Cereal Monogamist

The Amazing Race: Strategy, Luck, and The Inevitable Elimination of the Teams I Like

Though I was not willing to admit it immediately after viewing the episode, yes, Mike and Mel contributed to their own elimination on Sunday's episode of The Amazing Race. But they were not entirely and completely at fault. Fourteen seasons of this show have taught me more than a little about how it works.

Mistakes made by Mike and Mel

• They lost the mad dash for cabs getting out of the airport. This perhaps resulted in their unwarranted attachment to the cabbie who eventually picked them up and proceeded to lead them down blind alleys for the rest of the leg. They very much should have ditched that guy at the first available opportunity.


• They didn't listen to the people who told them the gorilla statue they were supposed to find was in a zoo; they did, however, listen to people who said the gorilla was on a beach.


• They let themselves get driven by their bad cabbie all the way to the beach.

Understandable mistakes made by Mike and Mel (places where their logic didn't serve them)

• Apparently, the first few people who they asked about the gorilla said, "I don't know, the zoo?" making the guys think it was a default guess; assuming it wouldn't be that obvious, they sought a different answer.


• They noticed other teams heading in the opposite direction as they were headed, and made a conscious decision not to follow the group like lemmings. This is an admirable move in a race where contestants frequently tail each other to avoid reading maps or figuring out clues for themselves. This time, it just made the Whites independently wrong.

Things that were totally not their fault

• The leg was designed with no thought-intensive challenges or tasks, which is how the dumbest teams managed to finish in top spots. I don't mind the physical challenges--I think the show needs them--but they need to be in combination with tasks that require logic and reason and problem-solving skills. Otherwise, you might as well just hand the million dollars to the dudes with the biggest muscles. (Which, admittedly, happens most seasons anyway.)

Anyway, even though I can acknowledge that a couple better-made decisions would have saved them, I will continue to find their loss controversial. They were such cool guys, good-natured, with no sense of entitlement whatsoever. In a previous episode, Mel was a bit short with a cabbie, asking him to hurry up; almost immediately, he confessed to the camera that he'd feel bad all day. This attitude was clearly sincere because we saw it again in this week's episode. Despite being significantly behind all the other teams, the Whites made it through the designed-for-frustration tea store task NOT by being bastards and demanding that everyone speed them through it, but rather by being silly, goofing around with the store owners.

You'll be missed, gay minister and bug-eyed, screenwriting son!

Other Amazing Race observations:

• Why is everyone getting into cabs without asking if the drivers know how to get to X location and Y landmark, and then complaining that the driver doesn't know what or where it is? Have these people not watched the previous seasons?


• Tammy and Victor are annoying, but there's a reason they're front runners. In addition to being fairly physically fit (they look like gym rats), they have never once been caught misreading a clue. Lawyers love details!