A Change of Guard

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Friday 16 October 2009

The Amazing Race: Monkey See, Monkey Lose Passport in Cambodia

October 15, 2009 by Alana D.
Filed under Television

zev_justinamazingraceI’m here! I’m late! I know. Forgive?

So we’re leaving Ho Chi Minh city this leg to go to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Surely, since we spent so much time on Vietnam’s history last leg, Phil’s at least going to give us some salient Cambodian history, right? Phil? Khmer Rouge? Pol Pot? Genocide? No? Okay, moving on. . .

It looks at first as though Zev and Justin and Keri and Lance aren’t going to make the same plane to Phnom Penh as the other teams, but they made it at the last minute, and everyone ends up on the same flight. Lance screams “No cheap wins, bitches!” as he gets on the plane. I’m thinking that competition wasn’t the only reason the other teams didn’t want Lance riding with them.

Brian and Ericka have decided that the theme this season is “jungle.” You know, because of the zebra and the ducks. And because they are team Jungle Fever. Personally, a fake zebra and a flock of domesticated ducks screams more picnic-area-at-the-zoo to me, but far be it for me to keep Brian and Ericka from forcing another decades-old interracial reference on us. So, do you think that Brian and Ericka really think we care about their respective ethnic identities that much? Or do they just think that’s the most interesting thing about them? Well, they’re wrong. I mean, there’s. . . . . . . . .ummm. . . . . . .okay, they’ve got a point.

In Phnom Penh, the teams must find Hotel le Royal and find a picture of Jackie O. The teams aren’t alerted to the fact that the woman in the picture was Jackie Onassis, and it wasn’t necessary to figure that out. Thus, we ended up with several race participants telling the camera that the picture featured Queen Elizabeth (Herbert), some kind of princess (Sam and Dan), or a beautiful native woman with really attractive Cambodian features (Mika). Heh. Next time, producers, try Oprah.

Next task is Detour, where the teams must choose cover or wrap. Cover involves locating helmets, and then selling them to a family of four for 10 bucks, no less. In Wrap, the teams have to go a marketplace, locate a specific booth and get a scarf. Then they have to find a woman wearing an identical scarf. I would’ve chosen Cover, and I would’ve made the wrong choice. Only Lance and Teri pick cover, and they manage to complete it pretty quickly, but Wrap didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would, given that it involved a moving target. The best part of this challenge was when Herbert interviewed that his target was trying to get away from him and he had to chase her down. Wouldn’t it have been awesome if she’d dodged him, and then suddenly more of the exact same women appeared, and he had to figure out which one was the right woman, like that scene at the end of the The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)? (Call me, producers. I’ve got more.)

Next, they head to an imitate-a-monkey challenge, where one teammate has to do monkey tricks. Relax, it wasn’t as entertaining as it sounds. There was no feces involved, just a log on the ground that the racer had to walk across in three different, entirely unimaginative, ways. Still, Zev had some problems because apparently he couldn’t quite bend over appropriately. Maria also had some difficulties, because Maria is whiney and annoying.

In the end, Zev and Justin managed to pull ahead of the other teams and made it to the mat first. But apparently, without Zev’s passport. It’s completely unclear when they lost them, and I’m assuming the producers don’t know either, because usually the editors hip us to the loss of important items during the leg. This way, we can silently mock the contestants for not realizing that they’ve lost something important. This time, though, there was no mocking; just a sad, sad, Zev and Justin retracing their steps in Cambodia, hoping to find Zev’s passport.

They didn’t. Zev is wonderfully zen about it, though. He states that normally, he sticks to a fixed routine, and the race has taught him that he can do new things.

Me, I’m not so zen. Not only did my fave team go out in Round 3, but their elimination means I’m stuck with Maria for another week. Sometimes, this race sucks.

Season 15, Episode 3: Sean Penn Cambodia Here We Come (originally aired October 11, 2009)

For more on The Amazing Race, click here.

Sundays at 8pm ET/PT on CBS

Photographs courtesy of CBS

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