AMAZING RACE – 3/26/12

One of the best scenes yet was Danny yelling at Joey Fitness just for freaking saying hello to Vanessa and Ralph. He literally walked over to them and said “hi,” causing Danny to lose it. He starts saying, “Come on, Joey” about 12 thousand times and then starts nitpicking that he’s going to put them behind by doing stuff like that. The best part was the 10 minute fight they had while waiting for the elevator after that. Clearly, the 2 second “Hi” he said to Vanessa and Ralph didn’t actually set them back. Turns out that Vanessa is right behind them while they are fighting about it, which was also really funny. I’m just surprised that Ralph didn’t turn green and overturn a bunch of trashcans over the whole thing like the Incredible Hulk. Where was he while all this was going on, by the way? Injecting ‘roids behind the car? Anyway, I guess Danny and Joey Fitness made up quickly because almost immediately they are seen trying to hit on yet another ugly travel agent. Funny how all these agents reject them too. “You want to come with us?” “Uh…..NO.”

Our next scene is of the border agents in a taxi, having arrived at this Azerbaijan place. One of them looks at the ceiling of the taxi and declares that from the look of things, the sun should be up in about an hour. Not sure what’s worse: someone who looks at the sky and haughtily predicts when the sun’s coming up or someone who stares at a car ceiling and tries to predict the same thing. What was he seeing, stars up there? I was ready for him to pull out a spyglass or something like Jack Sparrow.

Apparently Azerbaijan is yet another country on this Race where people like to sit around in the streets playing instruments and dancing in goofy costumes. Is this really what happens in these foreign places? Is there anyone stuck working in a cubicle with a crap PC and annoying coworkers in these countries? Apparently not. They are dancing in the streets everyday like it’s Fat Tuesday in NOLA.

Phil next introduces the Fast Forward: Unloading 150 bales of hay into a certain pattern. Rachel and Dave and Joey Fitness and Danny head right there. The border agents say they can’t do the Fast Forward because they already successfully completed one last week. By the way, they aren’t that smart. They both have the stupid light on that asinine spelunker headlamp on even though the sun had already come up. Maybe they were still waiting for the sun to come up. I mean, they were the ones predicting the sunrise by staring at the vinyl top of a 1987 Peugeot. Maybe the car ceiling had the sun coming up later or something.

Camera next takes us over to Mark and Bopper’s taxi. Bopper talks for about 4 minutes before I realize that he’s actually speaking English. Then Mark starts puking into a barf bag. I really hope these two win this thing. Talk about the perfect strategy for not having anyone take them seriously. Take lessons, Nary and Jamie.

Rachel and her giant forehead are next complaining about having hay in her eyes and that she can’t see anything. Idiot Dave keeps throwing bales down at her and it’s literally raining hay down there. Honestly, I don’t think his intent was to win the Fast Forward. I think he finally found his chance to hit her and bury her in hay bales and he was going to take it. Dave explains the Fast Forward to us, which is awesome because this is only the 20th season we’ve seen it. We don’t quite have the hang of it yet. Dave says “We’re either first or we risk being last.” Yeah, thanks. Kind of obvious for most of us, but I guess there are viewers like Rachel and Brendon out there. Anyway, I was wondering why Dave was not coming down to help Rachel out. He really made her do the whole thing. Dummy was still throwing hay bales even right at the end when she was done arranging them. She really worked hard on that one. Her face seriously looked like she tried to tan on the surface of the sun after that task. It did pay off though, because she and Dave beat Joey Fitness and Danny. Joey Fitness starts complaining that he can’t believe “we got beat by a girl.” Danny looks over, contemplating. I doubt there were deep thoughts going on in that head but he did seem to think that Joey Fitness was blaming him. Of course, that was pretty clear. Joey Fitness all but came out and said, “We lost because YOU are a girl, Danny.” Anyway, they were left to start over at the back of the rest of the back. So unless there was a GTL challenge ahead of them, they were pretty much f’ed.

The rest of the teams next hit the Road Block: one teammate had to be submerged and escape from a helicopter crash simulation. Brendon decides to do the simulation. I was pretty much expecting Brendon to cry like a girl because his hair was wet or something. Rachel makes small talk with Vanessa all of a sudden, which was really awkward. She says: “Little Brendon just did an obstacle course in the water.” Anyone else wondering if she was referring to his anatomy and almost puked? Maybe she was high or something. Just no clue what she was talking about. She probably just wanted an excuse to say “Little Brendon.” He’s like seven feet tall, so I guess there’s only one other thing she could mean by that one and it isn’t a big surprise.

In typical Amazing Race fashion, once again, one team saved the teammate with an extreme phobia to do that very task on the Race. Why do they always pick the person who sucks and is deathly afraid of something to do the task? I don’t get it. Vanessa is extremely afraid of water, drowning, dying and confined spaces so she and Ralph thought it was a no-brainer for her to do the simulation. Must’ve been time for him to inject his ass again. There will probably be a makeup application task later on that they’ll have Ralph do instead, I guess.