Note: This blog post will cover the events of Season 7 of The Amazing Race in great detail, thus spoiling it, and may also contain spoilers on previous seasons.

After The Amazing Race’s 11-month-long hiatus following Season 4, it came back in a big way. Season 5 was a smashing success, and production was spurred on to churn out the next few seasons at a breakneck pace. Season 6 premiered just eight weeks after Season 5 concluded, and Season 7 premiered a mere three weeks after the end of Season 6! And while we have not yet reached the most steady period of TAR history, Season 7 does represent the zenith of the series’ popularity – at an average of 13.05 million viewers per episode, Season 7 was the most-viewed season in Race history, and as of 2019, I don’t believe that it will ever be surpassed in that regard.

Just what was it that made Season 7 so popular? Was it mounting TAR excitement with all the new seasons, or perhaps a spectacularly great season? Actually, the answer to that question is quite simple. It’s a very significant point that influenced many things, including the viewership, about this season:

Rob & Amber

TAR production had made a single foray into ‘stunt casting’ (casting somebody specifically because they have some degree of fame from elsewhere) before this point in the show’s history, in the very short-lived case of Allison & Donny, and for Season 7 they made a second attempt – one that proved (from the standpoint of attracting new viewers) wildly successful. Survivor couple Rob & Amber came into the season fresh off a very publicized run on Survivor, and they completely stole the show from the get-go. The show focused on them, locals recognized and helped them, they got some lucky breaks and did very well on the whole, numerous other teams obsessed over them, and they lasted the entire season as the primary villains to boot. I’ve no doubt that they were the reason why Season 7 was the most-viewed season in the show’s history – and there are many fans who hate Season 7 because of their prominence in it.

Just why did they have such an impact? Why were racers, locals, and viewers at home so obsessed with them back in 2005? Coming in and first watching this season in 2013, as I did, or 2019, as my wife did, it’s hard if not impossible to understand the context of this notoriety just from watching the season, especially for viewers who aren’t familiar with Survivor and its history. So for the sake of other newer fans, who may not understand the full story, I’ll do my best to explain what made them such a big deal.

Their Background

Note: The following segment will contain spoilers for seasons of Survivor that featured Rob and/or Amber – skip it if you don’t want to read those!

Season 7 of TAR filmed at the end of 2004, and aired early the next year. Earlier in 2004, Survivor aired its eight season, All-Stars, featuring eighteen returnees from previous seasons. Nowadays, Survivor definitely occupies a niche in television – while it has a sizable, dedicated fanbase, it’s nowhere near the popularity of really big-name shows, and is not really part of the mainstream. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anybody discussing the show out in the ‘wild’, and it’s not a show whose happenings will be headline news, even in the entertainment industry.

Back in the early 2000’s, however, Survivor was a big deal. The final episode of the first season, back in 2000, drew in over 50 million viewers, and while those sorts of numbers couldn’t be sustained for very long, it maintained strong popularity, even in the mainstream, for a number of years afterwards – far more than TAR ever had. Survivor All-Stars was at the tail end of that period, but the show was still a big deal in those days – a big enough deal that the TV Guide magazine featured cast members for that season on the front cover, with the big cast reveal as the cover story. Survivor All-Stars was a ‘big deal’ kind of season when the show was still popular, bringing back a variety of the biggest and/or most beloved characters in the show’s history up to that point.

Included in that cast, among contestants like the earliest, biggest heroes and villains, strategic pioneers, and even several winners, were Rob and Amber. And Rob and Amber were generally regarded in the Survivor fandom (from what I’ve gathered) as two of the least All-Star-worthy contestants. Amber was a background character in her original season, not accomplishing much of anything and serving mostly as a sidekick to a more prominent character, and reportedly was the backup casting choice for a backup casting choice! Rob was a bit more memorable and prominent of a character, but out of all the All-Stars cast members, had made it the least far in his original season. Rob and Amber were two of the least noteworthy contestants on the season – then they became a couple on the island, ended up dominating the game, voting out and humiliating more beloved characters, and ultimately ended up as the Final 2 of the season. (The ultimate result: Rob had personally burned too many people, in a show where a ‘jury’ of voted-out contestants decide the winner, and thus Amber was awarded the victory in a controversial decision where many fans contest that she didn’t deserve it. However, Rob proposed to Amber, and she accepted, at the live reunion show immediately before the final result was revealed.)

So, back when Survivor had worldwide popularity and was a big deal, on one of the most hyped-up seasons ever, Rob & Amber were the last two contestants. Many people loved them, and their love story, while many people hated them, not least because they came as ‘less deserving’ contestants and humiliated the ‘more deserving’ stars. Six months later, they started filming The Amazing Race 7; less than a year after winning a million dollars and getting engaged on national television, they appeared on TV screens as cast members on TAR, vying for another million dollars.

Hopefully, if you’re a newer fan and didn’t understand what the deal was with Rob & Amber, that summary has given you a better idea. And now on to discussion of their impact on TAR itself…

On The Race Itself

Has there ever been a team that shaped as much of their season as Rob & Amber did here in Season 7? Up to this point in the TAR timeline, I would say no. Later on? I’m currently not prepared to give an opinion one way or the other, as there have been some other pretty high-profile teams over the years, but Rob & Amber are pretty high up there. Between the other teams’ focuses, recognition from locals, the storylines, and the strategy, almost every aspect of the season revolves around them, leaving a big, indelible mark on the season.

I just explained above why exactly Rob & Amber were such a big deal at the time, and this certainly doesn’t just apply to the viewers of Season 7. Quite a few other teams, and even locals/other travelers that they meet along the way, also recognize them immediately and have their own opinions about them. Among the teams, that opinion is generally pretty negative – and as certain teams immediately start talking about them, confronting them, and wanting to beat them, the show’s editors seize on this and make sure that this Rob-&-Amber-mania becomes at least a significant portion of those teams’ characters. To a certain extent, Debbie & Bianca, Susan & Patrick, and Lynn & Alex all serve as satellite characters to Rob & Amber. In some cases, especially the third leg (Lynn & Alex) and the beginning of the fourth leg (all the early teams), teams set it as their biggest priority not to do well for themselves in particular, but just to best Rob & Amber, with their triumphs or defeats largely defined in terms of that particular struggle. While this tendency is a lot less prominent in the late season and the other seven teams (thankfully) aren’t really shown to obsess over them much if at all, it’s still a very noticeable aspect, especially at the beginning of the season.

And then, of course, there are the other people along the way, non-racers who, instead of being annoyed and wishing for Rob & Amber to fail, are starstruck and happy to help them. Martin in the first leg helps them through half of the leg to catapult them into the lead, and later on in South Africa, when they’ve made a big mistake and have been knocked to the back of the pack, a large number of locals recognize them (especially Amber, it seems) and happily offer their assistance – the one woman even insisting on helping them through the rest of the leg. (In fact, Rob & Amber’s fame in Africa was enough that there was an unaired scene (included on the DVD extras) where they were looking for a map book in an airport shop and saw themselves on a magazine cover!) Both of these cases are definitely helpful for Rob & Amber, and, given that they stem directly from their stardom, are definitely controversial. You can’t deny that in these two legs, Rob & Amber had a significant advantage like no other team before them ever had – and arguably that no other team after them did either! While they were in little to no danger of elimination in either of these cases, and, based on interviews, the later cases of locals helping them were not due to their Survivor fame, it’s still a notable point, and amplifies the prominence of Rob & Amber on the season.

With all this help, plus their bouts of good fortune, plus the multiple teams out to get them, plus Rob’s natural tendency to play the villain, it’s no surprise that Rob & Amber take their spot in the season’s narrative in the part of the villains, all season long. Early on, as previously mentioned, multiple teams are out to get them and Rob is in full-on scheming mode. Later on, the fan favorite teams of Meredith & Gretchen and Uchenna & Joyce are not aligned with them, and Rob starts taking the opportunity to talk smack about them. Throughout the season, Rob deliberately acts cocky about their chances of winning, and in multiple cases where they start to fall behind, they catch a lucky break to jump right back into the thick of things. Combine these factors with many fans’ fatigue from seeing Rob & Amber, and a large portion of the fanbase very much did not want to see them win the Race. I’ve no doubt that a Rob & Amber win would have gone down as extremely controversial – and then, when their victory seems all but assured in the final episode, a combination of a giant equalizer, Uchenna & Joyce’s unlikely admittance to their plane to Miami, and getting stumped by the last clue of the Race results in Rob & Amber’s demise. The villains get their downfall, and it’s a great way to end the season.

All of these other factors, and we’re still not quite done with Rob & Amber’s impact on the season. You see, while once again I disagree with fan ideas that a team was a strategic trendsetter, it’s nevertheless undeniably the case that Rob & Amber were the most prominent team in this season’s strategy. Obviously, in the second and third episodes, Rob has a field day with scheming – instructing a bus station employee to not tell about an earlier bus, bribing the bus driver (and withholding his cut), and of course quitting the meat-eating Roadblock and getting away with it in spectacular fashion (although telling locals to withhold information from others is the only one of these strategies that will be seen again). But even after Rob quiets down on the plotting and scheming and starts relying more on strategies established in previous seasons, he and Amber are at the forefront of all of these. Nobody is running around looking for better flights more than Rob & Amber (even if they fail in one instance of this), nobody else is using the Ferning strategy like they do in Jodhpur and London, and nobody else points out that they’re leaving their bags behind to get through the final city faster (although admittedly Rob & Amber were the only team that had bags at this point!) While they may not have brought much Survivor strategy to the Race (and indeed seemed to be taking a break from the social game this season), they were still the most strategic team of the season.

With all that said about their impact on this season – what is the overall result of this impact? Is it positive, negative, or something in between? Among the early seasons of the Race, Season 7 is one of the most divisive, with many online fans loving it but many others hating it, and I think that among those who hate it, many hate it because of Rob & Amber’s influence. They can’t stand the other teams obsessing about them, the show focusing on them so much, and I suspect that many of these fans watched live after Survivor All-Stars and thus were tired of them already. When my counterpart Logan blogged Season 7, he ranked Rob & Amber dead last specifically because there was just too much of them at one time between Survivor and TAR, and I suspect that many anti-Season 7 fans dislike it and them for that reason as well.

But as someone who first watched Season 7 nearly ten years later, with no prior Survivor knowledge… I don’t think it was that bad. It could most definitely stand to be toned down, with less obsession about and focus on them, but I don’t find it unbearable, never did, and especially on this viewing (I believe my fourth viewing of the season) recognize that having such big stars on the season adds a certain degree of interest. And my wife, watching Season 7 for the first time almost fifteen years after it aired, stated definitely that she enjoyed having Rob & Amber on the season. If you were a Survivor and TAR viewer watching live in 2005, then I can see how you’d be sick and tired of having Rob & Amber on your screen, but in the present day, I think that overall they’re a good part of the season. I could certainly deal with less of them, especially the other teams’ obsession with them, but I think the good outweighs the bad. They provide interesting and entertaining moments, they’re big characters not quite like anything we’ve seen up to this point, and their rise and fall at the end of the season makes for what is, in my opinion, an even better hero-vs.-villain showdown than the oft-praised one of Season 5.

Rob’s Strategic (Mis)Adventures

Did you think I was done talking about Rob & Amber? Not quite yet, because ever since my previous rewatch of this season a couple of years ago, I’ve realized that, for all that he’s touted as a master strategist, Rob really doesn’t do that impressively on this front after the first three episodes of Season 7. As I mentioned earlier, after the third episode he’s largely done with plotting and scheming and sticks to more established strategies like Ferning and airport scrambling, but he and Amber also start to struggle, sometimes at the hand of their own strategic mistakes, and later continue to make questionable decisions:

-Leg 4: Not so directly strategy-related, but they get lost trying to navigate themselves at the beginning of the leg, only making the flight that the top teams are on because they just so happened to stumble across the Route Marker.

-Leg 5: Their first real strategic mistake comes here, as they decide to go for the Fast Forward despite other teams having a head start out of the airport. Not only does this, combined with their getting lost again, result in them arriving to the Fast Forward after Ray & Deana, but then, already second in line and with Ray & Deana giving up as their only hope of getting it, they decide to just wait it out, hoping to get a chance and not leaving until Ray & Deana officially win the Fast Forward. The combination of getting lost, going for the Fast Forward and failing, and then just waiting around for who knows how long puts them definitely in last and looking to be in trouble until the locals start to help them. (To their credit, Rob & Amber do learn from this mistake and avoid duplicating it in the ninth leg.)

-Leg 6: Meredith & Gretchen are easily the physically weakest team in the Race, and are not doing well right now. You’d expect a savvy player like Rob to want to keep the weakest team around for as long as possible, rather than have to face only the stronger competition, but Rob seems to want to knock them out as soon as he can instead, refusing to give them money as most of the other teams do.

-Leg 10: After generally doing pretty well for several legs, we get a particularly fun turning of the tables, as Rob & Amber end up in trouble when Rob tries to mess with Meredith & Gretchen by referencing an earlier flight that (he thinks) doesn’t really exist. While Rob & Amber do engage in their own flight-checking and trying to find something earlier, they’re for some reason unable to pick up on the actual earlier flight that Meredith & Gretchen and Uchenna & Joyce are able to find – and the latter teams are only spurred on to find this flight because of Rob’s “mind games”. As a result, Rob & Amber are forced to race for last place for a leg.

-Leg 11: Rob completely wastes a Yield with nonsensical logic, choosing to yield Ron & Kelly when they’re an hour and a half ahead of the two trailing teams. While this Yield does work out well for us as viewers by making the end of the episode that much closer, it accomplishes absolutely nothing for Rob & Amber, as thanks to their lead Ron & Kelly are done with the Yield and at the Roadblock before either other team arrives, despite getting stuck in traffic for a long time, and consequently finish the leg in second place anyway. And Rob’s logic for using the Yield? “If we Yield Uchenna & Joyce, and Ron & Kelly still end up last in this leg, we’ll have wasted the Yield!” Um, okay? But how would Ron & Kelly end up last in this situation, and how does Yielding them instead make this situation any better? The smarter decision in this situation would have been to yield Uchenna & Joyce so that hopefully they’d get knocked out, leaving the much weaker Meredith & Gretchen to race to the end. As it is, for somebody who’s supposed to be a master strategist, Rob ends up looking pretty incompetent in this case.

In addition to all of these individual blunders, Rob & Amber end up doing awfully poorly at the social game for a team that came over from Survivor. Granted, they never were going to be able to do the best in that regard, given that a lot of teams were predisposed against them and didn’t even want to talk to them. But Rob & Amber clearly don’t try especially hard at it either, as evidenced when they don’t even know Meredith & Gretchen’s names at the beginning of the sixth leg! It seems that they took a vacation from this aspect of the game during the Race, and while it’s true that you can get by with a subpar social game in TAR, and Rob & Amber did just that, it also, much like with Joe & Bill back in Season 1, didn’t do them any favors.

So once again, a team that’s lauded as strategic pioneers in the Race ends up looking to me to be a much weaker team in terms of strategy then their reputation would suggest, even if they also did a lot right in that department.

A Season Of Moments – and Few Flaws

And now, after 3,300 words, I’m finally done talking about Rob & Amber on this season, and ready to discuss the rest of the season.

One thing about Season 7 that’s always stood out to me is the number of memorable moments on the season. For me personally, that’s usually what I think of first when I think of Season 7 – a large succession of great and/or interesting happenings, with some other stuff in between. You have two footraces for last place in the first two legs, the epic drive through the Andes, the four-pounds-of-meat Roadblock, Gretchen falling in the cave, the orphanage visit, the introduction of the new non-elimination penalty, Brian & Greg’s car wreck and subsequent epic comeback, Brian & Greg’s Pit Stop entrance in the seventh leg, Joyce shaving her head for the Fast Forward, Rob & Amber and Ron & Kelly getting left in the dust when Rob taunts Meredith & Gretchen, Uchenna & Joyce falling way behind in the final leg, Uchenna & Joyce getting let on the flight after the gate was pulled away, and to top it off, Uchenna & Joyce begging for money right outside the Finish Line location to pay off their taxi driver.

Having all of these standout moments is a definite strength for the season, but it also raises the question: Just how good is the season outside of all of those moments? After my first viewing of the season, I had an overall impression that it was great, in large part due to those moments. I left my second viewing, however, feeling like the season wasn’t that good or interesting outside of those moments. I enjoyed it more in my third viewing, and came into this one with a more positive impression, but once again largely remembering the moments.

This time, though, I thought the season held up well outside of those moments. It certainly helps that Season 7 boasts not one, not two, but three great teams that last a decent while and significantly boost the season while they’re in it. But I think it also helps that, aside from the overexposure of Rob & Amber, the season was rather light on flaws, improving on some of the shortcomings of the preceding seasons. The Race finally got over its persistent issues with mid-leg equalizers this season, as while most legs featured equalizers (usually due to travel) at the start, no leg after the fourth had an equalizer after a major task until the final leg itself – and the three mid-leg equalizers in the first four legs all maintained some separation between the teams! And while only the seventh leg featured no equalizers at all, many of the equalizers in other legs were only partial, putting some teams on flights together, but not putting everybody in the exact same position, and that was a welcome improvement over Season 6’s dismal showing on that front.

Season 7 improved on the preceding seasons in other ways, too. After the flood of bickering couples in Season 6, this season only had two, one of which was gone by the halfway point – even though once again six out of the final seven teams were couples, they were by and large much more pleasant this time around. We also had a genuinely tense ending to the race for the first time in four seasons – while it’s true that the second-place team once again never came that close to catching up in the final city, Uchenna & Joyce’s unique situation at the finish line allowed for much more doubt than the previous three finishes had. And unlike recent winners, Uchenna & Joyce weren’t tainted by a variety of unpleasant moments or a turn towards the villainous side near the end – they were heroes through and through.

Season 7 is one that’s full of memorable moments, but the rest of it is solid as well, making it quite a good season on the whole.

What’s With the Route?

One of the more dubious distinctions that Season 7 holds is in its route. Excluding the upcoming Family Edition, which is in many ways an anomaly of a season anyway, this was the only season of the Race not to truly circumnavigate the globe. Those who watch casually may well not notice, but instead of proceeding approximately eastward the entire time to make a full trip around the world, Season 7 doubled back after the Indian legs, heading back westward for the rest of the season, leaving the route as a sort of circle on one side of the globe, instead of a circle around it.

This has garnered some criticism, and I’d say that it’s a reasonable complaint that the final teams didn’t actually travel around the world, as that knowledge does take away a bit from the Race’s epic feel. But ultimately, did it make any other aspect of the season worse? I don’t think it did, and so the weird route that this season follows is only a small mark against it in my book.

On Penalties from Quitting

The first quit of a task took place in Season 1, when Nancy & Emily quit the leg 9 Detour and were subsequently slapped with an unforgiving 24-hour time penalty that knocked them out of the race. Quitting a task in the first season was very much a death sentence for a team, and after this instance, nobody quit a task when they weren’t already in last place and ready to be eliminated… until this season.

The meat Roadblock in Mendoza is a pretty good task in its own right, but thanks in large part to Rob, it also offers us a good look at the rules for quitting tasks after the 24-hour penalty was apparently removed. The new penalty is still nothing to sneeze at – 4 hours of just waiting is pretty steep, and you have to wait to start until the next team arrives, which adds an unknown amount of time to the total. On the other hand, 4 hours is a significant downgrade compared to the old 24-hour penalty, and, as we saw demonstrated in this case, is not the guaranteed elimination that 24 hours is – while Rob guaranteed his and Amber’s survival by ensuring that other teams quit after them, the other two quitting teams also were able to finish ahead of the two teams that had fallen significantly behind. The decision to quit a task is still not to be taken lightly, but it no longer equates to quitting the entire race.

The question is, was this change a good one? From a strict competitive and completionist standpoint, one could argue that 24 hours is a better way to do things – according to this argument, the point of the Race is to race through all the destinations and perform all the tasks, and if you can’t do one of them, you don’t deserve to continue. While I can understand this point of view, I would side with the opposite viewpoint, the one that recognizes that the potential for teams to quit tasks without being automatically doomed makes for a more interesting and enjoyable show, on the whole. Would I want to see easier penalties, and a bunch of teams quitting tasks each season? No, but when it’s an occasional thing like in the third episode here, and one that that still carries a significant price, I think that having teams quit a task is a nice change of pace. (Plus this is a case where the decision to quit actually makes a lot of sense, as four pounds of meat is a ton to try and eat and I can understand not thinking you could do it in four hours.) Quitting tasks will pop up again from time to time, but it will never really become a trend, and I think this status as an occasional occurrence is the best way for it to be.

A Shift in Focus

Like many TV shows, The Amazing Race doesn’t have the same feel to it throughout its entire history, but instead the feel of the show, and the focus of the racecourse design and editing, changes over time. We’re still far away from the biggest such changes, and Season 7 is much more like Season 1 than Season 31, but at the same time, by this point in the TAR timeline, the show’s focus has definitely changed from the way it was at the beginning of the series.

The earliest seasons of the Race were primarily about the travel aspect and the teams themselves – we’d get long sequences devoted to watching teams get from point A to point B, even if it didn’t require a lot of airport scrambling or whatnot, and they would be a frequent occurrence. Much of the rest of the time on the show was devoted to expanding on the teams themselves, learning more about them and unfolding their stories. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bemoaning that this is already dead by Season 7 – indeed, we still have focuses on big, cool trips like the drive through the Andes this season, as well as bigger obstacles like big airport scrambles that teams have to get through, we still will have focus on the teams, and these aren’t going away anytime soon. But by this point in Race history, these focuses have definitely diminished, and in their place is a heightened focus on the tasks.

Many of the tasks in the first few seasons feel like an afterthought as much as anything else. A lot of them (especially in Season 1) don’t do much, if anything, to affect the finishing order, and they don’t feel like as significant of a part of the Race as they do later, like in Season 7. A Roadblock late in the leg might not manifest itself until very late in the episode, and take only a few minutes total to show, especially in cases where it only takes a couple of minutes to perform! But around the time of the first major changes to the Race, in Seasons 5-6, the challenges started to become more prominent. Season 5 introduced two types of big, sometimes hard-to-get-through tasks, the big eating task (as opposed to the smaller quantities that would show up a couple of times in the earliest seasons) and the needle-in-a-haystack task. As I mentioned in my Season 6 blog post, the tasks really started coming into their own in that season, with more significantly challenging tasks, and during these seasons the tasks accordingly started to occupy more airtime and prominence.

While I don’t think this shift in focus is quite that cut-and-dried (even in Season 3 and 4, the tasks were beginning to become more prominent, and I don’t have a clear mark in mind where I can say definitely “This is where the tasks were better”), that overview covers the general gist of it – and by Season 7, the shift had definitely taken place. We’re now at a place in Race history where we have a nice balance between the tasks, the travel, and the teams. Tasks are more interesting than in the earlier seasons, but we still get significant travel content as well, and in my opinion no single aspect is overdone. Eventually, the focus will shift further in the direction of tasks, to the point where we’ll have seasons where the travel aspect of the race is virtually nonexistent. But that’s still a long way off yet, and we’ll have a good long stretch of seasons with the current balance. It’ll continue to move a bit more towards tasks and away from travel, of course – that’s just the natural progression of the Race’s focus – and there’s still some improvement to come for the tasks, but the balance will feel largely the same for a long time yet.

Personally, while I also love the feel of the early seasons, the current balance is probably my favorite overall feel for the Race. It helps that it’s the same general balance that I was first introduced to the show with (even if the feel outside of that balance in focus will change quite a bit before we get to the point where I jumped in), and I like being able to have both good challenges and good travel segments.

But it is interesting to note that even at this time, there were people who didn’t like the direction the show had started to go. While the bigger focus on tasks is less of a stated factor than other changes, like stunt casting and the new twists, this article published after the airing of Season 7 provides one such interesting viewpoint to read. (Many thanks to u/PresidentLap on Reddit for first finding and posting this article.) It really drives in the point that, while from a perspective like mine that covers a larger span of seasons, Season 7 can still feel like the early days of the show, it still had significantly changed from the show’s origins. That’s how the Race’s run ended up going – after Season 4, the show will not remain static, at least not for long, but will continue to change. For my part, having seen the large number of quality seasons that came after Season 4, even if I don’t think that all of the changes the Race made were necessary or good, I’m glad that it did make those that it needed to in order to continue to survive.

The Progress of Twists

It’s now been a few seasons since two of the biggest twist modifications to this point in Race history debuted – the introduction of the Yield, and the reduction of Fast Forwards. At this point in the TAR timeline, how are those twists faring?

The Yield, unfortunately, is still a twist that suffers from underutilization. Even after production reduced the number of Yields in Season 6 to try and encourage their use, only three of the six Yields in the past two seasons were used, all showing up later on in the seasons. The inherent problem with the Yield is that there are still many situations in which it is more advantageous to not use it when you have the opportunity to do so – a team that withholds their Yield avoids angering any teams, and can still use it later on if they needed to, and the benefits from using it are often marginal, and always uncertain. In most cases, if you’re not fighting for last place, there’s no real reason to use the Yield, unless it’s late in the Race and, like Chip & Kim or Rob & Amber, you want to try and knock out the toughest competition, or, like Freddy & Kendra, you just want some good old-fashioned revenge.

This problem – the combination of getting on another team’s bad side and the frequent lack of significant personal benefit – is inherent in any twist that allows one team to purposely impede another team. Eventually, as the Race goes on, teams as a whole will become much more willing to fight against each other in this fashion, and this problem will diminish. But it will take a long time for that shift to take place, and even writing in 2019 I’m not entirely sure that it will cease to be an issue.

(As an aside – when I write about the frequent non-use of the Yield being a ‘problem’ or ‘issue’, I’m speaking specifically from the perspective of it being utilized and actively making for a more interesting show. While a Yield going unused is problematic for the Yield as a twist, from a larger perspective I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing. Teams trying to trip up and block other teams is never going to be something I specifically think needs to happen more.)

Meanwhile, while the Fast Forward is not and never will be the great strategic aspect to the Race that it once was, I think that by Season 7 it has settled comfortably into its new role. It’s now a first-place lottery, usually won by the first team to get its clue, that only shows up a couple of times per season, and the challenges have scaled appropriately. No longer do we see the relatively simple tasks of the early days, like building a puzzle with a picture of the Pit Stop or hiking up some snowy hill, but instead the tasks are in some way especially frightening, difficult, or unpleasant – like here in Season 7, where the two tasks are crossing a cooling tower on a tiny, harrowing bridge, and shaving off all of your hair. With few exceptions, that will remain the standard for Fast Forward tasks from here on out.

I’ve already written at length in this blog about why I prefer having a Fast Forward in every leg, so I’ll bypass further writing on that point, and instead say that – while it is unquestionably inferior to the former option – the current Fast Forward situation is also enjoyable for what it is. Particularly in cases like the fifth episode of this season, where multiple teams go after it, it can provide an interesting diversion, and as long as the tasks stay suitably interesting and difficult, it’s a worthwhile one as well. Unfortunately, it will continue to decline in later seasons, but for now we have this decent if not ideal setup to enjoy.

However, I would also posit that, from a strategic standpoint, teams would almost always be better served to not go for the Fast Forward when there’s only a couple available during the Race. In the end, what does it provide (in a best-case scenario)? A free leg win, for a team that was already in a stronger position to begin the leg than some others. That’s not all that big of a bonus, and in another leg or two it will be completely cancelled out by equalizers. Meanwhile, if a team is unfortunate enough to be beaten to the FF by another team, or unwilling to go through with the task, they’ll be set significantly behind. So far it hasn’t actually knocked any teams out of the Race, as Rob & Amber were able to make up ground and Brandon & Nicole in Season 5 were saved by a non-elimination, but that’s a looming threat that should be considered by any team that wants to take the plunge. Back when there were eleven or twelve Fast Forwards offered in every season, that wasn’t nearly so much of a threat, because frontrunning teams could use it later and had less of an incentive to go for it, but when there’s no reason to hold back except for worrying about getting beaten to it, that reason becomes much more compelling. Between the risk of falling far behind, the likelihood of having to do something decidedly unpleasant to take the FF, and the lackluster rewards of actually winning (Uchenna & Joyce got a measly two minute lead in exchange for Joyce shaving her head!), I just don’t think it’s worth going for it.

Format Changes in Season 7

Season 7 doesn’t feature any really big changes to the racecourse, but we do see the expansion of one twist, the enshrinement of another, and the debut of a TAR staple.

The non-elimination penalty is steepened. “Give me all your money” might be a clear and significant penalty that would give teams a harder time, but at the same time, it never actually affected the final results of any legs in the first two seasons of its existence, and in general wasn’t very interesting to watch. Production decided to address this for Season 7 with two modifications – one subtle, one big.

The more subtle, common-sense expansion is explained by Phil’s new phrase, “You need to start the next leg of the Race with zero dollars to your name.” The practical implication of this new rule is that teams can no longer beg for money during the Pit Stops, as happened a couple of times (like with Brandon & Nicole at the hotel in India back in Season 5). This is more of a rule patch than anything else, solidifying the effect of the penalty by covering up a mild loophole that teams could use to alleviate it. It makes sense, it’s fine, and ultimately it barely affects the viewing experience, so I’ll leave it at that.

The second, much more significant expansion to the penalty is that Phil will now also take all of the non-eliminated team’s possessions, except for the clothes they’re wearing and their passports (and perhaps a few other non-aired essentials). With this expansion, not only does a team lose any extra money they may have saved and have a harder time getting where they need to go in the next leg, but they also lose all of their things and have to go through the rest of the Race in significantly less comfort. From a Race results standpoint, this is fairly meaningless – it’s possible that a team might have some possession that helps them get through a task more quickly, but it’s not particularly likely, and this new aspect to the penalty won’t be stopping a team from coming back and surviving the next leg. Instead, the whole point is to provide a more interesting, and sometimes entertaining, viewing experience, and from this standpoint I think it’s a good addition.

I’ve criticized the “give me all your money” penalty before, so why would I support “give me all your possessions?” The real distinction is that teams need money to get through the Race, so they have to beg locals/tourists for money – not only funding a show with a million dollar grand prize from random passersby, but also creating moments that in my opinion are too uncomfortable to be placing the teams in. Teams don’t need their possessions to get through the Race, and so don’t need to beg locals for any – and that’s borne out here, as nobody does beg for possessions except for Kelly’s request to borrow lipstick (which I would say is hardly a necessity, but what do I know about that?).

And the new penalty does provide good moments. The two later non-eliminations are more skimmed over, but Meredith & Gretchen having to give up all of their belongings on top of everything else they’ve been through in the fifth leg is a top-tier dramatic moment, and makes it that much more of a low point for them. Then Uchenna & Joyce provide them with some extra clothes, providing a heartwarming moment and building up their image as heroes of the season. (At least Ron & Kelly also made a donation of clothes, according to post-race interviews.) And after the penalty is unveiled, we move on from the more dramatic moments from it and instead get more humorous moments as teams grapple with the potential to lose all of their stuff. Lynn & Alex (well, Alex at any rate) pile on the clothes in case of a non-elimination not once, but twice, while Brian & Greg decide to take the opposite approach and give us one of the greatest Pit Stop entrances in Race history.

On the whole, this non-elimination penalty (colloquially known as Mugged for Elimination) has both its good points and its bad points. Losing money and possessions leaves a team more vulnerable, and can give us a better look at how they react to it, giving a more personality-driven experience. We get the humorous, like the aforementioned Pit Stop entrance, and we get the dramatic, like Meredith & Gretchen’s aforementioned low point or – in a case where money very much becomes an issue – Uchenna & Joyce’s struggles in the final leg. The final leg of this season displays both sides of the penalty at its height – on the one hand, wondering how Uchenna & Joyce can get the money they need for so much taxi travel provides fantastic drama, and watching them try to make it one step at a time, not knowing how they’ll make it farther and on the brink of despair, is absolutely compelling television. The drama of the very end, where they’re at the Finish Line but need to pay their taxi driver and don’t have the money, is also amazing to watch and makes for an exciting end to the season.

But at the same time, I personally found it very uncomfortable to watch Uchenna & Joyce forced to beg people to give them money that they didn’t truly need. While the generosity of some people can be heartwarming to see, I can also just feel the agonizing humiliation that they must feel asking for money, knowing that the people they’re asking are suspicious of their motives, probably having been in those shoes themselves before. Being forced to hear a guy tell them that “Begging ain’t the way to do it”, when they no doubt wouldn’t be begging in any other situation, has to be incredibly painful. And as I’ve said before, the fact that these people are just taking money from random people to fuel their quest for a million dollars, when production could easily have provided them with those funds, just doesn’t sit quite right with me – especially when Joyce asks a woman for money, she complies, and then asks “Can you tell me what I’m donating for?” (Although from later interviews, I’m led to understand that the woman was made aware of the situation and still agreed to give the money.)

And finally, the current non-elimination penalty just doesn’t do a good job of affecting the race results, which in my opinion should be the primary function of a penalty for coming in last place. Yes, in the final leg of this season we got some prime drama because Uchenna & Joyce didn’t have any money – but they still won anyway, and that was the exception rather than the rule. In fact, during the past five seasons, only one team has come in last the leg after being non-eliminated (Don & Mary Jean in Season 6), and I don’t think the penalty had to do with that. Ultimately, I think that Mugged for Elimination has too many negatives and doesn’t hurt a team Race-wise enough to be an ideal penalty. After some time, it will go away, and I think that’s for the best.

The To Be Continued leg is cemented as a new Race element. The To Be Continued leg first showed up last season, as a last-minute patch job by producers to cover for the fact that begging is illegal in Hungary. In that capacity as a one-off thing born of necessity, I was okay with it. However, in this season, production deliberately plans to have what would normally be a Pit Stop turn out to just be the midway point in a double-length leg. The practical effect of this is that the leg becomes a non-elimination leg with zero penalty, immediately followed by a second, full-length leg. To seal the deal, teams are forced to wait for most of the day to board a train to continue on, ensuring that they’ll all be stuck together and the previous leg’s worth of racing will have had no effect whatsoever. (As a reminder, in these cases I treat the two “halves of the leg” as two separate legs, since that’s what they are in all but name.)

The only benefit I can see to this way of doing things is a very limited amount of shock value – surprising some viewers who thought a Pit Stop was coming, and surprising the teams who thought they were going to get a chance to rest. Removing the rest between legs no doubt makes things somewhat more exhausting for the teams, but it’s not a really clear effect or one that particularly impacts the show. In all other respects, this is simply a regression to the days before non-elimination penalties, giving an extra break to whatever team happened to finish last. The fact that in this, and almost every single other To Be Continued leg across the show’s history, all teams are equalized after the fake Pit Stop, rending the last leg pointless, seals the deal on this being a bad twist. It results in having one leg be completely meaningless – yet for whatever reason, production seems to love this twist, and To Be Continued legs will continue to be seen for an indefinitely long period of time. Too bad…

Travelocity makes its debut as a sponsor of the Race. The Race had sponsors as early as Season 2 – from that season through Season 6, we’d see various sponsored prizes or tasks. American Airlines and Royal Caribbean gave trips as prizes for winning legs. There were also some little product placement challenges or segments, like when teams used a T-Mobile phone to call home in Season 3, or the Kodak challenges (and EasyShare digital camera prizes!) in Seasons 3 and 4. But all of these sponsors were gone by Season 7, and there had not yet been any sponsors that stuck around for a long time. That changed this season.

The travel site Travelocity provided several trips this season as leg victory prizes, and in the tenth leg, teams had to find a Travelocity Roaming Gnome in an early challenge and would carry it around for the rest of the leg, with a highlighted Travelocity prize for one lucky team. These will all become staples of the show – in at least almost every season (maybe even every one) from now on, there will be a leg where teams have to find a gnome and cart him around for the rest of the leg, and Travelocity will continue to be a featured sponsor and provide trips as leg victory prizes. As of this writing, Travelocity has been a featured sponsor for nearly 15 years and 25 seasons, which is truly impressive and speaks to how much a part of the show it became. There have been other featured sponsors – a couple that have lasted only a single season, another one that lasted over five years – but they’ve all eventually gone away. Not Travelocity, and at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a sponsor for as long as the show goes on.

Season 7 is where they first enter the picture as a sort of element of the Race, and so I figured it was appropriate to list that in this section, since the Roaming Gnome leg does become a new element. As far as overall impact, it doesn’t really affect any teams’ chances of doing well in the leg it appears in, but it gets TAR some the extra sponsorship dollars that it needs to keep running, and the gnome is in general a fun addition to the legs he appears in. As a result, I have no problem with this new element.

Summary

Things I didn’t like about this season:

-An excess of focus on Rob & Amber. Even if it didn’t bother me a lot on this viewing, it still isn’t a good thing.

-Rob & Amber’s focus results in many of the teams being a bit underdeveloped.

-Most of the legs in the second half of the season were pretty lackluster and felt rather quick once teams arrived in their new destination.

-The route turns back midway through instead of going all the way around the world.

-The Final 3 non-elimination leg returns.

-The To Be Continued Leg becomes an official thing.

-The Yield is almost completely pointless this season.

-Despite its expansion, the non-elimination penalty continues to be bad at actually affecting results.

Things I liked about this season:

-Three great teams in Brian & Greg, Meredith & Gretchen, and Uchenna & Joyce. No earlier season has a trio of teams this good, in my opinion.

-Uchenna & Joyce and Rob & Amber make perfect heroes and villains, respectively, at the end of the season.

-A final leg that’s actually tense and exciting after three seasons of lame finales, and a very satisfying conclusion.

-Mid-leg equalizers are scaled back a ton. Less equalizers on the whole even if most legs did have some form of them.

-Thanks especially to the double-length premiere, it does feel like we get to know each team at least a little bit.

-The new non-elimination penalty makes for some good moments.

-Not very many weak legs, and even the weak legs aren’t completely boring. The bottom of the range of leg quality this season is better than in most.

-A lot of memorable moments, including quite a few tight finishes.

-A lack of really glaring flaws.

Leg Rankings

13) Leg 8: Khwai, Botswana – Lucknow, India (A little bit of flight drama at the beginning of the leg, but it’s not much and the leg plays out extremely quickly once the teams arrive in India. The second flight arrives a mere eight minutes after the first, but there’s no chance for the trailing teams to make up even that little ground, and we barely ever even see them in the same place as the leading teams. The Yield does nothing, the Roadblock is boring and seems pretty quick, and while we do get a few fun scenes from the tea Detour, nobody goes for the other option and the tea option doesn’t seem to offer opportunity to gain or lose significant ground. It’s probably a good thing that this is the leg that’s rendered pointless thanks to being a To Be Continued leg.)

12) Leg 12: London, UK – Montego Bay, Jamaica (Just a quick little leg before the final one, and it really does feel like it. After everybody flies to Jamaica together, there’s only three taxi rides, a quick limbo challenge, and a fairly linear Detour. The limbo challenge is a neat idea but needed a more fleshed-out route the next day. Uchenna & Joyce successfully catch up at the Detour, but all three teams seem to leave very close together indeed, leaving it up to bad fortune in the taxis to determine the leg results. Even though it doesn’t cost them that much time, Uchenna & Joyce’s flat is enough to put them firmly in last place with no hope of catching up this leg, which does feel a little unsatisfying. Not much to this leg on the whole.)

11) Leg 9: Lucknow – Jodhpur, India (The midnight train clue and subsequent day-long journey are interesting, as is the wedding celebration that the teams get to witness in the middle of the night. But once the new day begins, this is another leg that runs very quickly and offers minimal room for teams to separate. The elephant task is mildly interesting but not especially so, and Meredith’s struggles to push an elephant with Gretchen in it is the only way that any team falls behind at it. Camel racing has a few fun moments, but again all four teams are extremely close together at the end of it, leaving almost no room for error so that Lynn & Alex’s taxi driver getting lost is a death sentence for their time on the Race. Uchenna & Joyce taking the Fast Forward is a great dramatic moment, but the design of the FF as related to the rest of the leg is quite poor – all they get out of it is a measly two minute lead, and only nine minutes ahead of Meredith & Gretchen! This leg was simply too fast and didn’t allow for enough separation.)

10) Leg 10: Jodhpur, India – Istanbul, Turkey (Rob’s taunting of Meredith & Gretchen resulting in them + Uchenna & Joyce getting a lead for the leg is great. The two more likable teams push to the front for once. This leg is solid, but for the third leg in a row it feels like it’s too short once teams arrive in Istanbul and doesn’t allow for enough separation. The Roaming Gnome makes its first appearance and is solid and unobtrusive – the last place team getting the leg’s prize to compensate for their non-elimination penalty is a neat twist of fate. The Columns Detour looks really cool, but only one team goes for it as the others go for a relatively boring task. The Roadblock to end the leg is a neat task to watch, but is overly linear and offers no chance to choke. The fact that the Pit Stop is right inside the castle is a definitely blow to this leg’s quality, as it removed any chance to catch up after the start of the Roadblock. Teams got decently separated during the leg but there was no chance to make up ground at the end.)

9) Leg 2: Cuzco, Peru – Santiago, Chile (Bus station drama at the beginning is promising, but everybody gets on the same bus anyway. The shoe shine Roadblock is a neat task that allows for solid moments, but the fact that it’s all teams have to do before they’re assigned plane tickets makes this part of the leg a bit weak and gives the beneficiaries of Rob’s gambit more of an advantage than they really should have gotten. Good stuff once in Santiago, with teams missing the funicular and both Detour options including definite ways for teams to get ahead or behind, whether from misweighed fish or suboptimal stacking. Having to pay for the goods in Shop is a neat touch. Teams actually finish fairly spaced apart as we find out the next episode, but unfortunately this episode doesn’t do the best job of showing that and it felt like Brian & Greg and Meghan & Heidi were doomed to fight it out from the taxi ride – which they were, but for reasons not shown. Give them more of a chance and nix the plane ride in the middle and this leg looks much better.)

8) Leg 4: Mendoza – Vicente Casares, Argentina (The beginning of the leg is good, as teams set out early in the morning but the Route Marker location opens before more than one team has arrived. The Roadblock is alright but doesn’t give enough teams trouble, or slow down the troubled teams enough. The plane trips 5 hours apart immediately afterwards also makes this part of the leg feel largely pointless for teams other than Rob & Amber. A single Route Marker in Buenos Aires followed by another mostly-equalizer is a bit annoying, but not terrible. The Detour is largely good, well-balanced, and decent viewing, but unfortunately broken-down boats seem to affect the results more than anything else. I could see putting this leg one or two spots lower, but the beginning and the time in Tigre were good and I enjoyed the leg more while I was watching it.)

7) Leg 1: Long Beach, US – Cuzco, Peru (A solid premiere, if nothing special. Two hours gives us plenty of time to get to know most of the teams, although unfortunately some are still a bit underedited. Initial scrambling in Lima is good, with language barrier a definite issue and teams having varying degrees of success. Rickshaw ride in Ancon is neat and watching four different teams take the last departure time like suckers is fun, even if it all gets evened out afterwards. The second day is also solid. Zipline’s a fun extra task to have for the first leg. Detour is solid if not too exciting. Overall a decent starting leg where both halves are largely fair and make a difference. The only knock to it is the trucks acting as a semi-equalizer so close to the end of the leg, contriving extra footraces and knocking out a potentially legendary team.)

6) Leg 11: Istanbul, Turkey – London, UK (An excellent visit to London, on the whole. The top dogs get back in front when a risk pays off – the others weren’t left in the dark, but chose to play it safe, and it’s interesting to see how it works out. Searching for a clue from the London Eye is great. Boats Detour is kinda boring, but the mystery one is fun and creative, even if does seem a bit easy. Ron & Kelly fall behind from taking a taxi, and Rob & Amber Yield their only allies for no good reason, which allows for a nice close finish as three out of four teams are at the leg-ending Roadblock together. The bus driving is tough and gives the feeling that anybody could get out of there next. Overall a fun leg.)

5) Leg 7: Gweta – Khwai, Botswana (On the one hand, this leg was pretty linear and in theory shouldn’t have offered much chance for teams to fall behind. Roadblock is pretty basic, most of the paths teams drive are marked, and while the Carry It Detour was neat and fun to watch teams try and quickly give up, the milking was pretty basic and uninteresting. On the other hand, all but two teams found ways to have trouble, mess up, and on the whole keep the leg interesting. Teams start the leg all within an hour of each other (and there’s no equalizers period for the only leg this season!) but check in across the span of over three hours. Uchenna & Joyce missing a post, Lynn & Alex breaking down twice in one leg, and Meredith & Gretchen missing a clue costs each of them significant time and keeps uncertainty present for a lot longer than it otherwise would be. Teams deal with a suspected non-elimination in completely opposite manners for extra fun. The only big complaint I have with the leg is that there’s no explanation for why Brian & Greg couldn’t make up a ten minute deficit when everybody else messed up so much.)

4) Leg 6: Soweto, South Africa – Gweta, Botswana (The lion feeding is a fun task, and we get interesting stuff at the beginning with Lynn & Alex leading multiple teams astray and causing them to miss flights, but unfortunately a train ride afterwards renders everything moot and makes us start over again. Once in bush country, the leg is decently fun but largely pretty pedestrian. Tasks were rather quick and teams had their whole path marked for them, to result in not of time difference for the leg. Spear throwing is fun but doesn’t seem to set anybody back very far. Corn pounding is boring but gives some teams trouble; the water option is much faster and more interesting but it’s good that only a couple teams go for it. This leg would be rather lower were it not for the amazing sequence of Brian & Greg crashing their car, falling to last place, making up ground on the Detour as Ray & Deana fall apart, and catching up at the last minute for one of the best endings to an episode of all time. The Pit Stop location is also cool.)

3) Leg 5: Vicente Casares, Argentina – Soweto, South Africa (This was perhaps the leg that surprised me the most this viewing as being a really good one. Teams all arrive in South Africa together, but get wildly spread out by a variety of factors. Fast Forward is sufficiently cool. Tribes Detour seems a bit easy but is still a cool challenge on the whole, while Tunnels is a much more tasking challenge which multiple teams initially fail at. Roadblock of collecting supplies for an orphanage was a bit weak from a challenge design standpoint, but is made up for by the great moment where teams get to visit the orphanage to deliver them. What really makes this leg work is the trouble that teams have during it – Rob & Amber go for the Fast Forward but miss to set them back at the beginning, Uchenna & Joyce get lost and think they’re in last place, while Meredith & Gretchen get lost, get bloodied and need stitches, and finally limp to the Pit Stop only to have all of their possessions taken away from them for an all-time low point. Lots of interesting stuff happening in this leg.)

2) Leg 13: Montego Bay, Jamaica – Ft. Lauderdale, US (Similar to Season 1’s, this finale is unimpressive in terms of leg design but delivers in spades on the drama front. First part of the leg is fine and good – cutting up a ton of onions for an annoying task, an OK Detour option even if nobody chose the more interesting one, three teams going to Puerto Rico on separate flights since it’s so close and then driving around it for the rest of the day. But then a big fat equalizer, followed by a disappointingly simple final task, followed by a plane trip that could easily have seen all teams together and then three taxi rides in Florida is a lame design for the end of the season. However, the trials of Uchenna & Joyce propel this leg right to the front of the pack. They start only minutes behind, but that extends into hours as we see them struggle just to get from place to place owing to their lack of funds, hitting rock bottom as the other two teams battle it out, still not at the Detour yet when Rob & Amber are driving through Puerto Rico. They get lucky and hit the equalizer, but then nearly lose the race at the airport before the pilot agrees to reopen the gates to let them on Rob & Amber’s flight. Then they get in front in the final stretch, only to run out of money at the finish line and have to beg to pay off their taxi driver and finish. And then they win anyway for an amazing conclusion to the season. The drama is great and this is amazing television – I only drop it to #2 because of the madness and superior design of the top leg.)

1) Leg 3: Santiago, Chile – Mendoza, Argentina (A well-designed leg where a lot of crazy stuff happens = lots of fun. Teams have to go on a really long, really cool drive over the mountains, and not one but two teams mess up in impressive fashion to fall far behind the others. Yield is irrelevant, Detour is not that interesting and only gives a couple of moments, but once teams get to Mendoza it heats right back up again with the infamous “eat four pounds of meat” Roadblock. Everybody struggles with this challenge, and Rob comes up with a strategy to avoid completing it without being in danger of elimination, leading to an unprecedented three quits, none of which results in elimination! Uchenna propels himself and Joyce to the front of the pack, only to lose the win due to navigation woes. A clear distinction is set between the teams who completed the leg normally and those who quit or got horribly lost. Patrick’s struggles with the meat offers a much closer finish then we could’ve hoped for after Debbie & Bianca’s 4-hour mistake – the only downside to the leg is that it’s still not enough for them to make the comeback. Still, on the whole a fantastic leg, and my pick for the best of the season.)

Team Rankings

11) Susan & Patrick (They don’t offer any great moments, obsess over Rob & Amber at the beginning, and Patrick gets annoyingly petulant whenever Susan tries to give him advice. His defeatist air and lecturing his mother about not being defeatist enough isn’t very fun, and makes me glad to see them go.)

10) Meghan & Heidi (Not a very interesting team. They bumble a lot in the first leg, are saved by the trucks mini-equalizer, and then form an attachment with Brian & Greg only to have to race them for last place. That’s really all there is to them.)

9) Ray & Deana (I had better memories of them from my last watch, but realized this watch that they really aren’t that good. Ray is hypercompetitive, which leads to a few amusing moments like him telling Deana to suck it up about choking, or the fact that his one and only major rivalry of the season is with the extremely nonthreatening Meredith & Gretchen. But outside of those moments they don’t offer much. Ray berates Deana rather too much, Deana’s prone to give up hope a bit too easily, and it takes less than half of the race for them to implode thanks to how poorly they work together. At least they make a good sacrifice for Brian & Greg’s comeback in the sixth leg.)

8) Debbie & Bianca (A team with a lot of potential, that was pretty interesting in their brief run and would have been stars had they lasted longer. Lots of energy and somewhat (but not uncomfortably) unusual ways of venting it. However, they’re fairly muted after the premiere for not that much content on the whole, and spend too much of their time worrying about Rob & Amber or talking about how they need to win so an all-female team can.)

7) Ron & Kelly (A pretty uninteresting couple for much of their run, they’re background characters at the beginning and the strong competitors who aren’t quite as strong as Rob & Amber later on. A lot of their time is spent playing second fiddle to the latter, right up to getting Yielded by them in London. On their own, their relationship starts to implode in a fairly uncomfortable seventh leg, and is done for good by the twelfth leg. There is some interesting material here, stemming from their differing views on settling down vs. roaming around, but it’s not that great and we’re tired of hearing about it by the final leg. Ron also gets a large number of (largely contrived by leading questions) references to Iraq and being a POW which makes for an OK running joke. Ultimately, they get this low of a spot because they really don’t offer much of interest despite being in for the entire season.)

6) Ryan & Chuck (Best first boots ever. Portuguese-speaking hillbillies is a unique and entirely unexpected character type. They’re only in for a single leg, but still provide plenty of fun moments, between running with rickshaws, load-testing ziplines, and a bunch of little quips in between. I put them above Ron & Kelly because they make a much stronger impression in a single leg; if they’d made it to the end instead of Ron & Kelly then this season would have ascended to a whole new level of greatness.)

5) Lynn & Alex (A team that is light on memorable moments but still a decent enjoyable presence overall. They spend a bit much time worrying about Rob & Amber, but I find that focus amusing at times and they have plenty of time not worrying about them too. Even if they did have a couple of less good moments, Lynn & Alex enjoyed themselves and the experience of the Race, and weren’t completely boring while they did so. Thus they get a solid ranking.)

4) Rob & Amber (Ultimately, this boils down to a team that wasn’t afraid to piss the other teams off or play the villain, but also was doing so more for the benefit of the show and their own fun than out of any actual malice or ill will. They do this job well, provide some interesting and fun moments, make several amusing strategic misplays, and have a satisfying downfall. On the other hand, they mock the other teams a bit much, Rob can be petulant when they fall behind, and there’s the whole can of worms with their immense influence on the season. Your mileage may vary, but both my wife and I found the Rob & Amber experience to be an enjoyable one.)

3) Brian & Greg (One of the most purely fun and entertaining teams out there, Brian & Greg have an amazing ability to casually goof off and joke around at almost all times, and at the same time are genuinely funny. Various stunts when opening up their initial clue, Brian’s Shoe Shine Show, talking about Bushmaster Yoda, and their legendary entrance to their final Pit Stop, as well as a bunch of other little moments, enshrine this team’s legacy as an entertaining one. But they also deliver on the drama front, forming a friendship with Meghan & Heidi only to have to eliminate them immediately afterwards, crashing their car and injuring their cameraman, and pulling off an epic comeback to stay in the race for another leg. They aren’t afraid to get emotional when they come across these turns of fate, and overall show surprisingly vulnerability and lack of dominance for the first alpha-male team in three seasons. Brian & Greg are great – but the fact that they only get seven episodes, and some of those episodes are a bit light on content, means that I put them behind two other great teams.)

2) Meredith & Gretchen (You could argue that they don’t do that much of interest and are overly hyped up by Phil and the editors – but I don’t care about that, because Gretchen is my favorite individual character since Chip in Season 5. She reminds me of my grandmother, with her motor mouth, rambling on about things, but also occasional spots of self-awareness, and I love it. This is by no means a strong team, struggling to survive from the fourth leg on and usually beating out stronger and fitter teams more by luck than anything else, but they do survive, and Gretchen continues to be her lovable self through that entire time, largely shrugging off bashing her head open and everything. They last for almost the entire season, and I love having them in for all of it – so to the top tier of the rankings they go.)

1) Uchenna & Joyce (For most of the season they’re a good if not outstanding team. A fun couple who’s enjoyable to watch, have their backstory of relationship struggles, but are working well together on the Race itself and thus become quite rootable. Later on they become the underdogs, generally not at the front of the pack and ostracized from the Rob & Amber/Ron & Kelly power couple, but also definitely heroic underdogs, especially with their multiple cases of kindness to Meredith & Gretchen. All that is fine and good, but their final leg is what really propels them up to new heights. Their emotional journey, falling far behind, getting multiple lucky breaks to somehow catch up, almost losing the race at the finish line, but winning instead to unseat Rob & Amber is all fantastic, which is why I’ve ended up mentioning it so many times in this post! They see such high highs and low lows in the finale, but remain unquestionably the heroes and team that non-Rob & Amber fans want to see succeed throughout. The fantastic ending on top of being such a good if sometimes understated part of the rest of the season makes them an all-time great team, and the best team in a season of several great teams.)

Conclusion

I came into this rewatch remembering Season 7 as a decently strong season, but I wasn’t expecting it to turn out to be quite as strong as it did. I think people’s opinion of this season truly must hinge on their opinion about Rob & Amber’s presence on it – those who see that as a big problem will have it overshadow the rest of the season and make them not like it all that much or even outright hate it, while those who, like me, don’t think it’s that huge of an issue will see the rest of the season’s strengths and enjoy it for that. I do think that the excess of Rob & Amber focus drags the season back a little bit, but I also think that’s the biggest single issue with the season. Season 7 gets a lot right, and not a lot wrong, and because of that I would say that it’s definitely one of the better seasons.

Season rankings after Season 7:

1. Season 3

2. SEASON 7

3. Season 1

4. Season 5

5. Season 2

6. Season 4

7. Season 6

Putting Season 7 in the top three was a no-brainer for me, and after a bit of thought I decided that its generally superior cast and advances in areas such as challenge design merited it a spot above Season 1 as well. Season 3 vs. Season 7 was a tough debate, and I considered putting Season 7 first for its trio of great teams, better handling of equalizers, and more satisfying conclusion – but ultimately Season 3’s better storytelling won out, with Rob & Amber’s excessive focus setting Season 7 back a peg. (Of course, the fact that Season 3 had its own great team and host of memorable moments helped as well.)

Up next (after, hopefully, my in-depth rankings making their return for Season 7) will be TAR’s first foray into a themed/”gimmick” season, the Family Edition. It’s been nearly six years since I watched that season in its entirety, and I know that it’s overall a weak season, but I’m looking forward to enjoying the alternative experience, and hopefully being able to highlight the better parts of it here. Until next time!