours fruitlessly unrolling bales. I felt bad just watching the rerun.

Sunday avoided such a tragedy, but the randomness of the task still kept the drama going until the end. The fortunate Flight Time & Big Easy came in first, and the seemingly unlucky Gary & Matt came in last - only to be saved by the expected non-elimination.

The past couple of episodes have seemed unusually low-energy and dull for this late in the Race. Since Mika refused to go down the waterslide, most of the drama seems to have drained out. Perhaps that’s because the remaining five teams are all likeable. It’s less fun without a team to root against.

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When the previous episode’s preview showed Mika balking at the top of the water slide, the Watcher’s reaction was “ho hum.”

How many times in seasons past have they shown us a preview of someone freaking out, only for that Racer to finish the task easily the next week?

So what a great surprise to see Mika actually refuse to go down the slide, providing one of the best finishes to a leg in memory and saving the Globetrotters in the process.

With the mildy annoying Mika & Canaan out and the humorous Flight Time & Big Easy still racing, we got an incredibly satisfying ending.

The rest of the episode was a solid B, with little travel but a couple of interesting challenges. In particular, the gold-weighing Detour was hilarious, as we got to see the teams’ math skills - or complete lack of same - on display.

One of the great unexplained mysteries of life is how people who sign up for “The Amazing Race” can have such little knowledge of geography.

It seems that every season, some team or other displays a level of ignorance that would earn a seventh-grader an F. Sunday night provided one of those classic moments, when Sam & Dan tried to buy airline tickets to “the Persian Gulf.” Better make sure that’s a seaplane, guys.

It was an otherwise enjoyable episode, lacking in high drama, perhaps, but the contrast of Dubai’s scorching desert heat and its indoor snow mountain was fun to watch. And things ended well, as the annoying Lance & Keri and their unfailingly wrong sense of direction got the boot.

The Watcher momentarily worried, as Lance & Keri approached the Pit Stop without the requisite suspenseful ending or the sad music. They wouldn’t dare let this be a non-elimination leg, would they? Then we realized that the reason there was no sad music was because no one was sad to see Lance & Keri go.

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Sunday brought what undoubtedly will be the saddest chapter of this season of “The Amazing Race,” as the likable team of Zev & Justin appeared to have won the leg but ended up eliminated after losing Zev’s passport somewhere in the streets of Phnom  Penh.

To make things worse, Zev & Justin’s ouster saved the annoying Maria & Tiffany from the chop.

The disastrous ending capped off an otherwise not-spectacular episode, as both the Detour and Road Block lacked drama. Neither seemed to challenge the teams mentally or physically, meaning that taxi rides and airport exits had more to do with the outcome than the teams’ efforts - passport possession aside.

We also were treated to some eye-popping ignorance, as most of the teams couldn’t identify a photo of Jackie Kennedy. How many of us felt really old watching that?

By the way, Zev’s passport was lost near the Act Like a Monkey Road Block and turned in to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. You can see the details in the Elimination Station video on the CBS website.

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Those of us who have watched “The Amazing Race” faithfully have developed a few rules for the Racers to follow: Read the clues carefully, remember where you left your luggage, always take the more physical Detour.

But the rule that hovers above all of the others: The Race is not a vacation. The lollygaggers and sight-seers always are rewarded with Phil’s declaration that “you have been eliminated from the Race.”

Sunday night, it was Marcy & Ron who took their exit after drifting through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City at a leisurely pace. They also made the error of taking the physically easier Detour choice, but it was apparent by the closesness of the finish that they would have been safe with even a modest amount of hustle.

The episode won’t rank among the Race’s finest. Travel was restricted to cab rides, the challenges were mediocre and the teams whined excessively. It wasn’t entirely without its good moments,though. Chief among them was everyone’s least favorite team, Lance & Keri, being baffled by the bullet clue that every other team solved instantly.

“The Amazing Race” fired the starting gun on season 15 with a two-hour extravaganza Sunday that showcased the best and worst of the series.

The worst came first, with an unnecessarily cruel challenge at the starting line that left one of the 12 teams out of the Race minutes after it had begun. Yoga instructors Eric & Lisa, from the San Fernando Valley, failed to find the correct license plate and saw their Race end with a 30-minute drive home from the LA River (if traffic wasn’t too bad).

When the remaining 11 teams arrived in Tokyo, things took a turn for the better. The awesome challenge there required players to eat frightening-looking “wasabi bombs” before leading 20 locals through the baffling streets of the Shibuya district to the Pit Stop. Anyone who has visited Tokyo can attest to the near impossibility of getting around without getting lost.

The leg almost had a perfect ending when the highly annoying team of Maria & Tiffany arrived dead last, but they were spared by a non-elimination.

The second half of the episode sent teams to Vietnam to show off their duck-herding skills. A lack of fowl-handling abilities doomed Garrett & Jessica, who became the second pair to leave.

First impressions
Favorite teams: Flight Time & Big Easy, Zev & Justin
Least favorite teams: Maria & Tiffany, Lance & Keri
Looks like a winner: Meghan & Cheyne

Harlem Globetrotters. Professional poker players. A former Miss America.

CBS announced the cast for season 15 of “The Amazing Race,” and it’s stacked with pseudo-celebrities.

Why, you ask? Good question. I don’t see how basketball players without a basketball or card players without a deck of cards make the game more interesting. We’ll just hope they don’t make it worse.

In what is no doubt a cost-saving move, this Race will be the shortest on record, covering eight countries in 21 days. Season 14 had been the shortest to date at 9 nations/22 days, and it was a fine edition, so I doubt the cut will have an impact on our enjoyment.

A couple of new twists turn up this season. The most cruel: One of the teams will be eliminated at the starting line, which is in the Los Angeles River near downtown L.A. Another is the Switchback which will send teams to relive famous Roadblock challenges from past seasons.

To read about the cast, continue on …

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