Bucky reports on tonight's Amazing Race. Take it away, Bucky!:
Hello ... ello ... llo ... lo. Welcome back ...ack ...ck. (Wait! Is there an echo in here? It must be because everyone who liked the Cowboys has checked out until TAR makes rules against cheating.) Seriously, I'll be very interested in the ratings for this week, to see if people really have stopped watching.
Mrs. Bucky and I haven't. So, here we go ...
This turns out to be the penultimate episode of The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business. Next week will be a two-hour episode—presumably eliminating one team in the first hour and having the final three teams race to the finish in the second hour.
We are in Zermatt, Switzerland for this leg. Zev & Justin leave the Pit Stop first at 6:54 a.m. and the Globetrotters depart last at 8:43 a.m. Teams must make their way to a helipad and catch a flight to the leg's Detour. Flights depart at 5 minute intervals, so the teams will still be separated, but not by as much as their departure times.
It is clear we are going to get a lot of shots of the Matterhorn tonight, and in all of them snow is being blown off the peak by strong winds. Very picturesque. I want to go to Switzerland. Switzerland and Ireland. Those are the only two places I want to go.
The teams arrive at the Detour in this order: Zev & Justin, Kisha & Jen, Gary & Mallory, the Goths and the Globetrotters. Their choices are:
Search – teams will have to find a rescue training dummy (buried in the snow to simulate an avalanche) using an electronic avalanche beacon, and dig the dummy up to get the next clue.
Rescue – one team member will have to lower the other down a crevasse where (s)he will hook a line to a person waiting down there. The player on top will then have to raise both the teammate and the other person to the top to get the next clue.
Zev & Justin and Gary & Mallory choose Search; the rest of the teams choose Rescue.
In Search, finding the buried dummy is quick and simple. Digging it out is another matter. Zev & Justin struggle significantly. Gary & Mallory finish the task way ahead of them.
Rescue is straightforward and the teams finish in the order they started. (Even though it is straightforward, Kent—who gets lowered into the crevasse—makes his part overly dramatic. Vyxsin misses a good opportunity: she could have just left him down there.)
The next clue tells the teams to chopper off the mountain and catch the train back to Zermatt. All the teams except Zev & Justin (who continue to struggle with the digging) catch the same train back. This renders the Detour pretty pointless, doesn’t it? Except for Zev & Justin?
Back in Zermatt, the teams have to go to a hotel where they will perform this leg’s Roadblock: the traditional Travelocity Gnome product placement task. This year the teams have to construct a gnome out of chocolate.
(This could be worse. They might have had to construct a Ford Focus out of chocolate. That would have taken a lot longer.)
The gnomes are constructed by “painting” the inside of two mold halves with layers of chocolate, hooking them together and filling the assembled mold with chocolate. The entire thing then has to be cooled in the snow.
During the task, the team members who aren’t competing get to eat a lot of fine Swiss chocolate. Well, except for Kent, who decides that even though Vyxsin is doing the task, he knows more about it. He keeps giving her a lot of useless advice. (
SKK: If he had said "oven" one more time, I would have changed the channel.
)
In between “painting” the layers in a mold half, the molds are cooled in a freezer. So the process is, paint a layer of chocolate in one half of a mold, put it in the freezer to cool while you work on the other mold half. Then repeat.
“Why,” you are asking yourself, “is Bucky giving me all of this detail that is starting to put me to sleep?”
There’s a good reason: in the middle of the process, somebody takes half of Flight Time’s mold out of the freezer. Big Easy accuses Vyxsin and, frankly, is a bully about it. Flight Time, on the other hand, is cool and simply re-makes that half of his gnome. But Big Easy keeps up his running commentary. Get this: he feels like somebody cheated (and believes that somebody is Vyxsin.) A Globetrotter, feeling cheated. Can you imagine?
Kent talks all sorts of smack about Big Easy, but not to his face, of course.
Vyxsin finishes her gnome first and the Goths get the clue, which is directions to tonight’s Pit Stop, to which they are instructed to walk on foot. Kent & Vyxsin immediately run outside and try to hail a taxi. This takes a while and eventually all the other teams head for the Pit Stop on foot, while Kent & Vyxsin finally get a taxi.
The order of finish is:
1st – the cheater Globetrotters, who win a trip to the Cook Islands.
2nd – Kisha & Jen
3rd – the Goths, who arrive third but are given a 30-minute penalty for taking a taxi
3rd – Gary & Mallory
4th – Zev & Justin, who manage to make their way to the mat while the Goths are still sitting out their penalty
5th – the Goths, who are eliminated.
While waiting out their penalty, Kent manages to blame Vyxsin for losing the leg. Before you feel sorry for her, however, when she is interviewed at the end, she says that she is sorry for the teams still in the race, because when she goes home, she “is taking the best team mate with me.” Huh?
What do you think? (Those of you who are still watching.) Who do you think will win? The Globetrotters won’t win, because they won’t get help from other teams, and they will almost certainly blow the race-recap-memory task. Kisha & Jen could win, assuming they don’t stop at a porta-potty on the way to the finish line. Gary & Mallory could win ... they’ve been sort of under the radar most of the race. Zev & Justin have won the most legs, so I think they have to be the betting favorite, don’t they?
