Warning: This blog post contains many spoilers for Season 6 of The Amazing Race, and may also include spoilers from earlier seasons. You have been warned!

A general opinion I’ve had on TAR for a long time is no matter how bad a season may look compared to others, every season of TAR is worth watching. (I cannot, however, say definitely if this extends beyond Season 24.) A great example of this principle in action is the oft-derided Season 6. Season 6 has more nastiness then the average season, lacks most qualities that make a season great, and is in general a rather weak entry in the TAR canon – but regardless of that, while we were watching it over the past few weeks, my wife and I enjoyed it a lot. I haven’t joined the “Season 6 is actually pretty good” train, but it is still The Amazing Race, and The Amazing Race is good.

Different Frames of Mind

I think that, even though it’s not something that I actively notice while watching, my general frame of mind when watching has a great impact on how much I enjoy The Amazing Race. I think two factors in particular positively affected my rewatch of Season 6, in different ways.

The first and smaller factor is simply a difference between the way I rewatched Season 6 and the way I rewatched Seasons 4 and 5 for this blog. For Seasons 4 and 5 I would simply watch as much as I could whenever I could, usually equating to 2-3 episodes most days, often in the same viewing session. This led to me getting through the seasons quite efficiently (less than a week for each, I believe), but in retrospect was not such a good way to watch them otherwise. Episodes would run together a lot in my head, and I think that my hurried pace was a factor in my lack of love for the Season 5 route (although I’m not saying that in retrospect I think Season 5 was the best – my overall opinion is unchanged). For my rewatch of Season 6, however, I decided to instead watch only one episode per day (except for one day where I allowed two). The more leisurely pace did mean it took over two weeks to get through the entire season, but I don’t think that was a bad thing, and it allowed me to enjoy each individual episode more and make them at least somewhat more distinct.

Now, I suspect that this post may overall end up being a bit more positively toned than Season 5’s, but that’s not just because of my difference in viewing pace – there’s also the matter of their perceptions. Season 5 is often hyped as the best of all time, so the way my brain works I was naturally more critical about its flaws, in addition to the fact that I didn’t think it lived up to the hype. Season 6 is generally regarded as pretty bad, so I ended up looking for more reasons to enjoy it.

Anyway, moving on from that, the second significant factor as far as my mindset is one between the last time I watched Season 6 and this rewatch, and that’s the simple fact that I’ve grown more tolerant in the past four or so years. This is something I’ve noticed throughout my rewatch series thus far, where annoying or nasty stuff that teams do just don’t bother me as much as they used to – possibly partly the effect of watching with my wife, who’s even more tolerant about these things than I am, but it helps me like the teams more and not get as annoyed by things that happened in the episodes. In previous seasons that I’ve watched, there’s quite a few teams that I previously disliked but was fine (or at least more fine) with on this rewatch, including Tara & Wil, Reichen & Chip, Kelly & Jon, and Colin & Christie. In this season, my increase in tolerance was especially noticeable with Freddy & Kendra and Hayden & Aaron. I think that this change in attitude is definitely a good thing, helping me to enjoy the Race even more, even if my opinions end up being less strong because of it.

The Route – Good in Some Ways, Bad in Others

Season 6 had another pretty adventurous route. It didn’t go nearly as far as the marathon that was Season 5’s with about 30,000 less miles, but they still ended up jumping around to quite a few countries, and most of them were new: Germany, France, China, and the U.S. were the only repeated destinations. On the whole, I think I enjoyed the route for this season (as far as locales visited) about as much as the one for Season 5, possibly a little bit more. It doesn’t include Egypt or Giza, but I particularly enjoyed the visits to Ethiopia and the Scandanavian countries.

That said, it’s not without its faults. The route did end up being a little overly Euro-centric, with seven of the first eight legs taking place in Europe and thus arguably weakening the season. Much more of an issue was the great prevalence of equalizers this season. EVERY SINGLE LEG this season had a point where teams were fully equalized, with the interesting exception of the final leg itself! I know that this appeals to some fans who like for there to be more of a chance for teams that have fallen behind to catch up, but my preference is for there to be several legs included where the times checked in on the previous leg make a difference. In addition to the full equalizing every leg, rather too many legs stuck equalizers of some degree into the middle of the leg, which is a big no-no for me, since it can easily render much of what came before irrelevant. The overnight equalizer in the premiere I’m fine with since it’s a premiere tradition during this era of the Race, but beyond that, Legs 2, 3, 6, 10, and 12 all are offenders in this regard. (You could count other legs like 4 and 5 as well, but I’ll be generous in this case since they all came before any challenges.) All of the equalizers that saturate this season end up as a major drag on its quality.

Trying New Things

One thing that I noticed during this viewing, particularly during the first few episodes, is the fact that production was adventurous with this season and tried some new things. While it didn’t have the epic route that Season 5 did, production was still looking to make another blockbuster season, and pulled out quite a few stops to try and make that happen. This season, we see such moves as:

-Making the first leg be the “marathon travel” leg

-Instituting the Roadblock limit (more on that later)

-Casting was clearly trying to sell this season based on sex appeal. A lot of models, actors, athletic folks, and in general one of the most obviously sexy casts of any season. I personally am not a fan of this move in any case, but this is one case where it also turned out to be a relatively obvious mistake in retrospect, since all those looks came at the expense of a lot of the average cast’s personality.

-Including the first “big emotional destination” in the Gate of No Return – one meant to provide an emotional experience for the cast that can be presented in its own emotional segment in the episode. I have no problem with these, although they’re probably not as powerful for me as most people.

-Having a leg intended to be mostly serious in tone in Leg 5 (Goree Island to Berlin).

-Deliberately giving teams cars that are known to be unreliable. This could certainly be construed as purposefully screwing some teams over, but I’m fine with it in that regard – there’s the same chance for disaster for every team, and beyond that I find it fun to have the unreliable cars in play. This will pop up a couple more times before being phased out.

-I haven’t been specifically tracking challenges, but I feel like this may be the season where they really started to come into their own. We have quite a few strong and/or quite difficult challenges come up in this season, including the IKEA Detour in Leg 3, another food challenge in the Hungarian spicy soup, and two lengthy needle-in-a-haystack tasks in the Swedish hay bales and the Chinese padlocks, in addition to a number of lesser but still good tasks.

This was a season of innovation, even if that innovation ends up getting lost in the shuffle much of the time.

The Case of the Copious Couples

Other than a certain team, perhaps one of the most notable/noted characteristics of Season 6 was its cast composition – specifically, the large number of couples on the season. The season was dominated by couples, and many viewers see that as a definite drag on its quality – but how much did they actually drag it down?

Production decided to make an unprecedented seven of the eleven teams this season dating, engaged, or married couples. Already that’s a big effect on the season – out of the first thirty-one seasons of the Race, only two other seasons have had at least seven couples. But then the elimination order of this season shoved the couples further into the spotlight: the first three eliminated teams were all friends or family teams, leaving all seven couples in the final eight. Two eliminations later, the last family team exits, leaving six of the seven couples as the final six teams this season. Almost half of the season features couples as the only teams racing.

An attitude that I’ve always casually held about this season is that this preeminence of couples makes it worse, as couples teams are worse on average than other types of relationships. But looking back at the first five seasons, I’ve started to think that may not actually be the case. At any rate, just because a team is a couple doesn’t mean that they can’t be a good or great addition to their season – two of my #1s so far, Frank & Margarita and Chip & Kim, were couples, and there’s been plenty of other good to solid couples teams as well, like Michael & Kathy, Millie & Chuck, Kelly & Jon, and Colin & Christie. But on the flipside, we’ve also had short-lived but unpleasant couples before, like Amanda & Chris and Allison & Donny, as well as couples with significant arguing and/or animosity that makes them less pleasant to watch, like Teri & Ian and Tara & Wil. The thing about couples teams is that they’re more likely to have serious disagreements and get in fights with each other than most other teams. Family teams can have arguments, but they’re not likely to be as serious as couples’ since the family teams have lived with this relationship their whole lives. Friends teams rarely start bickering with each other. But, perhaps due to elevated expectations of how they should be treated by each other, some couples, especially those that are ill-suited for each other, can devolve into bickering or even more serious fighting quite a bit, and while some viewers enjoy watching bickering, I for one do not.

So how does all this tie into the viewing experience for Season 6 in particular? Well, whether it was a natural result of the preponderance of couples, or just because of the specific individuals cast, we ended up with a pretty lackluster crop of teams in the top 8. Most of the couples that we have this time are either fairly unpleasant towards each other, simply not that interesting, or both. Of course, there are some outliers in the field of couples here, in Jonathan & Victoria (almost certainly the most extreme fighting couple in Race history) and Adam & Rebecca (one of the most clearly shouldn’t-be-together couples in Race history). Then there’s Lori & Bolo, who bicker from time to time and because of their personalities do so in a loud and unpleasant fashion. We have run-of-the-mill bickering in the teams of Hayden & Aaron, Freddy & Kendra, and (to a lesser extent) Don & Mary Jean, and while Kris & Jon are quite nice and likable compared to other couples, they’re also not all that interesting. Most of these teams also don’t have much in the way of major positive qualities, and so the cast on the whole is a fairly weak one in my opinion.

The large number of couples on Season 6 may or may not have hurt its overall quality – but it certainly didn’t help it.

Points That Others Dislike But I Don’t

And here we have some elements to the season which help explain why I don’t hate it as much as many fans do. Many places where I see Season 6 discussed, one or more of these three points is brought up as a major negative in the season. To be clear, I don’t love any of these factors, but on this viewing, none of them bothered me that much:

The final task. I list this one first as it’s the most minor of the three points, and the least likely one to really make people dislike the season, but I have seen quite a few people complaining about the fact that the final task in the final leg is the simple task of eating a pizza. Let’s make this clear right away: I don’t think this was a particularly good task. While none of the teams were exactly enjoying themselves by the end of it, it also didn’t seem to slow any of them down significantly. However, to me it doesn’t stand out as a particularly bad task either. It makes enough sense to include in the final leg, as deep-dish pizza is closely associated with Chicago and so eating one makes for a task that’s relevant to the locale. And, more relevantly, I don’t think it’s any worse than the past two seasons’ final tasks either. People may complain that this task didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the race, and that’s true, but Season 4’s final task also didn’t, and Season 5’s was only marginally related. And both of those seasons’ final tasks were similarly rather uninteresting and didn’t have any appreciable effect on the results, just like this one. It will still be a few seasons before we get to actually good final tasks, and I don’t think that eating a deep-dish pizza is particularly worse than the other ones we’ve seen thus far.

Freddy & Kendra. And here we get into more potentially controversial territory. The winners of Season 6 have a very bad reputation amongst the online fan community, generally regarded as a blandly unpleasant team with a few ugly moments. Perhaps it’s just my higher tolerance at play, but I didn’t think they were that bad. Keep in mind that once again, I’m not singing their praises or saying that they’re a great team, but in general I found them to be just fine and mildly enjoyable to watch most of the time.

Oh, but the moments, you say? Freddy & Kendra do have some infamous moments, and none of the commonly cited ones are good looks for the team. But at least at this point in my TAR watching career, a single bad moment in a team’s run is rarely going to make me dislike the team all on its own, especially several episodes after it occurs, and I didn’t find any of Freddy & Kendra’s bad moments to be that terrible. In particular, Freddy’s outburst at the gate at the beginning of episode 7 wasn’t good but has almost no bearing on how I feel about them as a whole.

But what about Kendra’s comments about poor Africans, breeding, and the “ghetto” status of certain locales? Well… I’ll offer up the way that I see it. Kendra is clearly rather spoiled, and has no doubt enjoyed a comfortable and sheltered lifestyle her entire life. Faced with situations of extreme poverty, especially in the conditions that she thinks of as “ghetto”, she is extremely uncomfortable and has a hard time coping, and so says some regrettable things. I don’t think that this makes Kendra a terrible person, or automatically makes her and Freddy bottom-tier characters. Mind you, I’m not trying to defend her comments. As a TAR viewer, I’m already in the position of not having a lot in common with most teams, and not agreeing with a lot of the choices they make and things they say. In my particular experience, Kendra’s comments are just another form of that – a bit more prominent than most examples, but still one of many offputting moments that come from the teams, and as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve become more tolerant of such offputting moments. It is a hit to Freddy & Kendra as characters in my books, but only a small one. I get why others think differently, but on the whole I still find them to be an average-tier team.

The hay bales. Ah, yes. One of the most popular opinions that I’ve seen regarding something in Season 6 is that the infamous Hay Bale Roadblock was a terrible, unfair, total screw-up of a task and that Lena & Kristy were completely robbed by it. I don’t agree with this assessment. While it is a physically much more demanding task, and one that takes longer for each individual attempt, than your standard needle-in-a-haystack task, it otherwise was simply another needle-in-a-haystack task that was set apart in the annals of TAR by Lena’s incredibly unlucky attempt at it.

20 clues in 270 bales may not sound like a lot, but that’s a 1-in-13.5 chance of finding a clue on any given attempt when starting out, compared to the 1-in-3000 chance of finding the right lock on any attempt in the leg 12 Roadblock (I know, opening locks is much quicker than unrolling hay bales, but still. These are better odds by an order of magnitude.) And in fact I consider this to have been a rather weak task not because of Lena’s failure at it, but rather because all the other teams got through it in relatively short order and not enough people struggled at it! The leaderboard change was minimal.

People say that the fact that Lena could spend hours, and unroll over 100 hay bales, without finding a clue is evidence that the task was inherently flawed. But while it was possible for her to fall this far behind, that doesn’t mean that it was remotely likely. To prove how much of an outlier her case was, I ran some numbers on the odds of finding a clue after X hay bales. I made some (false) assumptions that make these odds actually less favorable than the real odds: assuming that all eight teams had already found their clue, and assuming that no other teams had unrolled an empty hay bale. With those assumptions in place:

-After unrolling just 15 hay bales, the odds are in favor of having found a clue already.

-The odds of finding a clue are better than 75% after unrolling 30 hay bales.

-The odds are better than 90% after unrolling 45 hay bales.

-After unrolling 50 hay bales, the odds of not having found a clue would be just 7.4086%.

-After 57 hay bales, the odds of finding a clue are better than 95%.

-There is a better than 99% chance of having found a clue after unrolling 82 hay bales.

-Phil said that they calculated that Lena had unrolled over a hundred hay bales. In an absolute worst-case scenario (which is not what she was in, mind you), the odds of having not found a clue after unrolling 100 hay bales are a mere 0.2657%. That’s a 1-in-376 chance.

Put another way: The nine teams could have run this leg over again forty times, and the odds would be against Lena getting stuck in the field for that long again in any of those runs. The terrible result that she ended up with was truly an outlier, and in my opinion is not enough to say that the hay bales ruin their episode, or are one of the very worst tasks of all time. (Of course, there’s also the possibility that she didn’t search unrolled hay bales thoroughly enough, and missed clues in there, in which case the cause shifts from crazy bad luck to poor challenge performance. We’ll never know.)

On Extended-Length Premieres

The first three seasons of The Amazing Race had premieres that were the same length as each other episode: one hour (technically about 43 minutes of actual show, but for the sake of simplicity I’ll call that amount of time an hour). But the thing with premieres is that they have an extra burden to carry compared to the other episodes in a season. Not only do they have a full eleven/twelve teams to keep track of, but we also expect to be introduced to all of these teams, and get an idea of who they are – later episodes can develop their characters but don’t have to spend as much time introducing every team, and have less teams to cover. Because of these extra factors, typical hour-length premieres are a bit too rushed, in my opinion, and the show benefited when it started showing longer premieres.

Seasons 1 and 2 were able to get away with hour-length premieres that still felt like strong, enjoyable episodes, but even those came at a cost, as quite a few teams were barely shown at all – teams like Kim & Leslie, Lenny & Karyn, Oswald & Danny, and even first boots Deidre & Hillary were virtual non-entities in their premieres. Season 3 ended up going in the opposite direction, doing a decent job of introducing us to all the teams, but as a consequence feeling a little bit rushed and turning out as a weak leg overall. Producers apparently agreed that the single hour was too little, because for the next two seasons the premiere was an hour and a half long instead. This is a much better length for the premiere. While there were still the inevitable editorial imbalances in these episodes, there weren’t any teams that were more or less completely left out, and there was plenty of time to show all of the events of the first leg without it feeling at all rushed.

Season 6 took it another step, and dedicated a full two hours to the first leg. Here’s where I can understand why people would think that it’s too long – this is double the length of an ordinary episode, and if you’re not enjoying it a lot then it can seem to really drag out. But I really enjoy having this extra-long premiere. It gives plenty of time for each team to have some character moments – a couple of teams do feel a bit less exposed, but the two biggest examples of those IMO (Freddy & Kendra and Kris & Jon) are both not the most interesting teams in the first place and teams that last the entire season anyway. The extra length in the premiere does much more for the early boots, like Avi & Joe and Meredith & Maria. We get to know Avi & Joe far, far better than any of the other first boots to this point in TAR history, and I think their characters benefit greatly for that. And, of course, there is no question of the presentation of the leg itself feeling rushed.

I don’t remember the specifics on when premiere lengths change again, but this will not be the last two-hour premiere, and longer-than-average premieres will be around for quite some time, and I think that’s 100% a good thing. Especially after several recent seasons that had only one-hour premieres, I think that in order to really do well, the premiere has to be longer than average.

Format Changes in Season 6

Compared to the ambitious Season 5, which rather overhauled the Race in several respects, Season 6 was pretty understated in its format changes. Only three small, subdued changes were made, although two of them have quite an impact…

The Yield is knocked down a peg. After a Season 5 which had the Yield available in every leg but only one Yield use during the entire season, production evidently decided that restricting its availability would make it more appealing to Racers, and so cut it down to only appearing in three legs during the entire race. This will be its format for quite a few seasons to come. What do I think of this change? Well, I can’t really bemoan the death of having a Yield in every leg the same way that I do for the Fast Forward no longer being in every leg, since the Yield was of pretty limited impact in Season 5. It was mostly forgotten for the better part of Season 5, just like it is here in Season 6. But from an abstract point of view, I would say that I think it’s better to just have it available in every leg, so that a team under pressure can go ahead and use it whenever they feel the need to, instead of only having it available a few teams. Even with its restricted availability, there are still legs with a Yield where nobody wants to use it, especially early in the race as we saw in the third leg this season. And there’s virtually no downside to having it in each leg, either – it shouldn’t have a big effect on leg design, and since it’s just a simple board and stand it should barely cost anything to include.

I don’t think that it’s the best change – but ultimately I also think it’s a change of little significance.

Roadblock counts are enforced for the first time. In the first five seasons, either team member could choose to do any Roadblock, without restriction. For Season 6, a rule was instituted to counteract that: no team member may complete more than six Roadblocks. This change is welcomed by many fans, who found the extremely imbalanced Roadblock counts in the first five seasons to be a major problem. If you look at almost any co-ed team that made the final 5 or better in the early seasons, you’ll find that the man did the majority of the Roadblocks while the woman made only a token effort – women performed 3 or less Roadblocks during the race in every single final 5 team from the first five seasons, except for Tara & Wil, who still had an imbalanced 4-7 split (although given how some of Wil’s efforts turned out, Tara should have done even more). Season 5 took this to an extreme, as three couples made the final leg, but in each of those teams the woman only performed a single Roadblock. Given the fact that all-female teams fell in positions 4 to 6 that season, a lot of people think that those teams were screwed out of the final 3 by virtue of not having any men to perform the Roadblocks.

I don’t think that I would say that myself, as trying to speculate how different team members would have done at different challenges is a tricky task at best, and in general the Roadblock imbalances of the early seasons don’t really bother me. But I’m still happy to have the Roadblock limits instituted in this season, as a commonsense measure that adds a small layer of strategy in choosing Roadblock performers and forces the teams to really work as a team in order to succeed. And this rule change will be felt through the rest of the TAR (US) canon – the specifics will change from time to time and there have been a few controversial cases, but never again will a two-person team complete the race with one team member only performing one or two Roadblocks.

The double leg/To Be Continued episode appears for the first time. Episodes 6 and 7 in this season had teams race through what officially was a single leg, yet for all other intents and purposes was two legs – two Roadblocks, two Detours, travel enough for two legs, a Fast Forward only appearing midway through – in short, all the trappings of two legs except a Pit Stop midway through (and in this blog, I consider them to be two different legs). In place of a Pit Stop, teams hit a pair of equalizers that were tuned to ensure that they would all be together again for the start of the next leg. So for all intents and purposes, it was a non-elimination leg followed by an equalizer to start the next leg… except that the last-place team didn’t receive any penalty whatsoever, effectively rendering the preceding leg totally pointless.

To be fair, this first appearance of the “double leg” wasn’t planned and was the result of necessity. Originally, Leg 6 would have been an ordinary non-elimination leg, but then producers learned that begging is illegal in the host country of Hungary, which would have made the “give me all your money” penalty too harsh to the point of unfairness for the last-place team. So production spliced two legs together and called it a day. While it may not be the best solution, I think that it’s a perfectly reasonable one given the circumstances.

However, after this season, producers apparently decided that they had a star idea here, and in future seasons we will see legs planned from the start to be “double legs”, two legs in all but name, where a giant equalizer will totally erase the events of the previous leg. I frankly think that these are a terrible idea, just a sneaky way for production to have an NEL without penalizing the last-place team, and this is where they have their genesis. In my blog, each such “double leg” will be counted as two separate legs.

Summary

Things that I didn’t like about Season 6:

-A rather weak cast.

-Two cast members who are extremely unpleasant right off the bat, in Jonathan and Adam.

-Editing seems to try to paint the eventual winners in a more negative light, making the ending less satisfying.

-One of the potentially best teams of the season is eliminated in the premiere.

-Too much bickering/other nastiness.

-There weren’t any really good legs.

-Too many equalizers – EVERY SINGLE LEG this season had at least one point where every remaining team was equalized, with the sole exception of the final leg!

-Nothing about this season really stands out as great.

Things that I liked about Season 6:

-Roadblock limits are introduced.

-Some pretty good challenges appear.

-There were less legs this season that I’d rank as “weak” as opposed to “average” than in any of the first five seasons. No really strong legs, but not many really weak legs either.

-Non-elimination legs are spiced up yet again, with our earliest one yet (final 8!)

-I rather enjoyed the Race’s first trip to Scandinavia.

-A two-hour premiere.

Leg Rankings

13) Leg 10: Lalibela, Ethiopia – Sigiriya, Sri Lanka (The problem with this leg is that after each location/task, there’s an equalizer – another plane ride, or train ride, or bus ride, or hours of operation. Adam & Rebecca fall behind early on by missing a train but it ends up being completely irrelevant several equalizers later. The relay race was fine, and the Detour was pretty fun, but the leg takes a massive hit because all that ends up mattering is a quick Roadblock and run to the Pit Stop. I’d guess that there weren’t more than about ten minutes tops between Kris & Jon and Lori & Bolo’s finishes. Having to swim across the pool to the Pit Stop is just kind of a weird addition to me.)

12) Leg 4: Stockholm, Sweden – Goree Island, Senegal (The beginning of the leg is interesting, as teams try to find the cemetery and deal with extreme culture shock, but then we wait until the next day and the main part of the leg just feels too short and linear. The Detour option that most teams choose isn’t particularly interesting and the fishing is an objectively worse choice in the end. Roadblock is… okay? but not very good or one that allows the team members who chose fishing to catch up. And then there’s a mini-equalizer in the ferry to the island for the Pit Stop. A rather weak leg that deserved to be non-elimination.)

11) Leg 11: Sigiriya, Sri Lanka – Shanghai, China (Another weak non-elimination leg, without a whole lot of interest really happening after teams wandering uncomfortable city streets at night. The only event of note this leg is Kris & Jon’s taxi troubles leading to them getting the angriest they’ve been all race, but them still surviving thanks to Freddy & Kendra getting Yield revenge on Adam & Rebecca. The Roadblock is basically just another heights task, and the Detour isn’t particularly interesting or difficult either.)

10) Leg 5: Goree Island, Senegal – Berlin, Germany (A very serious-toned leg, beginning with the emotional Gate of No Return visit, then a visit to the remains of the Berlin Wall, and capped off with a Brandenburg Gate visit where Jonathan cements his notoriety… and then in-between, we have teams making jokes about making sausage, delivering (and longing for) beer, and soapbox racing. Rather bizarre mood swings, if you ask me. This leg is okay but not really great in any way. All of the tasks are fairly quick and easy, with the soapbox racing in particular being a task with little to show. Gus’s longing for beer is the only really fun moment in the episode. All the placement shifts come from teams getting lost to various degrees – and Jonathan & Victoria’s argument over what to do with their bags.)

9) Leg 7: Budapest, Hungary (After the painfully obviously forced equalizer, this is a decent leg. Utter madness ensues when the first Route Marker opens. Fast Forward is well-themed and decently interesting, if an obvious gimme to the lucky team who pulled the first number at the Route Marker. The Detour is a bit too fast and boring, but the Roadblock makes up for it as a genuinely difficult task to get through and gives this leg its biggest boost. Gus & Hera going is a big bummer though.)

8) Leg 8: Budapest, Hungary – L’Ile-Rousse, France (Another leg that’s just fine but doesn’t have any really good points. Adam’s misadventures at the Fast Forward are fun, but it’s otherwise not too interesting. The climbing/rappelling Detour is pretty generic and doesn’t offer much after the initial showdown between several teams. The Fly Behind option is more fun but only one team goes for it. Grape stomping is a neat idea to have as a challenge, if another challenge that shouldn’t offer any big opportunities to gain/lose ground (Jonathan found a way though). All this combines for a solid, decently enjoyable, not amazing leg. Adding in self-drive gives it the extra boost to put it this high in the rankings.)

7) Leg 12: Shanghai – Xi’an, China (The first part of the leg, including the Detour, wasn’t very interesting, and so it relies on the second half to carry it. Better than the other way around, though. Hayden & Aaron have massive taxi troubles to fall far behind. Terracotta warriors is a really cool destination and the hidden clue there adds a small wrinkle for teams to negotiate. The keys Roadblock is the really memorable part of this leg, though, a tricky needle-in-a-haystack challenge that causes the teams a lot of trouble. Passes through all 3,000 locks without finding the right one, a broken key, and the threat of the location closing all make it more tense, and Rebecca finally completing it right after Hayden quits is a dramatic moment. Going to the Pit Stop is a bit dull in comparison, though. Aaron’s proposal at the end is good. This leg is deserving of being in the middle spot – more that stands out than the six below it, but nothing as good that stands out as the six above it.)

6) Leg 3: Voss, Norway – Stockholm, Sweden (This leg suffers from too many equalizers, with a hard (all teams together) or soft (some teams together) equalizer after each task. But it has some really cool happenings in it to compensate. The ice bar is a neat destination even if it proves irrelevant. I get a kick out of seeing the Sweden Ikea visited, and the Detour there ends up being a really effective one that beats the crap out of teams that go for the counting because they’re too scared of trying to put together a desk. The Ikea Detour is the high point of the leg, though, followed by the infamous hay bales – they ruin the leg for some, but for me they’re just a meh Roadblock that doesn’t really shake up the finish order (except for Lena & Kristy) enough. Makes for a dramatic ending though.)

5) Leg 13: Xi’an, China – Chicago, US (The finale to Season 6 is often criticized, but I actually rather enjoyed it, largely because this was the only episode this season to not have all teams equalized at some point! All three teams ending up on different flights, not only to the intermediate destination but also to the final city, is unprecedented, unduplicated, and interesting to me for that reason, especially when you consider that Freddy & Kendra and Kris & Jon are close together the entire time yet get different flights regardless. Freddy & Kendra earn their win through vigilant airport work, while Adam & Rebecca’s struggles in the previous leg doom them from the get-go. The Hawaii visit is okay, with tasks that are decent but not particularly interesting. The Chicago visit is par for the course for a final destination at this point in TAR history – a couple of places to visit, a final task that makes no difference – but it is a step up from the last two seasons as we actually see the top two teams close to each other in one shot which makes it feel like a slightly closer race. The railroad crossing cutting off Kris & Jon is an interesting way to end things. But really, the only reason I have this leg so high is because of the separate flights.)

4) Leg 6: Berlin, Germany – Budapest, Hungary (Let’s set aside the giant equalizer and really quick Roadblock and focus on what makes this leg fun – the fact that producers deliberately saddle teams with little, goofy, known unreliable cars to drive around in. I enjoyed this a lot and it’s a major focus in the leg. Unfortunately the rest of the leg is pretty lackluster – the catapult Detour looked fun but was barely attempted at all, the cannon option was rather mundane, the Roadblock was over too quickly, and unforeseen circumstances mean we end up with a weird non-ending even as six of seven teams are getting equalized at the internet cafe. But the cars were so very fun.)

3) Leg 9: L’Ile-Rousse, France – Lalibela, Ethiopia (The first part of the leg is unmemorable, but once we get to the village than it’s a quality episode. The Detour was imbalanced, but half of the teams did the mud anyway to make up for it and injuries during the challenge make it more interesting. The leg really takes off at the donkeys – having to manage animals is always going to make things interesting on the Race, and having some teams get slowed down by uncooperative donkeys (as well as Jonathan & Victoria royally screwing up) makes this the place where a lot of the leg’s final standings are really determined. Adam & Rebecca are the first team to instantly regret a yield, as Adam’s Roadblock screw-up puts them behind Freddy & Kendra. The Roadblock was a meh task but is made up for by being in a really cool and unique location. After the charter flights, teams are left to their own devices to navigate for the rest of the leg, which is always good. Jonathan & Victoria are finally eliminated, and completely through their own mistakes, for a satisfying ending to the episode.)

2) Leg 2: Grindavik, Iceland – Voss, Norway (A really quite good leg if you ignore the big fat double-equalizer right in the middle. Still a pretty good one even with that taken into account. The first part has a fun Roadblock with a lot more self-drive and navigation that gives teams a really hard time. The boat race is an interesting idea but ruined by the equalizer that comes immediately afterward. But after the train ride equalizer, we have teams driving themselves even more, a quality Detour, Lena & Kristy getting badly lost, Don & Mary Jean inadvertently stealing a car, and Freddy & Kendra getting slapped with a penalty, and yet none of them being eliminated, for an interesting end to the episode. Detour was good, with the games option giving teams varying degrees of trouble and the roller ski option being a goldmine of physical comedy. High-tier leg were it not for the equalizer.)

1) Leg 1: Chicago, US – Grindavik, Iceland (Having teams use public transportation, instead of the normal driving themselves, to get to the airport is an interesting move, although it doesn’t really pay off. This is a #1 choice that I can definitely see others disagreeing with, as the leg could certainly be seen as too long and boring with all of the driving around, but I really enjoyed it. Production decided to put the marathon travel leg at the very beginning of the season this time, with teams driving themselves across vast distances throughout Iceland, and I liked all of the destinations. Mid-leg equalizer isn’t such a big deal here as it’s a staple of the opening leg at this point in TAR history. Detour could have had more teams searching for the buoy, but it did at least seem to be well-balanced. Shenanigans throughout the leg and a lot of teams having trouble finding the Pit Stop makes for a good all around episode that I think is the best of the season, although it does fall well short of the best episodes that the first five seasons had to offer.)

Team Rankings

11) Jonathan & Victoria (There are hints here and there of potentially good characters – Jonathan’s way with the locals in the fourth leg, or his thing about superheroes, or what happens when ordinary people encounter his over-the-top-ness – but the fact is, any little gains out there are far, far outweighed by the sheer nastiness of this team. From the get-go, Jonathan seems to be off in Jonathan Land, where he is perfect and everything is a certain way, and is apparently upset at everybody else for not lining up with everything in Jonathan Land. This is, of course, most obviously seen in the case of poor Victoria, who can seem to do nothing right in his eyes and is continually, loudly, and belligerently berated for her constant “failures”, but he gets going quite a bit with others as well, to the point where he’s the only Racer I can remember who ever annoys a taxi driver so much that they kick him out of their cab! Victoria is no saint, either, and gets in her share of barbs, especially later on in the Race. Despite some clever preparations and an enthusiasm for the Race, Jonathan & Victoria were pathologically unable to cooperate and work together during the Race, setting them back time and again and ultimately eliminating them. I’ve seen the opinion that they’re a top-level team for the season because they’re responsible for its stand-out moments. I say that since all of their stand-out moments are bad ones, that makes them a bottom-level team. They add some indeterminate amount to the viewing experience but take away so, so much more, and so are at the bottom of my rankings here.)

10) Meredith & Maria (The friends were likable enough but did very poorly at the Race itself, struggling with navigation, driving stick shift, and Scandinavian games. Because of their struggles and constant bottom-of-the-pack status, they’re never really important to the rest of the race during their two legs, and they don’t contribute anything significant either.)

9) Adam & Rebecca (A lot of people find their unique dynamic and Adam’s immaturity to be entertaining, but I find their fragmented relationship and poor treatment of each other to be too much of an unpleasant experience for their occasional fun moments to win out. Adam’s the more obviously nasty team member, especially in the early episodes, as he flies off the handle at Rebecca often, violently, and with little provocation, but at least at other times he seems to actually care about her. Rebecca’s clearly done with the relationship, which isn’t an inherently bad thing, but it does result in her frequently undermining him, casually insulting him, and treating him as a child to the point where I’m not sure who’s more responsible for his “son” status in the relationship as presented to us, and this poor treatment really grated on me as the season went on. They also have some conversations that are EXTREMELY awkward and uncomfortable to watch, like that one where Rebecca was trying to rebuff Adam while he’s trying to get physically close to her. All of these factors combine to make a team that was frequently not one I wanted to watch, and to top it off I think I get rather less entertainment from them than most viewers do – Rebecca’s sense of humor/fun does not line up with mine very well.)

8) Lena & Kristy (This is a team that I’ve seen a lot of love for online over the years, no doubt largely because of their “robbed” status courtesy of some Swedish hay bales. However, in their three episodes, they didn’t really do much of anything to stand out to me other than that incident. They were there, they were fine, but I don’t think they were especially good in any way. I bet if they fall to the back on the counting Detour instead they’re far more forgotten.)

7) Don & Mary Jean (The obligatory old couple for this season, Don & Mary Jean had a bit more of a competitive edge to them than most teams their age, which works two ways in terms of characters – it makes them a bit more interesting than, but not quite as likable as, your average old couple. Still, they were fine and by no means an unpleasant addition to the season. They get a definite demerit for Don trying to plead his age to get out of the Leg 3 Detour, but they came back and soldiered on through for the next two-and-a-half legs, and that demerit is balanced out by refusing to beg the poor Senegalese people for money after being non-eliminated. A relatively forgettable team, but still more interesting than Lena & Kristy or Meredith & Maria.)

6) Avi & Joe (They had the potential to be amazing characters but we missed out when they went home first. As it is, they were very good characters for a single episode. Avi’s “heartless” trait might have gotten annoying had they lasted longer, but it was fine this episode as he didn’t go too far and was eclipsed by personalities like Adam, Jonathan, and Lori. They formed an alliance at the start but were fiercely independent and wanted to do things their own way, leading to their downfall when they didn’t trust their alliance partner. They were also a very distinct team, looking and sounding like no other team before or since. Really benefit from the premiere being two hours as we get to see plenty of them, and it’s a shame they didn’t last any longer.)

5) Hayden & Aaron (They kinda floated this high in the rankings by virtue of contributing for 12 legs, not having any big negatives, and a bunch of the cast not being very stellar. However, I don’t think they’re that great of a team. Whereas Adam & Rebecca and Lori & Bolo can be entertaining, and Kris & Jon and Freddy & Kendra can be enjoyable to watch racing around, Hayden & Aaron are pretty uninteresting most of the time. A lot of their memorable moments come from Hayden freaking out, shutting down, and making Aaron deal with things, which aren’t my favorite moments, although her extreme reliance on him for everything gets a bit amusing at times. Aaron has a few amusing moments but those are counterbalanced by several times when he casually acts like a jerk to or insults Hayden. A few enjoyable moments, a few unenjoyable moments, and a lot of whatever in between is how I view this team – except the proposal. I thought the proposal was great and it gives them that little extra boost to take the #5 spot.)

4) Freddy & Kendra (Make no mistake, this #4 is weaker than a #5 in any other season that I’ve covered so far. Season 6 has a weak cast. I went over Freddy & Kendra earlier in this post, but I’ll recap here: a lot of the time, they’re a relatively enjoyable team to watch race, if not greatly interesting or lovable. Little things like Kendra’s concerned reactions when Freddy’s in an unpleasant situation, or their tendency to use intelligent vocabulary that you don’t normally hear in casual conversation, or calling Adam & Rebecca the “little ones,” are enjoyable to me. However, they’re not that great, and they do have their bad moments, like Freddy flying off the handle after hitting his head on the gate, or Kendra’s poor reactions to impoverished locations. But I still like them enough for them to rise to #4 in this weak field.)

3) Kris & Jon (Ah yes, the team everybody was rooting to win the race. Kris & Jon are low-key fun to watch, they’re a very pleasant, likable team and almost never lose their cool, and that’s more than a lot of the teams this season have going for them… and that’s about all I have to say about them. The problem with Kris & Jon is that, like most of the teams this season, they weren’t particularly interesting. Some fun moments, no bad moments outside of their blowup at the cab driver in China, but not much else to them. Pretty much any other season they’d be a middling team in the rankings.)

2) Gus & Hera (A very likable team, as perhaps befits the team that ended up being the last non-couple standing. Gus is a rather eccentric individual, and provides quite a few fun elements like the “secret alliance”, a morning snow bath, those funny round glasses, and trying to sneak in as much beer as possible in the fifth leg. Hera’s a nice steady counterpoint and very pleasant in her own right, if not incredibly interesting. They have a nice little arc where they both learn to listen to the other’s advice and work well together as a team. It’s a shame they only last just over halfway through the season, as they’re probably the most rootable team in the cast and their pleasantness would have gone a long way in that endgame.)

1) Lori & Bolo (Yes, they can both be loud and obnoxious and yell at each other nastily and be generally unpleasant to watch (although that’s mostly Lori). But they’re also far and away the most entertaining team to watch in the season, with a ton of fun moments. There’s the boneheaded and/or redundant statements, Bolo getting frustrated and trying to avoid blowing up at people, Lori’s various acts of aggression towards Phil, Bolo making fun of other teams (especially Freddy), Lori’s “that’s funny, except NOT” reactions, Bolo’s insistence that he’s not on steroids… this team often kept me laughing, and keeping me laughing is the quickest way to gain my favor. And none of the other teams this season was really all that entertaining, making Lori & Bolo stand out even more. Like my pick for legs, this is a #1 pick that I can easily see why people would disagree with, as Lori & Bolo can be quite grating, but they added the most, on the whole, to my viewing of Season 6, and so they take the top spot.)

Conclusion

Updated season rankings:

1) Season 3

2) Season 1

3) Season 5

4) Season 2

5) Season 4

6) Season 6

Each of the first five seasons has some distinctive features, or a particular episode/stretch of episodes, that I remember very fondly. Season 6 just doesn’t. As I write this conclusion, it’s been a little over a month since I finished the rewatch of Season 6, and almost nothing stands out to me as having been memorable. There were the various fights and unpleasant moments (with Jonathan & Victoria as the prime examples), and that’s just about it. I think that, as much as anything else, exemplifies why I consider Season 6 to be a weak season of the Race, and easily the worst of the first six (spoiler: also of the first seven).

But that said, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I still enjoyed watching this season (and, in fact, enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the episodes of Season 31 that were airing during the same timeframe). The Amazing Race is my favorite show for a reason, and even when it’s not performing up to snuff it’s still good stuff. (Or at least it was back in the older days – my opinions on “modern” TAR are unsettled at this point, but I haven’t enjoyed the majority of recent seasons very much. We’ll see what my viewpoint is when I come back around for rewatches.)

Up next will be the season of TAR that had the highest viewership as it was airing of any season, old or new. Season 7 had the hook of an infamous couple from Survivor, and, love it or hate it, ended up being a very memorable season indeed. I’m looking forward to delving back into it. Until next time!