The Amazing Race 23: Episode 5

By Daron Aldridge

October 28, 2013

This forces us to reevaluate all our life choices. I'm going to go home and shave.

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Seemingly, the producers learned on the fly that the prolonged and anticlimactic flight perils of Chester & Ephraim do not make for good television because we are once again spared much travel footage.

The teams land in Gdansk, Poland, and load up in cabs. With a destination of Solidarity Square, which is described as the place that started the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (thanks for the history lesson), you’d think it’d be easy to find. You’d be wrong. Not only do three teams get lost but they get lost in a spectacular fashion that has them traipsing around some docks together. That’s right, exes Tim & Marie, the Afganimals and the Ice girls all end up in the same wrong spot. So their cabbies independently brought them there. Because of that I can’t blame the drivers wholly. Clearly, either the teams failed to communicate it correctly or the clue was written just ambiguously enough to throw off cabbies.

While they flounder, for the first time this season Okies Tim & Danny are in first place at the correct spot. What’s in store for them…just being directed to another location/landmark. It always bothers me when they throw in the unnecessary cluebox that serves as nothing more than a stopping point. It’s like the producers are contractually obligated to visit/highlight more than four places in each country visited. The clue at least warns that a U-Turn is ahead.




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The boys are heading to the Golden Gate and reach that one first also - that's twice in a row now. The doctors, New Englanders and baseball wives aren’t trailing the Okies by much, so their lead shouldn’t be that reassuring. At the Golden Gate, it’s Detour time, which means that the U-Turn will immediately follow this task, so the pressure to stay ahead of others is high.

This week’s Detour offers two forms of public humiliation. The choices are Pose or Polka. For Pose, they have to head to a square, dress in a black unitard with a beard and trident, and mimic the pose of a statue of Neptune in the square. They will have completed the task when they earn 75 zloty in tips. For Polka, they head to a hall, learn a complicated polka routine, and perform it to the satisfaction of their instructor. Plus, one team member will be the man and the other the woman. To ensure maximum humiliation, the teams must stay in their tasks' respective costumes for the remainder of the leg.

OK-Tim & Danny head to Polka and Danny instantly bemoans the fact that he will have to don the dress for the routine. Such are the perils of being half a foot shorter than your team mate and probably about 50 lighter. While they head to Polka, Brandon & Adam have slipped from first at the top of the episode to fifth. At Solidarity Square, their driver has called another cabbie for directions to the Golden Gate but, as bad luck would have it, the guy calls Jason & Amy’s cab driver. Because he knows where his bread is buttered, the Bostonians’ driver happily denies giving him directions. Brandon actually laughs it off in the good nature that we have come to expect from them.


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