The Amazing Race 33: Finale Recap

0:01 Welcome back to the nullified take where we've got the tnt takes for you on the amazing race 33 finale i'm your host chris and i'm joined here today as always by michelle how are you doing hi doing well it's good to do this at a different time of the day it's actually the middle of saturday here for me so it gives the american fans chance to hop on if they're around yeah i agree i think it's good to do it at a different time it's middle of the day here for me as well midday kind of in new zealand but you know hopefully we get a couple of the us viewers that follow this channel and know that there is predominantly you as viewers that follow this channel i think the last time i checked is about 70 of the viewers that are watching it later after we do the lives and normally do a lot of commenting on our takes as well so i'm sure people are you know sort of hanging on a thread to find out what it is that we thought about this finale that was on we've got lovable nikki here in the chat that always follows the content lovable nikki welcome to the live stream so michelle we've got a new record broken here there was a lot of talk about a potential record that was going to be broken but the oldest couple to ever win the amazing race have done it i believe prior to this it was

1:21 Chip and kim yay i think chip and kim was about 42 maybe or in the early 40s where i don't feel like there's that big of an age difference maybe like three or four years age difference between them and but i didn't realize that it was that long ago because wasn't that like season five or something like that god that would have been like 2003 ish yeah 2003 2004. i'm just looking at the 2004. yeah i'm just looking i'm just looking at the amazing race wiki i'm cheating but it's 2004 season five yeah end of 2004 wow i didn't realize that record have been standing for that long and that you know obviously we get them winning this there was also talk about raquel and kayla potentially becoming the fourth all-female team to win it so a lot of stake for them and then you know we go into the finale with four teams you know you've got ryan and dusty you've got arun natalia the super fans on the show also competing here and i thought overall it was a pretty strong combination of teams that were left and i mean aruna natalia people could say listen they nearly fell out a couple of times but they knew what it felt like to

2:41 You know be defeated and to have that heard of having to go home so there was no one racing harder than them in this final leg to try and get to the finale oh definitely oh they wanted it so bad and you know as i predicted and i think you did you know they probably wouldn't make it to the final three but i was i was there with them trying to urge them forward but yeah it was it was tough but listen michelle we get to see another i think last week we said is are they going to go straight back to the us is there going to be another country that they're going to go to we find out that they do start this league in portugal i don't know if you've ever been to portugal yourself michelle but i've always wanted to go to portugal it's one of those countries that's high up on my bucket list so i was very excited to see we get to see another country here before heading back to the us yeah i have never been to portugal but it was one of my father's favorite countries so i really do want to travel there and see what he loves so much there yeah we've also got here in the live stream a couple of additional people have joined jimmy welcome to the live stream hello i met jimmy and steven smith welcome to the live stream as well it's great to have you guys here yeah i really enjoyed this i thought that the

4:01 Scenery in portugal was beautiful obviously the first place that they have to go to is drive to a fort that they have to go to and they that we see again here that there's a little bit of navigation issues in the beginning it had me laughing when raquel and kayla nearly drove down a staircase i thought well you know what she was a bit like me like can we drive down the stairs because i'd be the same i'd be like oh we'll lose the whole underside of the car can we and i was thinking no there's a there's a handrail there's gonna be all sorts of issues and i was thinking gosh it looks very tight to go you know reversing back up where you came from so yeah very unfortunate that they went the wrong way there yeah do you think that the i know that production don't get too involved but do you think the cameraman or somebody said listen insurance is not going to cover this if you go down there surely they were like oh man we need to save some costs here i think if they would have started to move forward they may have said something but no i they generally just let them do things wrong all by themselves and i mean from experience having lived in london for a long time i think i mentioned this in the first podcast we did when they had the london leg there's so many like sometimes when you're reading a map it

5:22 Doesn't actually tell you when there's one ways and they could have gone down one of these one ways where they thought on the map it looked fine i could go down here but they ended up getting stuck and then realized oops we gotta we gotta back out of this but obviously while they're struggling with this we get kim and pen and the lead's going to go back and forth quite a bit throughout this episode but we get kim and kind of passing them by and getting to little row boats first where they have to find modern day explorers on the back of the boat and i was quite shocked at how many people just took absolute guesses and just said i'm just going to jump in the first boat before taking a minute to look at all the names now did you know any of the names to be honest with you i history was never like one of my strong suits at school like i was very much you know business economics math geography i was pretty good at history is something that i always found names and dates like i mean i get names confused all the time and i always have people in the live stream telling me no that's the real name or that's how you pronounce it so i probably wouldn't have been the best but i did know cristiano ronaldo i did know vasco de gama and i don't know how i knew that but i knew the gamma as well yes and i thought hang on was that year five i learned about that but

6:42 At least i knew but if i couldn't get that vote then i'd probably be like a rune and just taking anything because none of the other even the soccer star i didn't know him so wow you didn't know cristiano ronaldo oh no i know oh wait a minute has there been another ronaldo that's not cristiano yes there has so way back there was the original ronaldo that played for brazil and he was a pretty big soccer star as well but not from portugal cristiano ronaldo is actually from portugal and a little bit of an easter egg for people if they go back and watch and i know probably a lot of people are like why is chris talking about soccer so much because i know it's not the biggest sport but hey even at the los angeles galaxy being the stadium that they went to at the end which is a soccer team of us so for some of the reasons the amazing race loves soccer but soccer is the biggest game in the world but i know it's not big in america or in oh well it's getting up there in australia but it's the biggest game in the world yeah any country so it's i agree with fifa use things to do with soccer yeah so a little bit of an easter egg as dusty got to the end of this league and he did his celebration he actually did the cristiano ronaldo goal scoring celebration where he jumps

8:02 Down and does the super saiyan motion so it's it was a little bit of a shout out i saw it and i was like dusty knows that cristiano ronaldo is because he did a little bit of an easter egg there for people who actually watched it which i thought was really cool oh that's good that's good see my sports knowledge came in handy yeah definitely rewinding to when they were on top of the fort and they had to look for that flag yes i would have done something like that here for a race and we were up top of a very tall building and when you are up so high and you have to look for something so small it's really difficult and then when you finally find it how do you translate that to getting back to the ground and getting to that spot it's really hard and we didn't have a car to get to the spot we had to run to the spot so it was even harder trying to work out which way and through an alley and round this corner and yeah it's a lot harder than what you think especially when you get at ground level and you're in between buildings and things like that and you can completely lose direction don't know where north west south or east is at and i found it interesting that raquel and kayla and reina dusty seem to share information or both point to the same flag and say yes that's where it is and they ran away from the together because

9:22 You know i would have thought that raquel and kayla which they've done a lot throughout this season would keep a lot of that information for themselves instead of sharing it with a team that is as dominant as you know as dominant i put that in quotations as ryan and dusty is to get to the end but you know it's funny because ryan and dusty gets completely lost running to the boats and you see aruna natalia passing the by getting there first so they went completely wrong somewhere so i agree with you it's probably a lot harder than what we can appreciate watching it on the tv screen but it was interesting here michelle to see who ended up getting this first roadblock who had to do it for their team so kim is on there first she took a guess so lucky first guess she takes she's right she gets out of there so lucky then you get arun who's doing it for that team and he's a bit lost and i probably can't blame him i think i was gonna what is happening with him and rowing i don't understand it's tricky but it's not that hard yeah it was it was fine it was funny to see but listen i like again i think that rowing is more probably more difficult than what we appreciate like we always it's so easy to be sitting here on the sideline and look at that and say man what are you doing that should be the easiest thing to do but again you

10:42 They had to row on their own so the previous rowing challenges that they did which by the way most teams had a lot of difficulty in competing in any case and they were complaining about that afterwards you know had two people rowing it so you had one on each side of the boat to help with the steering in the direction but in this case you've got to do it all on your own and ryan had no issues he was probably the most impressive being able to just power through it you know obviously he was built for it but you know he also again gets it wrong in the beginning doesn't take his time to look and then gets it on that second attempt and raquel and kayla gets out of there pretty quickly as well i thought it was a fun challenge a good twist to it you know to have all those names and being able to decipher it because it took not just physical ability but also a little bit of knowledge and you know i would have been running around looking for someone saying hey and asking them yeah and also it's a good challenge in that the lead can change in it's not so linear that they're in and out so that was a good challenge for that for changing the lineup as well so the hangout room welcome to the live stream is saying i wish i was still a fan of the amazing race according to my family it's the only reality show that they think i can do it's like the challenge so i mean the amazing race is interesting in the sense

12:02 That you know it's the thing that you don't think is gonna trick you up is gonna trick you up and i think that's what we're gonna get to later on when we get to the finale lick and how that completely just bolts somebody or a team out of this you know the amazing race because sometimes it's the attention to detail taking a minute and you know that's a big problem that i have michelle like i always over complicate things like for myself i don't think that it's the easiest thing i always think now it's got to be a lot more difficult than this yeah well that's what i've done on races i've been given we've been given a clue and it was a very straightforward clue but i'm on google and i'm looking up all these different things found out something and even the organizers said to me how on earth did you even think like that and i said because i think sideways and upwards and downwards all at the same time and if i was making a race i would make the races do that not something really simple so yeah the when i was doing this race the lead changed because i was being all complicated and not just to running for the most simple thing that we had to run for so it's really hard if your brain is different than what the organizers are yeah

13:23 Yeah it's interesting i don't think you know until out there what you're going to be doing well and what you're going to be struggling at but that's why i always look for teams with a good balance between i think the best teams have got to balance and they've got different streams and they bring different attributes be it you know ryan and dusty ryan being the calm one dusty being the one that overreacts or gets in his own head same with kim and pen to a certain degree you know kim having anxiety and pen being the person who can talk her down and you know we'll talk about that because i've got some real takes on that when we get to the end that i want to talk about but you know steven says here and this is something that i think you could probably relate to living in sydney he wouldn't be able to find a flag down there because it's a nightmare to get around even without yeah it would be really hard in sydney stephen it was actually on the gold coast i was up in the is it the q building i can't remember what it is yeah but it was it was very difficult when you look down and it's so far down and the flag can be the biggest flag like the one on the amazing race it's huge flag but when you're up high it's so small and you're looking for any amount of red and yellow anywhere and yeah it is tricky now michelle we get to the route the route info and it's canned fish that they have to paint on a dawn i absolutely love the artwork it looked amazing but i would have hated this challenge i famously

14:44 Or infamously made my teacher cry in you know third grade when i painted a stick figure because she was like it's that ugly you know and i'm just not good at art you know i'm not that's not my thing i like arts i like the performing arts i've always been on stage performing and stuff like that but when it comes to actually painting that's not my thing so i would have absolutely hated having to do this and the attention to detail that was required on this challenge was quite complicated as well i would have loved it i am all for the detail i actually if i was there first i would have picked the mermaid like kim and pen easy looked quite easy compared to some of the others and i was i was actually excited by it i thought ah painting challenge and i was taken back i meant to google this and look it up the one where they had to paint a door in a previous season and i can't remember what country they were in why didn't i look this up can someone who is watching tell us and someone i think went to paint the wrong door or they're in the wrong place i don't even remember that but that's horrible like if you if you're even gonna go paint the wrong door imagine being the person living in that house getting out and being like what happened to my door open yeah you know i just went to go get some lunch and i

16:04 Came back to a painted door that's hilarious that's absolutely hilarious but you know obviously we see here that you know it's funny because you can tell when kim and pen gets annoyed and they got really annoyed with the handler it's happened a few times on the rise where they it's almost like the paint's starting to crack and they just want to kill someone because they really want to get out of there and she keeps turning them back because they're missing a little bit of detail in the shadowing of the actual letters that was pretty funny to see and you know i think this is a case where i think pen when kim gets frustrated pen gets frustrated as well and i think that he was trying to keep this cool but he was also struggling yeah he was doing well trying to keep them even and not go crazy and he was the one who kept looking at the picture and seeing what was going wrong yeah i think kim just couldn't look at it anymore yeah she was she was ready to kill someone for sure and you know kayla and raquel they get out of there not that long after kim and peen gets out of there ryan and dusty you know talk about and this is going to be a theme for them throughout this whole finale but it also has been a theme of their second half of the race they

17:24 Just can't seem to get it right when it comes to taking their time you know attention to detail they really i mean have and i'm sure there has been but i feel like they must be one of the teams that have had the most interesting trajectory ever on the amazing race starting off as one of the most dominant teams but then just being their own worst enemy in the second half of the race and you know i was really fearful for them here i thought aruna natalia was gonna surpass them because they couldn't find the doorknob that they needed to paint exactly yeah i thought that would happen as well but i just i probably wouldn't think of painting the doorknob and would you no probably not like i mean i'm not gonna i'm not gonna shade them here i don't know if i would have and you know good on ryan for eventually i think i wrote it down they had 12 or 13 attempts to try and get it and you know eventually he spotted the fact that he needed to paint that dusty was getting very close to losing it again so ryan probably had to keep that level head trying to do the challenge but the thing that really threw me off michelle is that i got semi-spoiled on facebook not who won but i saw the first sentence when i went on facebook because obviously it took me a day or two before i watched it and it said i'm very disappointed

18:44 At the outcome of the finale and then i was like oh i don't want to read anything what happened so i thought in my mind what could have made people this upset about the outcome did natalia win that they win and then i was thinking maybe aruna natalia is going to surpass ryan and dusty in this specific challenge and get to the pit stop before then because in my mind that would have been the only outcome you know i love i love arun and natalia there's the lovely people but they've been out of the game a few times i thought i would have thought that would have been a hollow i would have i don't want to say i would have had a holland hollow feeling about them winning you know if they did when so that was like i already went to worst case scenario because of just that first sentence that i saw on facebook well i didn't i tried not to look at anything i didn't actually and every time something would come up in my feed i blew my eyes so i couldn't see it or i just quickly look away and keep scrolling and then i thought just get off instagram you can't be on instagram at all so i got off instagram but i had to be on facebook for my other groups thank god i don't know how i wasn't spoiled because i watched it probably 10 hours after it aired and i got i got there without being spoiled so the finale was actually quite exciting for me yeah well they have to go from there to an old

20:04 Church and a white lighthouse which again the scenery this season has been absolutely astonishing and again such beautiful scenery going there and the challenge that they have to do here before they get there so it's another roadblock obviously the other person that hasn't done the first one had to go and do this roadblock and in this case pen would be the first person and to go do it they had to go and count columns in this church beautiful church but they were designated an area that they could stand in which i think i don't remember if i've seen this before i feel like i haven't seen something similar where they've got a designated area that they have to stand and i've seen them having to count certain things that you know like stairs for instance in the past and other things but i thought this really added to the difficulty of this challenge and you know i take my hat off to anyone that did this challenge i think that you know like ryan even said when you get to that shadowy part at the far end it makes it extremely difficult and maybe even hypnotizing to try and read this what did you think of this challenge it looked like i can't now my if you're allowed to wear sunglasses on the race and i have seen sunglasses on the race i have prescription sunglasses so it would help but you know when you get older as penn said your eyesight isn't as great as it used to be and trying

21:24 To see those columns right down the end i was looking at the screen going oh my god it's just insane i couldn't i would have been running back and forth i would have been like pen i would have been making it a race a just a run back make a number do another number until i got there yeah the hangout room here says michelle you're like them you avoid social media for days to avoid spoilers about their favorite shows yeah i normally do as well but for some other reason like i mean i immediately i was like okay i can't read any further than that we've also got i don't watch much here again in the chat so we've got the judge watching us when is the lulu and lala interview happening it was supposed to be today and they sadly had to pull out last minute they had some technical difficulties but it's going to be tomorrow at the same time so 8 p.m eastern standard time we should be doing an interview with lulu and laila really excited for that one michelle yes that'll be good hopefully if they're up and running yeah i think i think they had they had technical difficult difficulties combined by a probably a massive after party when the finale happened it probably didn't combine to the to the best thing for them to get on the podcast today so we'll get them tomorrow don't worry about that

22:45 So michelle so yes obviously penn you know tries a few different things here but raquel and kayla continues to impress here because you get kayla going out there she's got this method of counting you know in blocks yeah rather than doing everything in one hit and she does it with one attempt she gets out of there surpasses kim and pen and they win their second leg in a row so i mean going into the finale i kind of started believing that they could win this thing and it's weird because for the whole season i was like camipain's definitely winning this the edit is clearly telling us they're going to win it but the editor did make me doubt because again phil went on about them potentially becoming the fourth all-female team to win i know and i just thought what an interesting edit they would have had from being in the beginning of the season where they got a little bit off screen time they kind of disappeared a little bit in the middle i didn't feel like i got to know them as well and me and you were even saying like i don't know if we're killing kayla if they're a team that we're really shouting for and then slowly but surely as we got to know them better and better they become in fact one thing i almost forgot to say michelle i've really started appreciating kayla's sense of humor she's got a really dry sense of humor which i really appreciate you know like when she was talking about she hates sardis but she would rather eat the sedins than

24:05 Paint the can i was in stitches when she said that yeah i was thinking that but i was also thinking i quite like battered sardines they're not too bad i wouldn't even get them out of the can though and the funny thing is that when she said that again in one of my challenges someone in my team had to eat a can of sardines before we could move on and all four of us were like oh god we really don't want to eat these sardines and they were in a chili oil as well so it made it twice as bad but anyway that's an aside one quick thing i wanted to mention was that natalia got it in one attempt as well so if at the roadblock arun had been better at rowing would it have put them in the top three since she got it in one attempt this is this is something else that could have changed the game it definitely could have i mean dusty was having the hardest time out there trying to get an and i knew going in dusty is not the guy for this like they should have they're like i don't know dusty is not the guy for this he doesn't have the patience i knew he was gonna get frustrated he just came off doing the rock challenge trying to find the coin so i was very nervous for them so it continued to play into that narrative i made up in my head of erin and natalia coming from behind and just blitzing

25:25 Past him so i was very nervous for them and also very happy when they did eventually make it into the final three because i did feel like the strongest three teams the three teams that deserved to be in the finale were the three teams that got there in the end yeah chris stephen has got a question here for you michelle he says why did pink stand so far away from kayla when she was given the answer which when she gave her answer to the person there that they needed to give it to i think they would have had too or maybe look if they weren't supposed to stand that far away so they couldn't hear maybe he did it out of respect to not hear her but yeah i don't know i we don't know i mean we'd have to ask penn that i was very nervous that because we saw kayla and pen talking as they were running to give the answer i was very nervous that kayla was going to give the answer to pen and even when she got it i was like please don't give him the answer because kim and peen are the toughest team in the in the race they're by far the most dominant team if you give them that answer you make your chances of winning in the finale that much harder but luckily they didn't end up giving that information and they did realize listen this is crunch time now it's the finale we can't make it easier for our biggest competition out there so that was good to see that they were willing

26:45 To put their own interests in front of kim and pens yes definitely yeah do you think that kim and pen as the mom and dad it kind of defused their threat level out there quite a bit because you know raquel and kayla did call them oh you know we love mom and dad and yeah you know and do you think that helped a little bit with them being able to and one of the things i did want to say is that i was really disappointed we didn't get to see a u-turn this season yeah i think they were just trying to get through the race and you know they didn't have that many teams coming back they needed they really needed more and i don't know i don't think they wanted to complicate things that's all and to the to mom and dad question i think definitely it made them seem like less of a threat even though they were very good i think the younger teams would have seen them as you know less of a threat to their to their game i agree i think that they probably thought they could outrun them or something if it came down to it but it was interesting because the finale you can't predict how the finale is going to play out sometimes you've got this massive run that you have to do to get there or you know there's that chance but in the more recent seasons i feel like whatever the puzzle is it's normally like walking distance away from you know the final

28:05 Quiz is like walking distance away from the finishing line so yeah it doesn't really work out that way anymore like it did in the earlier seasons yeah but at the start of this leg when they also when they said go and they went around is a fast runner we got we got an aerial shot and a ron was like whoosh and i actually rewound just to see just to have a look at it again because he was fast on his feet aaron and natalie had a great run this season obviously as fans like i mean i'm sure they appreciated the fact that they got to see how the show was made get all the behind the scenes titbits you know they're now part of the greater amazing race family and they had such a great run they were able to come back sadly didn't make it here in the first leg but i think that they would have walked away from this experience really loving it and i do think that arun and natalie i know there's been plenty of dad and daughter or dad and son teams and things like that in the past but i really feel like they stand out they're quite a unique team i would not be surprised you know if aruna natalia pops up in our screen some point in the future as a potential all-star steamer like i would not be surprised but the thing for me michelle is i think in a normal season we wouldn't have seen them get this fast i don't know how they would go on another season if they were

29:25 To race against other really competitive you know amazing race teams that didn't have these restrictions and things around them or the race were a little bit tougher i would say probably in some other seasons i don't know how they would stack up but i do think there's a possibility they could come back yeah definitely all right so we go to the finale the final leg here heading into it they go back to the us they're in los angeles and what an epic starting point here for them to be at the top of what i think was the hotel and they were on a helipad on the top it looked awesome starting at the top and the very first challenge and clue that they get is to figure out that there is going to be a combination code on a lift an elevator going up and down and some teams find this easier to decipher than others yes and i can totally understand that because i wouldn't make it easy on myself i'd be thinking up and down what goes up and down but then i might not actually stay up there and go somewhere else but very clever i love the idea i was just thinking did they did they have to be on four different towers to get or to get three or three different towers to get the three different lifts i'm just i was wondering how that worked and then

30:46 I think they did i think they did because when you look at the aerial shot they were i think there were like three or four different yeah they were the roof yes i think they all had their own section of the roof and they would have had some visibility to the lifts as it was going up and down but then again it was kind of weird because every time they ran back they could see if somebody else opened their lock box and got out of there so yes this is my point yeah so yeah i was a bit confused because it looked like they were on one of those circular towers the circular ones and they looked across to the next one to see the lift but then they could but then the lock boxes seem to be close so yeah bit confusing for me wanting to figure everything out but then i then we went back on to the next thing so i was okay i'll just forget about that logania says i really wish there was a blind i'm assuming u-turn on the final leg yeah just the one before going into the night that would have really made the fans angry i think logan oh my god they would have said oh that's not fair in the final leg don't do it yeah that would have totally changed everything up yeah i did miss i did miss the detour as well for

32:06 The final league but before going into the finale i know that you had two roadblocks which is always fun but i do like detours because it i guess most of the time this season people everybody seemed to choose the same option when they went into the detours yeah which is interesting but i think that sometimes on detours if you're a smart team you're clever you have a lot more control in your hands in regards to what you choose to be able to make up time for instance as well and we didn't get to see that either but i yeah so w turn equals double u-turn yeah so what a double u-turn that's just that would be crazy so if kim and pam were coming first you know what like and they wouldn't have used it they would have just said we choose not to u-turn anybody i think it wouldn't have been used bc i still want to see teams like i mean raquel and kayla would have u-turned every single time they could have you know and i like to see that i like to see that cutthroatness in a team you know so yeah and raquel and kayla were ahead of kim and pen for quite a bit in these last couple of legs so there would have been a good chance for them to you know continue to further their own lead and get to the end but i know u-turns are quite controversial i don't know if i necessarily want to see it right at the end but i do like seeing it in a season like i like seeing what it brings to a season i think maybe another reason they didn't bring it in like obviously there were

33:26 Some limitations this season in regards to how many different detours and challenges they could put out on a course due to some of the restrictions they had that may have played into it but i also think another reason they maybe didn't do it is because we've seen alliances gang up on certain individuals in the last couple of seasons and it has meant that they had no chance exactly and coming back to i think i think ryan and dusty or raquel and kayla would possibly have used the u-turn i don't think kim and penn would have seeing who they are and their personalities i really don't think they would have but i mean we'd have to see that play out to make any sort of yeah it's tough i mean we could sit here and hypothesize but until you're out there you know racing and you get the opportunity but i think kim and pen surely they weren't feeling threatened by anyone out there they were the team to beat you know ryan and dusty wouldn't have had the opportunity to do it because they were that far behind throughout the last couple of weeks they would never have had the opportunity but i think we're killing kayla they would have definitely they would have been cutthroat they would have taken that shot which would have made it even more badass to be honest like i would have enjoyed seeing that happen but obviously this start here off the finale you know doing the elevator going up and down ryan and dusty really

34:47 Struggles continue to not really pay attention or slow down and look around and listen like i'm not judging them too much like if i was out there chances are like i've already said earlier in the podcast for those that have dropped late into this live stream i'm not good at those kinds of things either because i always over complicate things for myself so i would have also probably been looking down at the street who's running up and down like i would have looked for signs or something so i'm sure i would have gotten it wrong but how do you feel about this first challenge this first thing they've got to do being ultimately the deciding factor and if someone's going to be able to run a good finale or not do you think that you know if you were the producers of the show and you were putting down the challenges and the order that they were doing it and do you think that you want to take the suspense out of the show so early on because for me the suspense were gone immediately when i saw them getting stuck there and i knew that it was going to be between kim and pen and raquel and kayla i don't know look the pinatas there are a lot of pinatas there so if everyone left the hotel in you know well they did i mean kim and pan and raquel and kayla left very close together and they were at the pinatas together they were at the sound stage together so

36:09 It didn't seem like anything was really too difficult so yeah the first i don't know i don't understand why the boys found it so hard to do the clue box at the beginning i think it would have been a closer race if they would have got away from there wasn't really much of a chance to do something very wrong on any of the challenges to change a lead it was it was just it was always going to be quite close if the teams were close together but i can't i mean anything with a combination is tricky when you've got combination locks you know you can get the wrong combination but obviously not with this challenge because you had the combination there so they didn't have to work out you know mathematical equations or find particular things to put the combination together all that to do with c1 lift so i think the production crew was trying to make it easy in that they could all possibly stay close together but it just didn't work out that way yeah i felt it was the order of it was a little bit off and the rest of the different

37:29 Challenges they had to do getting into the finale here like you said were pretty straightforward against the sound room was a little bit there was a bit to that which could have definitely you know made some teams stumble a bit more and some did have a bit of difficulty going in there but overall i really felt underwhelmed in this finale when it came to the types of challenges we got on the way to get to the finale i felt like it lacked that really good physical exciting challenge like beer jumping down the bridge i know they've already done bungee jumping this season maybe they should have done something weird was like dropping out of a plane you know and doing some parachuting or paragliding like just something exciting like i felt like it missed that oomph for me you know like i mean i don't know how you felt about that if you were happy with the way it was but it felt pretty straightforward and easy and safe i guess we will give them some you know we'll give them a pass due to the conditions that they had around trying to get this filmed in over in the us who have had their own struggles with everything that's been going on with the pandemic and they probably try to keep people as safe as possible but yeah i felt a bit underwhelmed i understand where you're coming from they don't generally jump out of planes in the finale though it would have been cool imagine jumping out of a plane right going to the

38:49 To the finishing line you're like okay cool this is where you're going you're going to jump on a plane you're now para dropping into the finishing line like it would be epic you know like they should just get me to jump on there and design these courses for them you know i'll have explosions going in the background as they go like it'll be a full production michelle i'm telling you know viewer ratings will go through the roof it'll go through instead of hitting a pinata the pinata has to explode exactly shoot it down they're on a major network over in the us surely they can you know throw a little bit of cash that way you know get us visually stimulated as we watch this finale as they get to the finishing line you know i would have enjoyed that i'm sure tell me in the life here what do you guys think you know jumping down paragliding into the finale you know with some explosions happening as soon as the final team gets there what do you guys think i reckon explosions make everything better and the wind hits them on the way down and they suddenly land outside the stadium not a good idea okay so back to the pinanas so they get to the pinatas they have to hit three different pinanas one is the taco one's a donkey and one is a star they get different clues from each one of this which will tell them where to go next one person has to

40:09 Be blindfolded and the other one has to be the caller and you've got pen going in as the person who's gonna go hit these pinatas and i believe it was raquel going in as well to do this what did you think of the choices here do you think that they had it the right way around for who was going to go and do the calling i guess kim's a bit i'm assuming and again kim don't come at me if you ever listen to this i guess she's a bit shorter so she was like i'm going to struggle to hit the pinatas yes and pinatas are hard you know have you ever had a pinata no i can't say i have like it's not a big thing in south africa and i don't feel like even in new zealand i have i had a mexican party at my house once and we had the pinata strung up and then the first person had a turn and it they're hopping out of fell on the ground so obviously you've got to have it strung up a lot stronger than we did so i was imagining you know if they knocked it onto the ground and they're trying to hit the ground and open up the pinata it would have been very tricky so we ended up holding the pinata and someone else was hitting it with a giant log now this isn't the safest of things to do at a party where people have been drinking tequila thank god no one was really hurt by being a giant long and someone holding the pinata but yeah

41:30 I love pinatas especially at you know kids parties they're all over the shop and they don't know what they're doing so i was really happy with this because it was really colorful there was a lot of movement happening it wasn't just something like boring like well rowing a boat is boring but unless there's someone who's totally inept at it but i quite like the color and the movement that was happening here yeah and it was interesting you know again we see a little bit of this here where pen says normally when kim gets frustrated he's able to help calm her down or stop her from getting in her own head but in this case he you could see that he was getting frustrated out there smashing so many off them because she was getting lost and he was just trying to get out of there when he takes the mask off he's like that i do all of this he couldn't believe the amount of damage he actually did out there but really i think you know throughout this episode kim and pen it's quite interesting because you can see they just work so well together and this was the first time where they were truly kind of isolated in a sense where he could hear his struggling but he was not able to help because he couldn't see what he was doing raquel gets out there pretty quickly kayla gives great instructions by the way her strategy was to get everything hit before collecting all of the clues which i thought was interesting strategy

42:50 Yeah because if you're if they're far apart then trying to get back to everything would have been more difficult so i would have just put the thing down my top or down my pants and done the next one instead of leaving on the floor yeah but raquel and keller still gets out of there fast you know i'm chemical in a second so that means that they get the opportunity to go to the next challenge the you know where they have to do the sound room there's a word that they had for that i've wrote it down somewhere what do they call the sound holy it's become a foley artist so the guy honestly it was foley someone foley yeah so i'm surprised raquel and kayla never heard of this sort of thing that i knew about it i didn't know the name i didn't know the name but i knew of the art of what they did yeah i knew it was the yard as well and i loved the five things that they picked you know the watermelon challenge marks is broken the hay bales running of the bulls which is one of my favorite i love that and the and the pie fight the pie fight didn't stand out for me at all but it's obviously a good one to put sound effects to yeah did it stand out to me either i was i was a little bit lost but my knowledge like i've watched every single season but i haven't watched them more than once so there's some seasons that

44:10 I it's just completely blank to me and i couldn't remember that one marx is broken classic it's just it's just it was fun to watch i was more looking at it from a scene's michelle that if i was out there i would have not liked to do this because like it looked tough it looked it looked really difficult and like you really needed to know what you were doing with what props at what time but i think what really helped was that they did have a demonstrator showing them what objects they were using at what time so if you could just memorize that sequence then it just becomes a matter of timing which you know it may look a lot more complicated than what it actually is because we get a demonstrator actually showing us how to do it before we actually get into the challenge yes yeah and as pen said you know he does a lot of lip syncing so he was sort of i had a bit of experience in getting things timed right so that worked in their favor i think you know you have to be down to the second kim like kim said she follows people who do it on instagram and this is something that she really enjoys and she was really into it and immediately when they went there i thought you know they had the painting which played into the artistic thing that kim had some great i guess natural ability to be able to pick up then they had this which again is a performing art or it's a being creative again

45:31 And it just really played into kim and payne's strengths in this last couple i'm not saying that the whole race was designed around them i'm trying to say that kim and pen just seem to be very versatile and a lot of the skills that they have translate really well to the amazing race i mean they even had to sing like earlier in the season when they were in scotland so i mean a lot of things really played into their strengths i agree and as i was watching them i thought i thought a bit about myself and how on this podcast i can tend to give a personal story about most of the challenges and yeah it's just your life and some people do everything in their life and have a bit of weirdness in it and have done lots of things and then some people haven't and i think that helps on the race if you've had experience in a lot of different weird and wonderful strange things in your life you know yeah definitely it's a show designed for jack of all trades master of none i guess when you go out there not that i'm saying that these guys don't have a thing that they master which is probably their youtube channel which is very successful obviously but you know it's interesting because raquel and kayla gets really annoyed by it and you can see this is not up chaos

46:51 Not what she likes to do she doesn't naturally gravitate towards this raquel does a really good job keeping her calm because we don't really see the side of her killing kayla for most of the season i think that they're normally pretty even kill and you don't see a lot of emotion but you know finale that's the finale so a lot is at stake and we saw that going into the finale they were celebrating like crazy and then at this point they know their chemi pen is right up there with them they know that this is going to play into their strengths but they get out of there and they you know before the boys even probably gets to the pinatas that's why i said it's so boring because they couldn't get that first thing right they're already going to the final thing which is going to be the memory challenge where they have to combine pictures and put it up against the wall that sort of combines with the relevant clues that they get on there and this was quite interesting because you kind of alluded to this last week on the podcast that kim has been talking about the fact that she kept a notebook where she's done a lot of drawing so again another thing that just really plays into their favor because when most people probably wrote down details of different things she actually did drawings of it i know step up because i don't think i mean i don't know what other people did in the past but i never hear about drawings i hear about notes yeah and

48:11 Obviously it helped a lot except for with the coins the lollies they knew straight away she just knew but the coins really you know gave them a hard time gave everybody a hard time yeah it was interesting because the coin was also the one that she hated the most so i think in her mind she just wanted to forget about that challenge and that's why she couldn't remember it and you get out of there you wouldn't pay much attention you just see the bit of gold and you'd want to leave yeah so i can't imagine she would have drawn the coin at all so you see for me whenever i look at the amazing race and i always say to myself oh yeah i can go there i can do this i mean i think i'd be pretty decent in the amazing race this again would not be my strength whatsoever like i remember random facts i don't remember like images or things like that i normally bring up the random facts where people are like where did you hear that but you know i would struggle remembering this fine details because i mean the detail even on the greater that they had as they were running up and which way it was pointed like i would not remember that stuff at all like i don't even remember what people like friends of mine wore two days ago like i don't pay attention to that stuff yeah i guess i guess the one thing i will say michelle is that when you're on the race you don't have your phone you don't have all

49:31 These normal things that distract you from small details that i think you probably will be more honed in because there's nothing else to take in but your surroundings and the race that you're in this is my point i think you'd be better if you were on it i think you'd take more notice of everybody especially greeters and especially anyone who's in the race that's not phil you definitely take more notice but whether you'd remember the size of a hat not the shape of a head yeah come on it was pretty intense like i look i'm not going to lie to you michelle i looked at this and i was like i'm intimidated as hell like i don't know like if they if they had that level of detail going into it i don't know how i would do but i would pick someone that has strengths in those areas to be on the show with me hopefully that could carry some of those things but like i said maybe when you're out there on the race it's a little bit different but it was interesting because when they started getting things wrong you could just see them swapping things and it got more and more wrong which we've seen many times in other seasons and they're overthinking it and at one point it really was a gamble it was anyone's race because raquel and kayla had two wrong which i believe was the candy and the coin and then they had only the coin wrong so it could have really been anyone's race and i have to say seeing kim and pen leave the look on raquel and kayla's face you know off the feet i really felt

50:52 Sorry for them like i mean yeah i turned around on these girls so much like they have so much heart they played a really strong and good game and if there was one team like at this point maybe two teams this point that i'd really like to see come back like raquel and kayla would be up there you know they'd be up there as a team i would i feel like they've got it in them to be champions yeah but what they didn't do when they first got there and i thought why aren't they doing it take all the tennis racquets out put them all on the floor like take them all out why are they doing this and putting them back why just take all of them out it's not that hard you can see everything then makes life a lot easier and then pen and kim did the same thing and i'm like oh my god take them out of the container do you think there was maybe a rule to that like if both of them did the same thing like you'd think like common scenes would prevail in that scenario but i didn't pick up on that but yeah you'd think that they would have been told you can't take them all out of the container i don't see why there could have been a rule like that or why there would have been a rule like that it's just common sense i don't think it gave anyone a leg up if they did it or didn't do it's just something i don't think production would have said anything about that i mean there were a lot of production standing around them

52:12 We got the aerial shot and there seemed to be about i think there were about 18 i counted standing around them waiting for them to finish the challenge can you imagine standing there and having all these people look at you not just your two but what did you think of that what did you think of what did you think of you know pen getting to the end and wanting to give a shout out to those that normally don't get any of the praise and those that are behind the scenes like i mean how awesome was that amazing i just went yes how good and then they panned to them and actually acknowledged them and i thought that was amazing and you know someone like penn who's in production and not in production tv shows but his own you know production would understand that and you know even justin and a lot of the races always bring up that you know it's just such a hard slog for them trying to run with these huge cameras on them and they're ultra fit and they do enough running that everyone else does and they have to be up usually before the races because they have to get themselves prepped and ready to race and they're just amazing humans who can do that and race around and you know get stuff for the edit at the same time yeah

53:32 Stephen says i reckon i chose what type of a person he really is and i agree with that because another thing that really struck me on pen and i think as an example for those out there that watch this show is just how much of the credit he gave away to kim at the end and he's like you know it's all kim she was the hero she was the one who did it and i mean what an honorable guy because we know i mean the viewers know that you know kim was great but pen also added to it so much i mean there were key points in the race where pen has memory being able to pick up things says super power of adhd where just came in clutch like i mean they're really i'm not taking anything away from kim but just his ability to pass all of that praise on to his wife that's something to be looked up to and they really as a pair i think the first two episodes i struggle with them a little because i thought they were over acting but then i got used to them and their personalities and since then i've always enjoyed watching them i think the only boring thing for me was that i knew they were going to win very early on or i had my suspicion on that very early on i've seen too many of these shows michelle i can read the edit but you know kevin penn what a great team and being well done for just being a stand-up guy yeah oh he's so lovely wouldn't everyone be happy to have a husband like him yeah he's really lovely to kim and it was cool you know full giving

54:52 Them the opportunity to say what would you like to you know your kids to know seeing mom and dad win the show and pin saying study plays being dead you know saying study will work you need to study very hard that's what really helped us win this thing here i think you know again kayla and raquel getting there at the end and second place a lot of respect goes to them for being an all-female team that ran a great race went to the finale i think they proved themselves this season and then i wonder how many of the challenges ryan and dusty actually had to complete i'm pretty sure when they got to the memory wall they just said just put a couple of things on there and pretend like you did something and just run because i feel like they didn't even finish that because they wouldn't have waited there for like how long would that have taken ryan and dusty the way they were going yeah i mean we won't know unless we'd ask them or someone else in production yeah i don't know whether they get them to finish and i don't personally between me and you i don't have a problem with production just saying as soon as they get there even on camera they could just say the race is already finished just continue to run because what's the point i guess no if i was in the final and i want to do it third i'd want to do it to say that i've done the whole thing i'd be really angry if they said just leave it and run through there now i just i would say no i want to do this i want

56:12 To say that i've done all the challenges and i've completed it not just been told to run at the end however if you're hours behind understandable yeah stephen agrees with you we personally want to finish the race and do every single challenge no shortcuts again ryan and dusty great team like i said i mean they really fell from grace from the beginning of the season where we thought they're just gonna steamroll this whole thing and where other teams got stronger and better they kind of probably stayed at the level they were at but other teams improved so much and then they just couldn't catch up to the rest of the races but again they talk about dusty just being a great friend always being there for ryan when a lot of other people ryan were friends with didn't talk to him didn't you know reach out i love dusty's passion i like to see that type of thing on the tv show you know because it's exciting there's nothing more boring than watching people be wallpaper you know on a tv show so i love what dusty brought to the season i love what ryan brought to the season i really wouldn't be angry to see ryan and dusty pop up on our screens again in the future i think dusty potentially has already expressed interest in the challenge cbs i don't know if they are gonna cast him for that or not but i think

57:32 He could be a great addition because he's got that really hyper personality that makes for a great reality tv show and i think that he would be super competitive when it comes to physical challenges oh definitely i mean i could actually see him i know in america you probably don't they probably don't have anything like we have something called sas australia i could imagine him on something like that i need to catch up on sas australia by the way i've saw that lucky a previous australian survivor got in a bit of heat of trouble this week so i need to go watch and see what happened on that and i do like essays it's really good i've just had too many shows this recent couple of weeks to watch and try and fit him with a full-time job at the same time i know i need these shows to finish at least amazing races finish i've got widam which is the mole dutch mold finishing tomorrow i think on monday thank god but then we've got american survivor starting and i'm like stop and i've got hunted starting soon it's not going to stop there's going to be a lot of reality tv still on michelle did we miss anything here as we spoke about the finale i feel like we touched on everything how do you feel overall about the season now that it's finished you know i know it's quite early on obviously you know it's hard to immediately say where you sort of put this season

58:52 For me personally i feel like at this stage in this very early on i would put it as a mid to higher tier season because of the conditions and everything and then being able to make it happen and all these players sacrificing to be out there but i do feel like it's probably a difficult season for the amazing race producers to have on at this stage when the amazing race is always an uncertainty when it comes to being renewed and i think they would have loved to have had a proper season to showcase what the show is about so how do you feel about this season as an overall i think it's really hard to lump it in with the rest of them because it's such an individual season i think it'd be really hard to put it in a hierarchy i'm i'd be interested to see what logan thinks he's since he's the tastorian and he knows about it every season anywhere yeah so someone like logan i'd be very interested to hear where he puts it i would probably logan if you're in the chat definitely i think we at some point need to get you on to have a bit of a chat off-season chat about the amazing race and what you thought of this season i know you haven't had the opportunity to express a lot of what you thought i guess you've had the opportunity to do that in your blog

1:00:12 But you know we'd be more than happy to have a chat about this season with you as well michelle it's been great talking to you about this season now i know that you've got a little bit of snippet information about the amazing race australia that they potentially are quarantining right now so hopefully we get to see you talk about the amazing race australia in the future yeah they seemed look they could have started today they could still be in quarantine i'm going to head out to where i know where they are today to see if they're still there a friend of mine said do you have a wig and i said no i don't own a wig because people will know you and i'm like i'm just gonna go there anyway i don't know yeah just go there but i should be on it i should be there i should be sequestering quarantining whatever they're doing i should be there and it's so annoying that i got so close this year and nothing oh my god just keep trying like i mean there's some people who how many times have you applied for the show five times five yeah but i got the closest this time so hopefully next time

1:01:33 I feel like santoni from survivor south africa last season applied five times as well before she got onto the show for survivor south africa so sometimes people are in that process for a long time you get overlooked a couple of times but you know i think the more you're out there you're doing a i just want to thank you on behalf of all the amazing race fans for all the hard work you do on the amazing race fan page on facebook the amazing race australian fan page as well i mean a lot of people don't know that you also manage the australian survivor fan page like i mean you do so much for the community online that i hope at some point you will get that recognition and that you do get the opportunity to jump on and do one of these shows you know and hopefully by jumping on doing these kind of podcasts you know getting your face out there this adds to it where you can say look at this i'm even doing podcasts about the show i'm that level of a fan you want me on there isn't great or no you're great but yeah no you're good like i would never i try my best i can only do what i can do and you know one day hopefully no you'll get i'm fully confident you'll get there and also don't be pain in this situation and say i'm great like this is a team effort here like we both add to the podcast together and i couldn't like it would be

1:02:53 Not no fun whatsoever to talk to myself all the time about the amazing race and i've had so much fun that i've asked you to come on and do some australian survivor content with me as well so for those that live in australia or follow australian survivor michelle will be dropping in because we've had so much fun talking we'll be talking about australian survivor as well as jake who's been doing a lot of those recaps with me will transition over to survivor 42 he is from the us as well so we'll be talking about a different show so if you've really enjoyed this dynamic guys tune in next week as we have a former survivor player that we'll be talking to myself and michelle about next week of australia survivor and it will be a big one by the sounds of it yes i mean the most devious move in survivor history apparently i take everything with the grain of salt the channel 10 says but let's just see stephen here asking you do you think that the amazing race australia will be as long as last season stephen i don't know i've heard they're going overseas i but they were planning to go overseas when they did it last year when they were you know working it all out i don't know whether they still will be due to omicron which came out after they said that so i don't know i thought they'd start overseas

1:04:13 They could still be because where they are at the moment leads to it's quite close to the airport so they could just start i don't think they'll do anything in sydney i don't think they'll start challenges in sydney unless they're staying here if they're doing that i'll be running around like a like a scolded chicken tomorrow or next week trying to find them but yeah look bo did say overseas so but you don't know how production's changed this time it could if it's here it's going i think it's going to still be this as long as it was last time i don't like intruder teams i don't like this big brother lending into amazing race but we're going to have to see what they've done michelle i have to go catch up on last season of australian survivor because that's one of those seasons sorry australian amazing race because that completely is one of those seasons that i just couldn't get to luckily i don't know who the winners are i've got no spoilers so many episodes so i'm gonna go catch up on that before this next season comes out just in case you and me do get to talk about the next season i'll have a little bit of a better understanding because i did like the first season that bo ryan did as the host so definitely want to want to watch that and catch up and then also since we spoke about australian survivor i know this a lot of people that are watching this are not

1:05:33 Necessarily survivor fans but i'm trying to put a little bit of incentives and a little bit of competitions which will continue to evolve as we grow this channel michelle we've you know in a matter of six seven weeks we've reached 320 subs already on the channel which is amazing thank you so much to everybody that has supported the content i really appreciate it when we hit 500 subs i will be giving away this nice australian survive above from last season still in its actual packaging it's brand new i've not worn it and that one there sold in the u.s not that long ago for 750 us dollars so yeah it's really expensive so even if you don't watch the show it's a pretty cool bit of memorabilia to have because there was only a hundred i believe of those made ever and you can't buy them online at all so you know when you buy them it's because someone is pricing it up crazily so that will go to somebody crazy totally crazy this season's merge buff at the moment one goes on ebay probably once every five days and they're selling for like five hundred dollars i don't have one this is the first year i don't have one and it's freaking me out i need the price to go down i need more people to be crazy do the 500 so that something will come down to maybe three or two because it's just insane it is insane so that's going to be up for grabs so

1:06:53 If you know continue to support this channel continue to be active in the live streams continue to comment on the videos i'll know who you are you're going to draw to win that potentially and i am really excited to do that and continue to continue to grow the channel and do these types of things why 500 subs is such a big thing for me is because when we get there michelle i get to do community posts i get to put polls out there and engage even more so with the listeners of the show as we grow it so i'm really excited about that we've got amazing race guests coming on obviously lulu and lala is going to be on we've got survivor australia survivor south africa guests coming on to recap some of the survivor content that's coming up so a lot is going to continue to happen on this channel and we'll continue to evolve it but for now thank you so much for listening to all of the recaps that we did for this season i really appreciate it and we will catch you guys next time bye