The More I Think About The Last Amazing Race Episode, The More Frustrated I Get

It’s been four days since I watched this last Amazing Race episode, and I have not cooled off. In fact, the more I think about it, the angrier I get. Amidst a live double u-turn, maybe the softest coming in last speed bump in the history of the show and multiple challenges that were way too easy, the frontrunners to win the season went home. The remaining contestants hooped and hollered on the map like it was some great victory, but judging by the fan reaction on social media, it certainly didn’t feel like a win for viewers or fairness.

I’m going to get into hyper specifics about episode 9 “I’m Not A Big Fan Of Olives,” which, by the way, should have been called “You’re Gonna Run Over A Turtle!” If you haven’t watched yet, bail out because there will be spoilers.

Still here? Great. Now, before I get into some aggressive complaining, I just want to offer a few thoughts on my basic perspective on the show so you know where I’m coming from. In general, I’m not a big fan of excuses or the type of person to moan about frontrunners going home. I don’t like when teams help each other too much or when a team goes home because their cameraman got lost, but for the most part, I think the players just need to suck it up and get the challenges done in front of them.

This past episode, however, had a serious game design problem. It was laid out in such a way that I found to be uniquely stupid and unfair. It was clearly biased against the frontrunners and designed to be frenzied and chaotic, and it was way too generous to the team that finished the previous non-elimination leg in last. So, I’m not mad that frontrunners Tucker and Eric Des Lauriers went home before the finale. I’m mad that they went home on this particular leg that was poorly laid out and biased.

Let’s back up and start at the beginning so I can walk through how many places I think producers messed up. During Episode 8, Joseph And Adam arrived last to the mat, but they were saved from going home because it was a surprise non-elimination leg. That happens from time to time on Race, and in general, I’m fine with getting that plot device once or twice a season. It often leads to really emotional and fun moments. As usual, they were told they would encounter a penalty the following episode.

Well, Episode 9 started with the teams flying to Athens, and they were all told to head to Pnyka Hill to meet host Phil Keoghan. They had to wait for all the other teams to arrive, which meant Tucker and Eric lost the entire lead they’d built up over the last four episodes. Phil then told the teams they were all going to vote to pick two teams to U-Turn.

Ordinarily, a U-Turn is a huge advantage to the team running in first place. Since they’re the first to arrive at the U-Turn, they can choose which, if any, teams they want to complete both sides of the detour, but a Live U-Turn is the exact opposite. Because every team is voting at the same time on who they want to penalize, there’s an overwhelming chance they will choose the team that's literally spent most of the race in first place. As the winners of four or the last five legs, Tucker and Eric were always going to be chosen as one of the teams.

As a penalty for finishing last in the prior leg, Joseph and Adam’s speed bump was that they would automatically get one extra vote toward them being U-Turned, but as a team that’s literally never won a single leg and finished last in the prior one, they were never going to get any votes to begin with. They’re one of the weakest teams left and no threat to get U-Turned. Because of that, their penalty was not a penalty at all. They didn’t lose a single second, and there was no scenario in which they were going to lose a single second because the teams were never going to vote for them.

So, to walk us through so far. Tucker and Eric built a lot of distance between themselves and the rest of the pack over the past several weeks. Production completely eliminated their lead (which they shared with Jas and Jag) by sending all the teams on the same flight and making them wait until everyone had arrived at the Hill. Then, they let all the teams vote on who should be slowed down, and they obviously picked Tucker and Eric as one of the teams since they’ve been winning almost every leg. Oh, and also, the team that should have been disadvantaged for being saved by the non-elimination leg, wasn’t disadvantaged in the slightest.

After the vote, the three strongest teams, Tucker and Eric, Jas and Jag and Kyland and Taylor, all were assigned to do both sides of the detour, while the weaker teams, Izzy and Paige, Joseph and Adam and Jack and Chelsie, only had to only do one side. The teams were then released to go do the detours: identifying olives, working as a busker or both. As per usual, Tucker and Eric and Jas and Jag immediately shot to the front of the pack again. They found the detours quickly and completed them very quickly, while other teams got lost and other teams took a half dozen attempts to get one of the detours correct.

Now, that might sound like a huge advantage, right? The detours were all really easy so getting U-Turned wasn’t a huge disadvantage. That’s true but also misleading. Everything during the first portion of the leg was so close together and so easy to do that getting lost and/ or failing a bunch of times didn’t really matter. Kyland and Taylor took six attempts to identify the olives, but because you could just change the identifiers and guess again, there wasn’t much time lost by messing up. The next road block of pushing a boulder up a hill didn’t matter either. All the teams seemed to do it very quickly and easily before being sent to another roadblock, where they had to memorize the Greek Alphabet.

This portion of the race was significantly harder and more complicated than every single other challenge the teams did during the leg. Not a single team got it during their first attempt, and you clearly had to run a fair distance between where you memorized the Alphabet and where you did the actual guessing so it was time-consuming. Tucker and Eric were the third team to arrive out of six, but unfortunately, they had a ton of struggles at the roadblock and wound up finishing it last. The next clue was to head to the pit stop, and by the time they got there, they were a few minutes behind and got eliminated.

Now, I’m not saying Tucker and Eric didn’t deserve to go home or that they didn’t make mistakes. Clearly, they were the worst at memorizing the Greek Alphabet, and had they finished in the same amount of time as everyone else, they would have survived the leg. They had their chance and are going home because they lost. No excuses.

As a viewer, however, it’s hard to watch that episode and not feel like producers really meddled and had a hand in who went home. They eliminated Tucker and Eric's lead which they had or shared for weeks, basically guaranteed they would get U-Turned, gave no penalty to the team who finished last week in last, made every challenge but one extremely easy and quick and then hit everyone with a really complicated memory challenge at the end. There was no driving, very little directions needed, almost nothing physical and no time to build any real distance between teams.

I love The Amazing Race and shows like it. It’s won ten Emmys and been nominated countless more times for a reason. This past episode, however, was not its finest moment, and the more I think about it, the more frustrated I get.