TAR S37 E6: Oh no, more stupid mistakes by production!

Hello again everyone, مرحبًا and I'm sure many of you were left less than satisfied with the structure of TAR S37 E6 in Dubai. This is a city that I know extremely well, not only have I lived and worked in Dubai back in the day, they even visited the place where I used to work - well, they were practically there, at the Mall of The Emirates metro station. I used to work there in 2006 to 2007, I have also returned to Dubai not so long ago on another business trip. This is the 6th visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on TAR US and the 5th visit to Dubai - they did do one season in the UAE which they didn't go to Dubai (S23, when they were mostly in Abu Dhabi), but it is clear that Dubai is a city they are fond of! There is so much to talk about; but first, we shall look at how the average ranking statistics have been shaken up after this leg. 

Average ranking after leg 6 in Dubai

• Carson & Jack 2
• Jonathan & Ana 3.33
• Alyssa & Josiah 3.66
• Brett & Mark 4.66
• Melinda & Erika 5.16
• Pops & Jeff 6.33 (eliminated in Dubai)
• Han & Holden 6.33
• Nick & Mike 7.5

The production team truly messed up on the fast forward format. 

It is nice to see Carson & Jack win another leg as I like them as a team, but I hated the format of this leg in Dubai. The only reason why Carson & Jack won this leg was mostly down to good luck - firstly, they had a good taxi from the airport which got them to desert camp in 4th place which meant they left in the first group on the camel ride in the morning. The only little bit of effort they put in was running the short distance from the clue box to where they had to sign up for the flights - there were four teams there and they were the first to get to the sign up board. That meant that only two teams had a realistic chance to go for the fast forward as only the first two teams who jumped on the first flight were running around the car park, looking for the sports car whilst the third jumper Alyssa had barely just landed. Since there was only one car that took the team attempting the fast forward to Deep Dive Dubai, that meant that once Carson & Jack had found the orange sports car first, they were guaranteed that they were going to win the leg as there was no way for another team to challenge them in the diving challenge. Now this sucks, I really don't like it at all. What they really should have done was to allow more than one team to attempt the fast forward since the Dive Centre is massive, you could easily have multiple teams diving at the same time and the first team that finds the fast forward will win, whilst the rest would have to go back to pick up where they had left off. So whilst it any kind of scuba diving is not easy (yes I've done it before and I found it very difficult), Carson & Jack knew that they could take their time and do it calmly given that no other team were there. This lacks the kind of drama that other fast forwards in the previous seasons had - let's take TAR S13 E8 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Two teams attempted the fast forward at the same time and there was so much drama, because the team that won were guaranteed victory as they could go straight to the pitstop whilst the team that didn't succeed were eliminated as they had fallen so far behind all the other teams after having wasted a lot of time trying the fast forward. It was a do or die situation, just the kind of drama that TAR thrives on and that drama was completely absent from the fast forward in this episode. At times, this episode had almost felt like a travel documentary about the fun things to do in Dubai, yes we want to see the best of each location featured on the race, but come on this is still a race!

Are there really that many sports cars in Dubai?

Yes actually, there are. Dubai is a very rich city and I remember my last business trip there, my boss decided to rent a car to do a day trip, the price between a regular car and a sports car wasn't that huge, so he decided to push the boat out and get a Lamborghini for the day. Oh I got so car sick as a result, it wasn't comfortable at all to be in a sports car like that as you're very cramped at the back and so very low to the ground. I've been there, done that, it is actually overrated. 

So many pointless activities in this episode. 

I would consider any activity that doesn't give the teams any opportunity to change their order by performing it better or faster than another teams as a pointless activity. Firstly, the camel ride was pointless, it was led by a guide and the racers were just totally passive; it was the kind of thing that many tourists like to do in Dubai (myself included, I have done those camel rides and got the photos) but why was this included in the race? Secondly, there was no way to overtake the team in front of you during the skydive due to health and safety - the skydivers had to be spaced out to avoid collision, that meant the order of the jumps were determined by the sign up board, so the real task was the short run between the clue box and the sign up board and that made me roll my eyes and go, oh come on. How ridiculous was that? At least the high tea task allowed teams which had great attention to detail to gain some ground and the eFoil roadblock required a high level of skill, we like tasks like that which allows teams to get ahead or fall behind. Han & Holden had their best ever performance yet in 2nd place because of Han's surfing skills but otherwise, this was not a well constructed leg. I would have made the teams do some kind of task the first thing in the morning to scramble up the order of the teams, such as making them solve a puzzle relating to the local culture and language, that would've been a far fairer way to determine which team actually became the first to do the skydive. You can still showcase all of these facets of the local culture whilst making sure that there is still always an element of competition in every part of the leg. 

Wait, no detour on this leg? 

Yup, it did seem a bit lazy to be honest. To be fair, I liked the high tea task at the Atlantis hotel because it involves great attention to detail. But all teams had to do the same task, there wasn't an alternative task within the hotel. I could think of loads of tasks to do in a hotel like that and it would be appropriate, given how important tourism is an important part of the local economy in Dubai. If one task is time consuming and requires a lot of attention to detail, the other side of the detour should be something very different - it could be a task which depends more on luck, for example, Phil mentioned that there were 90 pools in that hotel, the other side of the detour could be a luck based task where the task could involve finding a swimmer wearing a TAR themed red and yellow swimming cap in one of the 90 pools. There would be no skill involved, just plain luck as to how long it would take as you explore the many swimming pools. Having a detour would increase the chances of mixing up the order of the teams, but with all the teams doing the same task to the same standard, judged by the same French chef, the teams basically left in the same order they arrived in with very little drama involved. The most exciting moment during that part of the programme was when Pops knocked a chunk of cream off the log cake and the cameraman didn't even catch that crucial moment when it happened! You had one job - like seriously!

I visited that very same beach on my last visit to Dubai!

I went to the Burj Al Arab public beach on my last trip to Dubai because there are so few public beaches in Dubai! My hotel was inland, so whilst it had a rather nice pool, it had no beach access. The best beaches are all private property which are parts of hotels, resorts or private residences, so there are very few beaches left still open to the public. It is not even the nicest beach in Dubai, just one of the last ones that have not been snapped up by property developers there. 

Why did they route the teams via the Mall of the Emirates? 

The Mall of the Emirates is one of the few malls in the world with a massive indoor ski slope, Ski Duba,i though it took me about 45 seconds to get from the top to the very bottom of their longest slope. Ski Dubai has been featured in a few seasons of TAR across the TAR international franchise. Like I said earlier, I used to work at that mall in way back 2006-7. It was the nearest metro station, about 13 minutes drive away from the beach. From there, the metro ride is about 17 minutes, with trains running about every 4 minutes. It was a nice way to showcase the local public transport rather than have teams simply take their taxi from the beach directly to the pit stop - it did create some drama because Pops & Jeff missing their train led to them being eliminated as there was no way they could've won a foot race against Nick & Mike. 

Are we surprised that Pops & Jeff got eliminated on this leg? 

Not really, I'm sorry guys. Despite not being the weakest team going into this leg in Dubai, statistically they were not one on of the strongest teams left and I knew it was only a better of time before they got eliminated. They got off to a slow start in Dubai when they assigned the later departure time in the second group at the desert camp. After that, they just struggled at the very back of the pack, leaving the hotel in last place. They made up one place at the eFoil challenge despite the fact that Jeff did it with his shoes on - that was a bad idea, I'm surprised his instructor didn't tell him to take off his shoes. Good grief, they made a fatal error of judgment on the metro station..They even managed to leave the beach ahead of Nick & Mike who were in last place then, but then it all went so desperately wrong for them at the metro station.

Why didn't they just get on the train which was there? 

Please allow me to explain what happened there. The metro station at the Mall of the Emirates is not a complex station at all as only one line  (the red line) runs through it, so there are only two platforms. The Dubai metro system isn't complex unlike a city like Tokyo, New York, London, Paris or Berlin. There are only four lines: the red, the green, the tram and the Palm monorail - the main system only comprises of the red and green lines whilst the tram and monorail lines only serve local neighbourhoods. So unless you're at an interchange station, most stations are really simple and straightforward - you just need to know which direction you're going as there are only two platforms to choose from and they were already told to go platform 1. All stations in Dubai have signage in both English and Arabic, so there are signs that clearly show the words "platform 1". This is when it all goes terribly wrong for Jeff - they did find their way to platform 1, then he starts second guessing himself. He sees a sign with a number 4 and I think I know what that is. On the train platforms, there are these screens displaying the wait times for the next train. This information is in English and Arabic - so I am guessing that what Jeff saw was an information display that said that the next train (after the one that was there) was 4 minutes away. There isn't even a platform 4 at that station as there are only 2 platforms. Jeff then asked the passengers on the train "is this platform 1?" Now imagine this: you're riding the metro, you boarded the train a while ago and when the train pulls into a station, then some guy on the platform asks you, "is this platform 1?" The honest answer would be, "I don't know, I have no idea what platform we are on, I didn't get on the train at this station, so how am I supposed to know the layout of this station?" A much better question would be, "does this train go to Emirates Towers?" Anyway, the train doors closed even before the locals could have attempted to help Jeff. But if I was on the train, I would have ask Jeff, "where do you want to go to?" After all, none of the other teams who took the train had any difficulty in locating platform 1 there and getting on the correct train. That crucial four minute lead would have probably been more than enough to have kept them in the race, but ultimately, it wasn't Pops' age that led to their elimination, it was Jeff's silly mistake. Ironically, they were not even the worst team at this stage and Nick & Mike are still the weakest team left and yet somehow they are still in it. 

Do people speak English in Dubai? 

I have a complex answer to a simple question. Dubai is such an international city with 92% of the population there being foreign born expatriates from all over the world, so even if Arabic is the official language in the UAE, English is the default lingua franca that everyone uses to speak to each other. All signs in public will be in Arabic and English. However, I found that taxi drivers in Dubai speak very little English because they rely on technology these days - they simply enter the address into the GPS and follow the directions without having to speak a word to the passengers. I'm sorry to be blunt but the reason is obvious: this is a very poorly paid job that is done by poorly educated migrant workers from poorer countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and India who simply have not had enough formal education to learn much English, but they know just enough English to enter an address into their phones to plot a route. That is why some of the racers had huge difficulty in communicating with their taxi drivers and I encountered that situation as well when I was in Dubai. 

Can we talk about what happened last week please? 

There was so much talk on social media about the double U-turn vote on the last leg that I do want to revisit the issue. 

Was it fair for one of the strongest teams to be eliminated? 

There are two arguments which were discussed widely on social media, both of which are valid. Allow me to speak as someone with experience within this industry, hence I have a good understanding of how this works. The first theory is that it is totally fair because when you agree to participate in TAR, you sign a contract which states very clearly that you abide by the rules of the game as set out by the producers whether you feel like they are fair or not - the contestants have legally signed away their right to complain that they have been treated unfairly in the process. The producers are the judge, jury and executioner in this process and if you don't like the deal, then don't take part. That's the technical explanation as to why this is fair but the other equally valid argument that I wish to put forward is that of how the process needs to be perceived as fair by the audience because this is a product that's created for audiences to view and enjoy as a TV programme - if you upset your audience with a decision like that, then any decent producer would have to be honest enough to admit, okay we totally messed up, we made a bad decision, we should not have done that. I can tell you that within the industry, this kind of mistakes do happen and indeed, have happened before in the past but the producers will never admit it openly - why? Because they are always hoping that viewers will not really notice or mind, that they will simply accept it as part of the process that the game is inherently unfair, that you can never ever level the playing field to create a fair fight amongst the teams. Thus we do have a situation whereby it can be considered fair that Scott & Lori were eliminated under such circumstances simply because the rules of that double U-turn had already been clearly laid out for the teams, they knew what they were getting into and what was at stake. However, because so many viewers and fans were left very unhappy by the outcome, it is only fair to say that the producers have made some poor decisions here in the way this whole double U-turn was handled in that episode and we deserve better as fans. Thus it is a messy situation and if the producers had done a better job, people would have just said, "that's a great episode, we really enjoyed that". But no, if this is the kind of conversation we're having instead, then the producers have messed up.

Flashback to S31 E8, how did I feel back then?

Well you can read all about how I felt when I reviewed the original episode here, but I didn't mind it as much then because it got rid of a team that I really disliked - Rachel & Elissa. So whilst I didn't like the mechanism they used, I actually liked the outcome. But when that same process got rid of a team that I actually rather liked, then it angered me. 

What makes a strong team on TAR? Can we use a checklist to predict a winner? 

I have some criteria for the perfect TAR team: firstly the team must be physically strong as many of the tasks on TAR can be physically demanding. So you can be an older racer like Pops in this season who is 65 but he is very fit and has never ever struggled with any physical challenge so far. I would rule out teams who have at least one member who is overweight - when you put a fat racer up against much thinner, fitter, stronger racers, then it is not a fair fight. I'm not naming names here, but in recent seasons, we have seen a number of really quite fat racers and I thought they never stood a chance. Secondly, the racers ought to have had plenty of experience with international so they can hit the ground running when they are flown halfway around the world rather than just go into blind panic. This means that teams who have been too poor to afford international long haul trips are at a massive disadvantage in this process. Thirdly, teams who do speak a few foreign languages will have an advantage over those who are monolingual English speakers - this played a massive role in the last season TAR S36 when the winning team had a native Spanish speaker. Foruthly (and I know I will offend a lot of people with this one), the more highly educated teams have a big advantage over the teams which are less educated. TAR will involve challenges where you need to learn and memorize complex sequences very quickly and people who are highly educated are used to such challenges as part of their formal education and jobs, whilst those in more working class jobs are likely to do the same tasks over and over again without having to step too far out of their comfort zones to learn something new. Fifthly, the team must be fearless or at least be able to confront their fears, for example, even if you're very afraid of heights, you will still do the bungee jump to avoid elimination. Finally, the last criteria is a great working relationship that doesn't crack under pressure. Even if you have checked the first four boxes, your team can still self destruct if the racers turn on each other and start attacking each other instead of supporting each when the going gets tough. A winning team doesn't necessarily have to tick all five boxes here and a team who ticks all five boxes may be extremely strong but still encounter some bad luck along the way that stops them from winning, though it would be very unlikely to have any winning team tick only one or two of the five boxes on this list. 

So according to this checklist, can we pick a winner for TAR S37?

I am leaning towards Alyssa & Josiah at the moment, followed by Carson & Jack and Brett & Mark. Jonathan & Ana thrive when they're in the lead but we have seen how they totally freak out and crumble when they are under pressure.

Have we been way too harsh on Jonathan? 

Allow me be blunt here, I have read through a lot of the comments on Jonathan's behaviour on social media and the vast majority of them are scathing, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that most people hate him or at least have criticized the way he has behaved. It was hard to find anyone who has said anything nice about him and many have also commented on how Ana deserves a lot better. I am not here to kick a man who is already down, but the key social skill he lacks is tact. There is a form of self-censorship that we need to practice when in front of others because giving them our honest, blunt and uncensored opinion will often cause offence and we want to avoid that. Thus we choose our words carefully to see how that same message can be communicated without causing offence and if necessary, which parts of the message has to be left out. Let me give you a example, I saw a friend in the gym recently and I could see that he has put on weight. If I had just gone up to him and said, "you are so fat, have you weighed yourself recently? Why have you put on so much weight?" Now that would cause a lot of offence, upset my friend and destroy our relationship. But if I carefully steered the conversation towards fitness and stamina during our workouts without one mentioning his weight, then I can cover that delicate topic without specifically referencing the elephant in the room and in the end, he was the one who admitted, "yeah I know I have put on weight recently." These are social skills that we need to develop in order to navigate our way around delicate social situations even in our daily lives but when you put it all under the lens of reality TV and have every single tactless word captured on camera then I would say that Jonathan is at best naive about how he would be perceived and judged for his behaviour on the race. Jonathan is a software developer, so he probably just spends his days at his laptop writing code rather than dealing with other people - he is in a job which is vastly different from that of a sales or account manager who is responsible for fostering great relationships with the company's most loyal clients, a role which requires a lot of social skills. Jonathan instead is doing a job where he can have virtually no social skills but as long as he is brilliant at his job, he still can earn a lot of money and that's fair enough as we should all play to our strengths. But that goes a long way to explain why he is the way he is and why his social skills are so poor, it is not a valid excuse though and I'm not condoning it - I am just trying to help everyone make sense of the situation here. 

Okay, so Jonathan is autistic but does that make it okay? 

In his podcast he admitted to being autistic but I'm like, so what? I'm autistic too but I don't treat people in my life badly. If anything, I know my social skills aren't great so I tend to shy away from conflict but Jonathan does quite the opposite. We can talk for a long time about being neurodivergent and how being autistic impacts on how we relate to other people, but you can't go on reality TV, act like a complete obnoxious jerk to your own wife and then say, hey but it's okay because I am autistic so that's all cool and normal. No, it is not. Allow me to share with you an experience on my last trip to America to give this more cultural context, I turned up late at a restaurant as I had been traveling all day, I wasn't quite sure if they were still serving dinner or if I would be turned away. But this friendly waitress Debbie went out of her way to give me the best service there and she made sure that the kitchen stayed open long enough to cook everything I ordered. As the restaurant was quite empty by then, she even came by my table a couple of times and as she picked up on my British accent immediately, she started giving me tips about where to visit whilst in town. Overall, Debbie was your typical friendly American waitress who was brilliant at her job and you might say, yeah but she's doing it for tips, it is part of her job and I hope you left her a nice tip (which I did, of course). The reason why I shared the story of Debbie the friendly American waitress is because it is evident that we get a lot more out of our social interactions with people if we have the social skills to manage those relationships, if we know exactly what to say to please the other party. But my point is simple: the bar is set pretty high within the context of American culture where we have come to expect people to have decent social skills, if we can expect to walk into a restaurant and get nothing less than great service from the waiting staff, then we are going to apply those same standards to people who go on reality TV. But if someone happens to be autistic or simply have very poor social skills, I'm not saying that can't do reality TV but they ought to consider exercising a greater degree of self-censorship when a camera is in their face, lest they say something they regret as in the case of Jonathan, who has caused a lot of offence thus far. If you don't have the social skills to handle reality TV, then it is not a good idea to go on it, cause so much controversy then face a huge backlash. This begs the question: what were the casting directors thinking? Are they rubbing their hands in glee as this was just the kind of drama they wanted to induce? 

Wait so Alex, you're autistic too? 

Yes I am! It runs in my family, I come from an extremely autistic family, autism is in my blood and genepool. Here's the thing that frustrates me about the topic though, a lot of people confuse autism with mental retardation. Even my own mother (whose autism is off the charts) said to me, "you can't possibly be autistic, you did well at school, you went to a good university, you're not stupid." So many people wrongly equate autism with stupidity, when it is clear that autism doesn't effect your intellect. You can be a genius and autistic at the same time. So yes, this is something I can talk about.

Why is this situation so different from the real world then? 

Allow me to share a situation that I'm dealing with right now at work okay? So there's this guy who works at my business partners' company, he is extremely autistic and he is their chief technology officer, let's call him Mr CTO. He's a genius when it comes to the tech behind their brand but this guy has zero social skills and his autism is way off the charts. Never mind talking to other people, sometimes his personal hygiene isn't great as he would stay up all night writing code then walk straight into the first meeting in the morning without having taken a shower or brushed his teeth but hey, he is second to none when it comes to his technical abilities. Then we have the CEO of the company, let's call him Mr Boss and whilst Mr Boss isn't as brilliant as Mr CTO when it comes to the technology, Mr CTO needs Mr Boss to manage him, so Mr CTO can just stick to what he does best and come up with all of these amazing technological innovations whilst Mr Boss would be the one who speaks to the investors and the clients. In fact, Mr Boss admitted to me that he needs to keep Mr CTO away from the clients and the investors because Mr CTO had once spoken rudely to a client and it was a messy situation that Mr Boss had to clean up. I've met Mr CTO on a few occasions and he reminds me of the weirdo at school who had straight As but no friends. But that's fine, Mr Boss is in charge and knows how to manage this tricky situation with Mr CTO. So in the case of Jonathan, he works a tech job and is autistic, gosh he really reminds me of Mr CTO and whilst Mr Boss values what Mr CTO brings to the table within the business, he would never ever let Mr CTO out of his office to face the clients and investors - that's just how it is in the real world. If you want to do reality TV, you ought to have the same level of social skills and charm as Mr Boss. But putting Jonathan on a programme like TAR is like putting Mr CTO in the most important press conference of the year and letting him speak directly to your most important investors - that's at best a highly unusual, unlikely situation but that's exactly what is happening here. But of course, it isn't that fun or insightful to simply present real life to the viewers thus in the quest to create experimental and unique programmes, the casting directors would make the impossible happen by putting people like Mr CTO on a reality TV programme so he is no longer hidden away from public in the back office, but the lead character in your favourite show. 

Who will win the next leg in Bulgaria? Who will be eliminated next? 

The teams are off to Bulgaria next, a country I know well and have traveled to before. We know there  will be another double U-turn in the next leg, so it is going to be yet another unpredictable leg as the outcome will depend on who ends up being U-turned. It does look like it will be a normal U-turn board that is placed at the end of the detour, that means the team that finishes their detour the fastest will get to U-turn another team. So this is what I am predicting, one of the top teams will U-turn the team that is directly behind them in order to secure a win in Bulgaria, the U-turned team will then choose to target one of the weakest teams, just to make sure that a weaker team will have to do both sides of the detour, thus that is a strategy that will end up sending one of the weakest teams home. Statistically speaking, that would probably be Nick & Mike. I watched the previews again and we see some teams struggle with the driving: Carson & Jack were frustrated and lost, Jonathan & Ana seemed to be stuck in a ditch in a rural area and Holden really struggled trying to drive stick shift (and needed help from Jonathan in the carpark). In one of the previews, we see the teams carrying a very heavy load of wood in the Bulgarian countryside, so this suggests that it would be a task that would favour the racers who are physically stronger than the others - so I am going to guess that Brett & Mark will have the physical prowess to take the win in Bulgaria. The only other team who look very physically strong are Nick & Mike, but their record so far has been dismal and they barely survived the last leg in Dubai. So I think it will be a fight between Nick & Mike and Melinda & Erika for last place, but if it is going to be a gruelling, physically demanding task, then I think Nick & Mike will have the edge over Melinda & Erika, so it will be Melida & Erika who will be eliminated next since Melinda is the oldest racer left in this season. And how long would Jonathan & Ana's car be stuck in that ditch? But of course, I'm making these predictions whilst missing the most important piece of information which is what will happen at the double U-turn board, thus the outcome next week might surprise all of us. Okay, so that's it from me for now, many thanks for reading.