The Curse of the Red Pearl

Amazing Race

Episode Report Card

M. Giant: A- | 1 USERS: B+

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The Curse of the Red Pearl

By M. Giant | Season 22 | Episode 2 | Aired on 02.24.2013

In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description!

Only the second leg and we're already bunching. Leaders Jessica and John begin their leg in the wee hours of the morning, only to learn that everybody's going to have to wait for the water taxis to their next clue until 7:30 AM. While waiting, Dave and Connor talk to Jessica and John about the second Express Pass that, according to an arrangement agreed upon during the course of the leg, Team JJ (TM Meghan, grr) owes the father-son team. John only cares about keeping it quiet so all the other teams will still suck up to him for a while first.

When the leg begins, they take motorboats across the water to a wedding chapel at a nearby resort, where a priest gives them a blessing, some snorkel gear, and their next clue. In the Detour, racers will have to either dive for oysters until they find two with red pearls inside, or don diving helmets to set up a picnic table on the ocean floor. Almost all of the teams opt to look for pearls, but Dave and Connor blow their early lead when they get all the way to the oyster field before realizing they didn't pick up their snorkel gear and have to go back to get it. Joey and Meghan end up finishing the task first, but the hockey brothers and Jessica and John and even Dave and Connor are breathing down their neck. The four of them end up pretty close together all the way to the Roadblock. Where, on a tiny island, one racer from each team has to kick a coconut down the beach on stilts. Hockey dude Anthony finishes first, with Connor right behind. A footrace to the Pit Stop ensues, which Bates and Anthony win. Connor's dad Dave seems to blow out his Achilles tendon on the final sprint, so he may be out of the race for good. Which of course is all about John and who he's going to give that second Express Pass to now.

After Joey and Meghan narrowly beat Chuck and a physically overtaxed Wynona to the mat to check in as teams four and five, there's still drama at the back half of the pack. Idries and Jamil, whose fear of water was pretty well established during the first leg, prove completely stymied by this Detour and its total lack of a dry-feet option. So much so that Jamil wants to quit and take the penalty almost on sight. Idries holds out, though, and the patheticness of their attempts to pearl-dive are overshadowed only by the self-destructiveness of their method. Meanwhile, roller derby moms Mona and Beth find success with the underwater picnic Detour option and end up as team number six, Pam and Winnie get lost trying to jet-ski to the Roadblock, and Max and Katie and Jennifer and Caroline start their leg an hour and forty-five minutes behind everyone else, thanks to the penalty those two teams took in the previous leg.

But the penalized teams rally, starting the leg with their hair on fire despite some lip service about working together, Beekman Boys/Team Grabbie-style. They also do the undersea picnic, then catch up to Pam and Winnie at the Roadblock. Former gymnast Caroline smokes both Max and Pam at this task, so she and Jennifer end up as team number seven, and Max and Katie are team number eight. Pam is running out of patience with the stilts by the time Idries and Jamil decide to belatedly switch Detours, find the diving helmets much more conducive to breathing, and finally get their clue. But the time the twins spent in the water proves insurmountable, as Pam and Winnie are the penultimate team and Idries and Jamil are Philiminated. So now they can go back to their OB/GYN practice and look forward to years of their patients teasingly asking them to do water births.

Want more? The full recap starts right below!

This is French Polynesia," Phil informs us over what I trust are images of French Polynesia, "made up of more than one hundred breathtaking islands [and four ugly ones, I can't help mentally adding], including Bora Bora, known as the Pearl of the Pacific." Phil's coming to us from outside Motu Café on one of its beaches, a spot that coincidentally was both last week's Pit Stop and the start of this second leg. Jessica & John, having won the previous leg, are of course the first to depart at 2:56 AM. They rip open their clue by the light of their LED headlamps and read that they'll need to take a water taxi (I'm starting to think there's no other kind around here) to Motu Toopua Nui, the location of "the spectacular Hilton Bora Bora Nui." I can tell you this Hilton looks a lot different from others I've seen, consisting of not a giant block of rooms, but a maze of thatched-roof huts reaching out on a pier into the water. It's beautiful, all right, but I don't know how you're supposed to find the ice machine.

The racers will have to search the sprawling grounds for a wedding chapel to receive a blessing from a priest out back. Not a Catholic missionary either, but an impressive figure in red-feathered robes and headdress. John reads from the clue that the water taxi doesn't start running until 7:30 AM, which we viewers already knew from seeing the sign at the beginning of Phil's narration just now, but they're a little bummed at the certainty that they'll lose their lead. I'd also be bummed about being out of bed four and a half hours earlier than I needed to be, were it me. John reminds us that they won the two Express Passes during the previous leg, so he's going to enjoy seeing how that plays out. He says the first rule of the alliance that calls for them to give it to Dave & Connor is that the alliance doesn't officially exist. I think that's actually the second rule, but John seems almost hoping that somebody spills the beans so he won't have to hold up his end. "Loose lips sink ships," he says. In this case, they can conveniently let one off the hook, but that doesn't rhyme. They stroll over to the end of the dock with the water taxi sign announcing the beginning of service at 7:30 AM. They figure that all the teams will be here by then. So I take it they don't know about how Max & Katie and Jennifer & Caroline took the four-hour penalty, then.

After the Bora Bora sunrise, which you will be shocked to learn is spectacular, most of the teams are indeed on the pier waiting for the boat together. Dave comes over and heartily congratulates Jessica & John as a pretext for him and Connor to talk about the pact. John reminds us that they were in a five-team alliance consisting of these two teams, plus the twin OB/GYNs Idries & Jamil, best friends Pam & Winnie and the mulletastic Chuck & Wynona. As we saw in the previouslies, the purpose of the alliance was for whoever won the first leg to give the second of the two Express Passes they would win to whoever in that group was next to check in, which was Dave & Connor. John assures them that they're still cool, but warns them to keep it quiet or else "the whole contract becomes null and void." Which he's only saying because he wants all the other teams to suck up to him in hopes of scoring the extra Express Pass. At least he admits it, if only to the interview cameras. Connor interviews that this is a ridiculous argument and John says it's a race, not an honesty competition. He adds that their word is their bond, but they won't give you their word. Um, okay.

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