Amazing Race finally went to Jordan—to do a slide puzzle?!

In its 33-season, 22-year history, The Amazing Race has never traveled to the Kingdom of Jordan, as Phil Keoghan announced from the stairs to their charter plane.

The pit stop was at The Great Temple, “among the most impressive pit stops in Amazing Race history,” Phil told us.

But it was also one of the least-impressive legs in Amazing Race history, or if that’s too hyperbolic, a disappointing leg to set there. It was ultimately passive, with three weak challenges.

As always, The Amazing Race’s cinematography showed off the stunning locations—the Wadi Rum desert and the archeological sites in Petra—and I have no doubt this took a lot of coordination and effort to create.

But the teams had basically nothing to do there. They were:

• flown to Jordan
• taken on a train to the desert
• driven further into the desert
• driven to Petra

“Teams have no idea what they’ll encounter next,” Phil said, as people on horses with swords charged the train while screaming. But what they encountered were cars to drive them.

Perhaps the heat was enough of a challenge? Perhaps they were limited with resources or challenges that could be done in such delicate areas? Perhaps the production crew is still worried about losing a team in the desert just before a sandstorm moved in?

It was all so anticlimactic. The train ride telegraphed that: The recreation of a Lawrence of Arabia scene, with people on horseback yelling and screaming and waving swords ended with one of them giving a clue to each team and welcoming them to Jordan by saying, “good luck, have a nice time.”

If I was to be charitable, the episode’s challenges honored both Jordan’s archeological history and filmmaking history.

But I was just disappointed: the Roadblock and Detour offered three super-weak challenges, and the leg had absolutely no other challenge, unless finding Phil at the pit stop counted, which no one seemed to have a problem with.

There was so little going on that I started to obsess over the bizarre face-mask usage—which may actually have an effect, as next week’s preview showed Phil telling someone they’d tested positive for COVID.

In the car ride to the Detour, the groups were inconsistently masked, in a way that made me think their departure groups resembled birth order:

• First group/child: properly wears their masks at all times in cars
• Second group/child: just does not wear their masks
• Third group/child: a complete mess—some on, some off, even in the same car, with Linton wearing his with one ear strap around his head, Ron DeSantis-style.

Phil told us the country was known for its more than 100,000 archeological sites, but The Amazing Race had its teams search sand for pretend and generic “spaceship debris,” a nod to Star Wars or Transformers filming there, maybe.

The “search an area for a small thing” challenge is a a very common Amazing Race challenge, though here they had the use of metal detectors. There were varied strategies—Derek ran around while David kept checking the same area—but compared to other versions of this challenge, it seemed to go quickly.

After a 90-minute drive to Petra, where they were just passengers, the teams encountered their Detour: set up a feeding station for a camel or complete a slide puzzle.

Wait, what? A slide puzzle? What is this, Survivor?

The camel one was not tricky, but just tedious: filling a basin of water, which required walking to and from the water source, and carrying four bags of hay.

Marcus and Michael fell behind as a result, and as soon as last-place Linton and Sharik chose that, I thought they’d be eliminated, as they were.

The slide puzzle was an image of—and set up directly in front of—the Palace Tomb, which led to a funny moment or two. You can’t get a bigger reference image than that!

Although I did not love this leg design, though I realize I may have not yet made that clear, it did provide for some movement: Derek and Claire went from seventh to second, and Luis and Michelle from fourth to first. Meanwhile, Emily and Molly fell from first to fifth. Some of that happened on long trips when they weren’t driving, so shrug emoji.

The biggest surprise for me was that Luis and Michelle came in first instead of being eliminated. With sudden attention to a team that’s kinda been ignored at the middle of the pack, I assumed they were being highlighted only to go home. But their manifesting worked.

I will try to manifest a more-interesting leg next episode, which will also be in Jordan, though I don’t think it works for things that happened in the past.

I suppose the teams deserved a bit of a break after the megaleg. Mostly, I’m giving The Amazing Race a hard time here because its other legs—in the distant past, for sure, but also this season—have set a higher bar.