A little disappointed in tonight's Race

Since it's pretty obvious they're not leaving the continent (notice Phil says at the start "a race" rather than "a race around the world"?), some of the usual equalizers are missing in this season of the Amazing Race. Normally you have very long and limited flights, train trips, etc. that allow most of the teams to catch up, but a flight from D.C. to Charleston just isn't quite the same thing. There are multiple options and they're all within a few minutes of one another. This forces the AR folks to artificially create equalizers or spacers, and I'm not liking it.

Sure they've always done the thing where there are two or three buses, planes, etc and the teams sign up in order for the earliest one. The difference is before there were always other tasks afterward that almost guaranteed the order of the teams would vary wildly between that point and the end of the leg. Not so tonight. There were two of those options right after one another -- two buses and eight slots to do the NASA centrifuge. There was no room anywhere for the order to change except for running faster to the sign-up sheet (or getting hopelessly lost between the building and the shuttle, but even the Paolos weren't dumb enough to do that.) Basically the order in which they did the centrifuge was the order in which they finished.

It was fine, but not very exciting. Don't get me wrong, equalizers are necessary and a good part of the show -- imagine if they weren't there, you'd have some team a full day ahead of the rest by week four or five. I just hope they do a better job of balancing them with random chance in the future.

(Boy did I feel stupid for choosing the mud bog in the detour! Only one team actually had an easy time completing in (go Gaghans!) but it shocked the hell out of me.)

Posted by tivogirl at 11:18 PM