Hello again guys, that was a very disappointing finale good grief. We have had some nail biting finals in the history of TAR but in the end, it wasn't even close at all - there was little doubt as to which team would win. Will & James took the lead from the start and won by a mile, they left the Mardi Gras World warehouse before Hung & Chee even showed up. Congratulations to Will & James for proving me wrong - I was expecting the strongest team statistically to win but for once, the statistics were so wrong. But nonetheless, let's look at the average rankings at the very end of this season and I have included the average ranking of every team on the season to give you an idea of how they performed this season.
Average rankings for all teams in TAR S32
- Will & James 2.45 (winner)
- Hung & Chee 2.72 (2nd place)
- Riley & Maddison 2.27 (3rd place)
- DeAngelo & Gary 4.5 (eliminated in Manila, leg 10)
- Eswar & Arpana 5.44 (eliminated in Siem Reap, leg 9)
- Kaylynn & Haley 6.5 (eliminated in Hyderabad, leg 8)
- Leo & Alana 5.71 (eliminated in Almaty, leg 7)
- Michelle & Victoria 4.8 (eliminated in Paris, leg 5)
- Jerry & Frank 7.67 (eliminated in Manaus, leg 3)
- Kellie & LaVonne 9.5 (eliminated in Bogota, leg 2)
- Nathan & Cody 11 (eliminated in Tobago, leg 1)
Karma is a bitch on TAR.
So let's start by analyzing what these statistics tell us: Riley & Maddison finished a very disappointing third (oh boy, they didn't try to hide their disappointment at the finish line) despite being statistically the strongest team this entire season. I think they have only themselves to blame for this result because throughout this season, they acted as if they were so confident that they were going to win and they treated this alliance as a way to take their new best friends with them into the finals - this strategy only came back and bit them in the ass because they struggled in this final leg, starting in last and never moving out of last place. Given how much time they had wasted getting lost with a taxi driver from hell on their way to their first clue box at Louis Armstrong park, you could argue their fate was sealed the moment they picked the wrong taxi driver when they dashed out of New Orleans Airport. Nonetheless, if you were going to be in a race for a million dollars, you would much rather be racing against much weaker teams rather than the two strongest teams in the season. In this series, they came across as overly arrogant and have paid a high price for that error of judgment - to the tune of one million US dollars to be precise. Ouch. Now I know reality TV is never an accurate reflection of reality (oh the irony) and a lot of how we perceive the racers does depend on the editing, but I am judging them on their decision to target the weaker teams (such as Kaylynn & Haley in Hyderabad) instead of the stronger teams who were in their alliance. Let's move onto a tweet from DeAngelo - who has really hit the nail on the head after having watched the finale.
What did DeAngelo tweet?
DeAngelo tweeted, "I've watched the season finale of @AmazingRaceCBS twice and the challenges were subpar and unentertaining at best! But couldn't tell if I felt this way if I was eliminated or if it was actually trash!?" Well, I can answer that question - it was actually trash. Allow me to point out to you why it was so awful and this is when we blame the incompetent production team (and not the racers). Firstly, a good leg needs to have quality challenges which are difficult enough to make some teams struggle whilst other teams who have the right skill, mental dexterity or strength can finish it faster and overtake the other teams. We got very little of that in this finale, the taxi ride to Louis Armstrong park was boring - it was at night, we could only see the park gates, they couldn't even go to the park and they did absolutely nothing there. Then collecting the beads on Bourbon Street didn't involve a lot of skill - they just had to wait for the revelers to throw them enough beads and this little detail about "only the bigger beads count towards the 50 you need to collect" didn't challenge the teams much - hence they left in exactly the same order they arrived in and that sucks! That was a terrible task but wait, it gets worse, the teams couldn't even run to the next location which was the beignet cafe; no they were escorted there by a marching band who set the pace so we couldn't even have the uncertainty of a team possibly getting lost on their way there. I know you're trying to portray: New Orleans as this fun, colourful party city well known for their Mardi Gras carnival, but this is TAR - we need suspense for an exciting final and so far it has been painfully predictable. I bet the producers were thrilled that Riley & Maddison got lost on their way to Louis Armstrong park as at least that provided a bit of drama in what was otherwise a very linear, boring finale. But wait it gets so much worse.
Luck played too much of a factor in this finale.
I understand why they wanted to feature an aspect of New Orleans culture in making the teams search through dozens of king cakes in order to find that little king cake baby - I really disliked this task. The problem with this task is that it is the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack; very little skill involved, it boiled down to a question of luck. Will had the advantage of knowing what he was looking for but even after Riley saw what Chee had found in the cake, he still was stuck with this 'needle in a haystack' situation. Yes I know there are tasks when the producers through in a challenge that mostly depends on luck rather than skill just to level the playing field (who could forget the rice cakes challenge in Vietnam from TAR Australia S4 E3), but should they really be doing that in a final? I don't think so for a simple reason: you want a fair outcome, you want the winning team to have rightfully won the leg because they excelled in a difficult task (often a memory challenge) rather than because they got lucky in a 'needle in a haystack' type challenge which depended mostly on luck. This roadblock definitely determined not just the winner but the order the teams would finish in because the rest of the challenges involving the bridge swing, the rappel and the final task involving the giant globe at the Mardi Gras World warehouse were so straightforward. So these are very poorly chosen tasks for a finale - I am very disappointed not just in this episode, but in the season in general and I don't know why the people on social media are wasting so much time bitching about the alliances in this season when they should be criticizing the production team for some very poor decisions. Don't put these producers on a pedestal as if they can't do any wrong, they mess up so often!
I thought we got rid of gross eating challenges?
Will did make such a big fuss about it. On one hand, I just wanted to scream at him, "it is for a million dollars, just be grateful it is a piece of fried dough and not something gross." We have had so many gross eating challenges in the history of TAR: in TAR S5 E4 in St Petersburg, Russia when the team member doing the roadblock had to eat a kilogram of caviar. Now I actually really like caviar but it was insane to make anyone eat that much caviar, only for them to vomit it right out as their stomachs protested. Then in TAR S7 E3 in Las Heras, Argentina (I've been there but I digress), the roadblock involved eating an insane 1.8 kg (4 lbs) of barbecued meats and there was a lot of vomiting. But the worst has got to be TAR S6 E6 in Budapest, Hungary where the roadblock was eating a bowl of extra-spicy soup - in an unforgettable TAR classic moment, Freddy managed to puke into the soup, rather than into the bucket next to him and thus had to complete the task of drinking the mixture of puke + soup left in the bowl. But it's not just TAR US that does these gross eating challenges, in TAR Latam S1 E8 in Cartagena, the roadblock consisted of "eating a bottle of local candies", but that bottle was insanely huge and most racers ended up vomiting. Yucks. Then in TAR Canada S6 E3 in Ganges, each team had to eat two massive blueberry pies - cue the vomiting. Then there are the gross ones like in TAR China S2 E10 in Penglai, each team member had to eat two live sea cucumbers before getting their next clue. That was beyond cruel to both the sea cucumbers and the racers. In TAR France S1 E2, one of the detours involved eating scorpions and cockroaches.Then in TAR Asia S5 E5 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the roadblock involved eating a massive dish of roasted rat, centipedes, bats, scorpion and lizard. Now I'd like to see Will eat that for a million dollars! But do we enjoy watching racers eat till they throw up? Hell no - we don't! That's certainly not my idea of good entertainment.
How did the teams get from Manila to New Orleans?
Now this is quite confusing because there are no direct flights between the two cities, so the most obvious and direct route would be to fly from Manila to Los Angeles where the teams can then connect onto a second flight to New Orleans without taking any detours. In fact, we see footage of a Philippine Airlines aeroplane on the tarmac at Manila airport but then confusingly enough, they show an airport information TV screen that read "Delta 2297 to New Orleans" - if you look up that Delta 2297, that flight actually operates between Atlanta and New Orleans, it doesn't go to Manila at all. So I thought, that was odd. Then I saw on that same screen the line that read, "the next flight departing from this gate is Delta 2237 to Portland, OR." So a quick check on that reveals that this is a flight between Los Angeles and Portland and they were on a flight that was also a code share with Korean Air 7201 - which is a scheduled flight between Los Angeles and New Orleans; so I can only conclude that Delta 2297 used to serve Los Angeles as well but given that this season was filmed two years ago, Delta has since made some changes to their network and perhaps this is as a result of the fall in demand during a pandemic. So that screen that we see must have been taken from LAX, but it was shown out of sequence whilst the teams were still in Manila. But wait, when the teams touched down in New Orleans and ran out of the airport, it was already nighttime - that flight was scheduled to have landed at 3:30 pm Los Angeles time but New Orleans is two hours ahead, so that would be 5:30 pm in New Orleans . The sun would set at about 5:03 pm in New Orleans on the 16th December (yes I checked) hence it was a night leg. Yes, I am a travel geek, I love details like these.
TAR has visited New Orleans before.
The hardcore fans amongst you will remember that on TAR S8 E4, the pit stop for that leg was at the Preservation Hall in New Orleans. That was the really weird season which they tried something different with families of four racing around mostly just the United States; it didn't work, the dynamics were wrong and they have stuck to their original formula since.
Am I disappointed with the outcome?
Well yes, but I am very disappointed specifically with the construction of this finale but Will & James earned their victory fair and square. They didn't make any major mistake in this leg but I was frustrated that there was just no way for the other teams to catch up after Will & James found the tiny baby in the king cake. Most seasons end with an epic memory challenge, one that is supposed to be more difficult than any of the other tasks encountered in the season as a befitting finish to the season. In the finale of S31, we had variation on that when the teams were faced with an extremely complex assembling task that required so much attention to detail - that wasn't a memory task but it did work well to give us an extremely close final race between the top two teams. But in this season, they already did the difficult memory task in Manila on the previous leg, thus it was highly unlikely that they would do yet another memory challenge in the finale. Furthermore the final task was so straight forward - all you had to do was know what the map of the world looks like and it's not like they're making the teams recall some intricate detail from their race, even if you don't remember the map of the world too clearly, you can still work it out as a jigsaw puzzle. If they had saved that super difficult music-themed memory challenge till this leg, then at least Hung & Chee would have had a good chance to catch up with Will & James, thus creating a far more exciting finale. So I can't fault the racers, I can only blame the production team for their shoddy work. Like I said before, all three teams are extremely strong - it's just that Riley & Maddison had the taxi driver from hell and Chee was really unlucky when trying to find the baby in the cake so making the victory for Will & James even easier.
Will & James were the only team who raced with their bags to the finish line.
I noticed that Will & James were the only team who still had their bags during this final leg in New Orleans. The other teams must have checked their bags in on the flight to New Orleans and simply left them at the airport, many teams do use that trick to lighten their load on the final leg, given that you can simply return to the airport a little later and chances are, all your bags will be at the lost luggage counter. But their bags weren't an issue at all for them and it would have only been a big factor if it came down to a foot race, then the teams without the heavy bags are more likely to be much faster.
All in all, was I happy with this season?
Hell no - it was a very disappointing season. The cast were great, but they were let down by the production team who made so many poor decisions and when you're dealing with a long running series like that, the hardcore fans like me will have high standards. If I were to compare this to season 31, then I must say season 31 was much better from a production point of view. This is what I mean when I say we must hold the producers to account - they have big budgets and they owe it to the loyal fans to produce a good show. The bullshit lies about the mega-leg and city sprint being new just shows you how lazy and incompetent the production team have been this season. The fans deserve so much better.
Other LGBT winners of TAR
Will & James are another openly gay couple who have won TAR - there are so many LGBT racers/couples who have done TAR across the global franchise so I can't list them all individually here, but let's just have a look at the LGBT winners who have been on the race: TAR Australia S4 was won by Tim & Rod. Over in Canada, last year TAR Canada S7 was won by Anthony & James (who were such likable racers), TAR Canada S5 was won by Sam & Paul and TAR Canada S4 was won by Stephanie & Kristen. In TAR America, past LGBT winners include Chip & Reichen from S4, Kisha (of Kisha & Jen, sisters) from S18, Josh & Brent of S21 and of course Scott (of Brooke & Scott) recently from S29.
Proposals during TAR
Will popped the question and James said yes - what an epic way to finish the race! Can you imagine if they have came in second or third? Would Will have proposed as well under those circumstances? I believe this is the fifth proposal on TAR US: Aaron proposed to Hayden on S6 E11 Xi'an, China - they did that after they got eliminated, finishing 4th that season. Chad proposed to Stephanie on S17 E8 in Muscat, Oman. Just as well he chose a picturesque seaside location to propose as they only finished 5th that season. I've been to the very spot where that happened, but I digress. Then in S26 E3 in Phuket, Thailand, Matt proposed to Ashley at the pit stop - they finished 5th that season. And most recently, in S30 E5 in Les Baux, France, Lucas proposed to Brittany at the pit stop - they finished 5th that season. Ah but I also remember that in Amazing Race Ukraine S1 E11 in Niedzica, Poland, Oleksiy proposed to Olena at the pit stop and she accepted. Of course, in all six proposals were successful and that is the kind of reality TV magic that you just can't script.
So, what is happening to season 33?
If you don't know already, they filmed three legs of TAR S33 this year before suspending it due to concerns over Covid-19. This is all over the news as it was a pretty big deal, so I'm only divulging information that was gleamed from all the news coverage of the suspension of TAR S33. The first three legs were run in Europe and that was in late February when countries started closing their borders due to concerns over Covid-19; the production team then decided it was in the best interest of the racers and the crew to suspend filming and for everyone to return home at once. I suppose it was the right decision because so much planning goes into each episode and what if you turned up in a country but faced all kinds of restrictions due to Covid-19, how are you going to film under those circumstances then? We have no idea if and when they will resume filming - would they start all over again or will they pick up where they left off? What would be the fairest approach to this extremely unusual situation that we have only found ourselves in because of a global pandemic?
But wait, there's TAR Australia S5
We don't have a confirmed date yet but filming has completed on TAR Australia S5 in November 2020 and this was run entirely within Australia for the first time - this was also the first TAR to be shot during the pandemic and it does demonstrate that you can make reality TV programmes even during the Covid-19 pandemic. But of course, you must take into account the fact that Australia has done incredibly well to cope with Covid-19 and the infection rates there are so low now that they can do a lot of things that just aren't possible in Europe or North America at the moment. So in this season there are 14 teams (yes 14, that's a lot) in this season so we can definitely expect some twists like double eliminations. No I won't be blogging about that season because the main reason why I feel I have the right to bitch about the teams on TAR is because I've been to many of these places before that TAR visits, but for a race around Australia, I think I would incur the wrath of so many Australians if a non-Australian were to start telling them what they should have done in their own country. So if it was an international season with them visiting various countries around the world (like they did in TAR Australia 4) then yeah, I would have blogged about it. But nonetheless, I do still look forward to watching it. We still have no news on TAR Canada, but I live in hope. Fingers crossed - I do always enjoy TAR Canada very much.
So that's it from me - I think it would be a pretty long wait before we will have another American TAR but hopefully, life would return to normal in 2021 at some stage and we can enjoy more TAR in the near future. For the readers who are just here for my TAR posts, I do write about other stuff you know? Leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.
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