The Amazing Race: “The Kindness Of Strangers”

That totally inconspicuous Amazing Race bus making its way down the Pacific Coast Highway can only mean one thing: Phil Keoghan is somewhere nearby, performing his eyebrow warm-up exercises. That, and it’s time to meet the 11 teams that will soon be yelling at foreign taxi drivers for not being able to speak English. They are:
- Andy and Tommy, professional snowboarders. Henceforth known as the Dudez.
- Ethan and Jenna, the winners of Survivor: Africa and Survivor: Amazon, respectively, and dating for seven years. Ethan beat both cancer and Big Tom!
- Ernie and Cindy, dating couple. She’s a control freak.
- Justin and Jennifer, brother and sister. She’s a hothead.
- Laurence and Zac, father and son. One has an accent, one sailed around the world.
- Bill and Cathi, grandparents. They’re probably toast.
- Liz and Marie, blonde twins who can communicate with their minds, but yell at each other a lot anyway.
- Jeremy and Sandy, another dating couple. Apparently, they were in this episode, but I don’t remember them.
- Ron and Bill, domestic partners and flight attendants. Pan Am counter-programming.
- Amani and Marcus, married couple. He’s a former NFL player for the Colts. Sunday Night Football counter-programming.
- Kaylani and Lisa, Vegas showgirls. They claim to have big brains in addition to big boobs. Remember that, as it may be important later.
Phil greets the teams at a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles and presents them with their first challenge, a word puzzle that must be solved using letters on umbrellas. In a suspicious bit of post-production overdubbing, Phil informs us that the last team to depart will have to complete an additional task called the Hazard. Teams appear to be grabbing umbrellas more or less at random, although the Dudez have a strategy of looking for vowels. (It doesn’t appear that the teams actually have to solve the puzzle, “Taipei, Taiwan,” just find the right letters.) Once teams have the right umbrella, they get a key to a product-placed car. You’ll never believe it, but Team Boobs ‘n Brains is the last to depart.