The Amazing Race Recap

Having a Baby’s Gotta Be Easier Than This

By David Mumpower

April 28, 2009

Women always look exactly like this when I rub them.

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While Victor & Tammy stumble repeatedly in their attempt to perform a satisfactory dive, Kisha & Jen arrive and quickly make everyone aware of the fact that this is probably the event that sends them home. Jen is not only not a strong swimmer but she is deathly afraid of drowning. She is being asked to overcome her worst fear live on camera, and she handles it about as would be expected. She turtles. She and her sister make the grievous miscalculation of choosing to do the dive first. Given that it is performed from the three meter mark, Jen is forced to stare down at her potential doom for several moments before jumping. She chooses to leave the diving board for a while. Her fear is winning out. She and Kisha suit up for the swimming challenge and Kisha methodically swims the first 100 meters of the required 400 meters. Once Jen is expected to get into the water, she refuses, instead asking her sister to go back to the diving challenge. This is...not good.

There is other stuff going on at the gym, but the main stories are Jen's fear and Tammy's clumsiness. Once the cheerleaders get to the swimming pool, their only complaint is how tight the swimsuits are. They're in and out of the water in less than ten minutes. As Victor sees this, he winces at the realization that he chose very, very poorly for his team. While they continue to screw up dives, Margie & Luke show up, set the water on fire with a scorching eight minute heat and leave the facility. Only Tammy & Victor and Kisha & Jen remain and it is readily apparent at this point that neither team is going to be able to perform a successful synchronized dive.

When Jen returns from the swimming challenge, she bravely jumps into the water from the three meter height, an impressive feat in and of itself for someone afraid of drowning. When she starts swimming, it is readily apparent she has had no formal lessons. She sticks her face straight down into the water as she does the breast stroke, thereby swallowing as much water as is humanly possible as she moves. Irrational fear or not, if she does swim like that for very long, she will drown. She does two more dives off the board with the same result each time. The sisters are nowhere close to being coordinated in their timing and she is taking on water at an alarming rate as she swims back out of the pool. It's a scary situation, and she has a total meltdown. Reduced to uncontrollable sobbing, she asks her sister to go back to the locker room. While they are there, Victor & Tammy finally clue into the fact that they should do the swimming challenge instead. A little over ten minutes later, they finish it and realize they just threw away first place senselessly trying to do the harder, slower challenge. It's Transylvania all over again.




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The editing of the show cannot do much here to make the situation tense. Given the order of the three teams exiting the building and the fact Kisha & Jen haven't started swimming again prior to Victor and Tammy's departure, there is absolutely no suspense here. Kisha sweetly leads her sister back to the water and Jen finds her courage once more, slowly making her way across the water. 25 meters in, she figures out that with a floatation device strapped on her back, she can simply roll over and backstroke her way to the completion of the leg. I'm stunned that it took them and Victor & Tammy as long as it did to have this epiphany. Less than 20 minutes later, they have completed the challenge and Jen has overcome her mortal fear. They will, however, be eliminated from the race.

Unless...

The cheerleaders get to the finish line and are giddy from the heady pleasure of knowing that they have finally finished in first place in a leg of the race. They anxiously await Phil's description of their prize, only to be informed that this leg of the race is not over and they have been at least temporarily robbed of their rightful spot in the final three. God, I hate this show.

By the way, in case you are wondering, the total number of references to BitchGate in this episode was 14. Thanks for not running it into the ground, CBS!


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