Andy DehnartAnd just like that, we’re down to the final three in the 14th season of the newly revitalized Amazing Race. In the most oddly dramatic ending ever, a bathroom break allowed obnoxious ass Jaime and her long-suffering partner Cara to make the final three, while Jen and Kisha were eliminated. The other two teams in the final two are always-strong Tammy and Victor, who breezed through China, and Margie and Luke, who I once rooted for but increasingly dislike.
- What better way to start an episode than by Jaime getting her head slammed in a taxi door? It just swung shut while she was bending down. After all the abuse taxi drivers and others have suffered, you could basically hear cheers from around the globe.
- Margie and Luke are now in stressed-out mode, which means they’re being obnoxious. On the plus side, Margie is now turning on her son’s bitchy (ooh, I went there) behavior. “You yell at me again, I’m finished,” Margie told Luke, and then said, “I just don’t want to hear him yell ‘moooom’ one more time.”
- Upon arriving at the fake pit stop, Jen said, “I am so over China,” and looked relieved that she was about to be eliminated. When Phil gave them their next clue, Kisha said, “shut the hell up,” and Jen looked like she was going to go slam her own head in a cab door.
- The Travelocity gnome reappeared, and would have been less annoying had the editors not included an overabundance of product placement gnome porn, however comical some of it was. The best moment came when Jaime tried to show her cab driver the clue written on the gnome’s base, and he freaked out because she thrust the gnome’s pointy red hat at him as if she was going to stab him–which for Jaime wouldn’t have been all that unexpected.
- When Kisha and Jen learned the Detour task involved getting makeup to appear like a man and a woman, Kisha said, “I think you should be the gentleman and I should be the princess. I’ve never been a princess my whole life, so maybe this is my opportunity to be a princess.” The editors included a quick shot of a skeptical-looking gnome, but the joke felt flat because it seemed like an obvious riff on her sexuality, something the show insists upon concealing.
- Speaking of concealed sexuality, Margie said that her son’s makeup work “made me look like Alice Cooper,” and also said, “I feel like a drag queen.” Luke said, “Mama, sorry I’m not a girl.” Awkward!
- I’ve never liked the U-Turn because it infuses the race with artificial conflict that doesn’t make sense in the context of the show. That was apparent when Phil Keoghan pointed out that the second U-Turn would not be blind, so the team who used it would be “held accountable to the team they slowed down.” Like, how? Are they going to vote the other team off, slip drug paraphernalia into their luggage so they get stopped at customs, or just slam their heads in a taxi door?
- Tammy and Victor U-Turned Jen and Kisha, and described their rationale when they wrote on the photograph, “Sorry! I can’t outrun you!” That was kind of a specious argument, since if Victor is leading the way, anyone could outrun Tammy and Victor, since they’d be lost.
- “Surely they know the name ‘taxi’ and they’re playing dumb,” Jaime said, frustrated again by the lack of communication. She even tried to claim that there was an “emergency” but a taxi still ignored her. Funny how taxi drivers don’t suddenly learn English when obnoxious cheerleaders pretend to have fake emergencies and scream the word “emergency” in English.
- Jaime said that they decided upon the makeup Detour because “we’re really good at doing our own makeup.” Now, if only someone would invent ugly concealer.
- Once U-Turned, Jen and Kisha were forced to do a difficult task: repeating customer’s orders in Mandarin to a chef. That resulted in a number of hysterical translations, and Jen saying, “We black, not Chinese.”
- Let’s play Guess Which Culturally Insensitive Demanding and Obnoxious Ass Redhead said this? “This is why I did not want to go to China. It sucks.” (Hint: The answer is not Cara.)
- After wandering around Beijing only to realize the clue box was right where they’d started, Jaime freaked out, and Cara said, “First of all, if we’re going to be defeatest, why even bother to continuing?” Jaime then said, “As if you haven’t been acting that way the entire time, Cara.” Cara stood there and made faces to the camera, as if she couldn’t believe this crap, either.
- On the way to the bird’s nest stadium in Beijing, Jen said, “Oh, I’m gonna pee on myself.” She’d completed the Roadblock task by washing down the fried scorpion, starfish, and other delicacies with lots of water, so she stopped at a porta-potty. And they came in fourth because of that, “seconds” behind Jaime and Cara, Phil said. Kisha, ever the supportive big sister, said, “I’m not going to hold this against her at all.” But she should definitely still buy her sister some Depends as a gag gift.
- Jen and Kisha’s elimination meant that Jaime and Cara now have the chance to be “the first-ever all-female team to win the Amazing Race,” as Phil told them. But if they do win (please, no), they will not, sadly, be the first-ever obnoxious, loathed team to win.