If you would ask me which one of the remaining four teams on
The Amazing Race 12 I have a fancy for I would have to think about this for quite a while. If one team should win and others lose, it would matter little. This Season's teams remain, for the most part, for me, an enigma. There has been no one who routinely stood out in terms of strategy, personality or nerve. Until now...
By David W. Taylor (
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Reality Reel Media
01.11.08
However, there was a moment in the last episode in Osaka, Japan, when I knew that the team of Nathan & Jennifer would be my bottom pick for victory. It was when Jennifer said that she and Nathan were going to be "kicking the ass" of the "older" teams. This obnoxious remark and their annoying, youngster-ish, bitchy bickering has left me cold.
It wasn't until Osaka, Japan, that I saw some personality ooze out from among the teams. It was during the Taxi Driver Roadblock. Left waiting in the transit station were Ronald and Donald as mates Christina and Nicolas were chauffeuring their Japanese fares to the Post Office.
Ronald and Donald were staring blankly ahead and Ronald was holding a bag of cookies, munching wildly. Donald was chewing also. Without flinching, eyes forward — seemingly in a trance — Ronald handed the bag of cookies to Donald and said, "Let's finish this...Chocolate Chip, yeah...No problem, hmm." Donald grabbed the cookies and took some...it was like watching two Homer Simpsons standing opposite each other. Hmm...
It was an endearing moment for the two older dudes. A rare glimpse of inter-team sharing. Selflessness. One finally got a sense of some sort of camaraderie between the Racers; a human moment amid the hustle and rapid-fire pacing. It was a snapshot I wish we could see more often: a small respite that infused personal charm and humor into the Race. It is a footnoting technique that has become, unfortunately, increasingly less evident. Phil Keoghan shouldn't have all the fun, after all, with his delightful Pitstop pauses and quips.
And, slowly, we became witnesses to a team — TK & Rachel — whose face of calm fortitude against an avalanche of bad luck, ignorant clerks, delays, stresses and disappointments should seduce us to envy such a carefree and positive state of consciousness. And I don't use the term "consciousness" lightly. To watch TK take an entire leg of mischief and come out the other end with such an awareness and appreciation for his position in life, his reality — instead of hurling pedestrian bitterness and scorn — is truly an almost spiritual haunting. I can say he is a better man than I.
Their headlong trip into calamity began in India when TK & Rachel entered a forlorn Travel Desk in a local Mumbai hotel. There, a bespectacled ninny issued them airline tickets on a series of flights that would be the first departure out of Mumbai but the last arrival into Osaka. TK seemingly made every effort — except checking their itinerary himself — to assure that this clerk was achieving their travel goals. More than once TK strongly commented, "...we want the one that gets into Osaka earliest." And, I suppose sensing this gentleman's less than confident glow, repeatedly urged, "You're sure this is good?" TK was covering his bases, he thought.
