The Amazing Race recap: Boxers or Brrrrrrrrrriefs

People occasionally wonder why Survivor always shoots in blisteringly hot climates, and the answer is pretty obvious: Because Mark Burnett can’t get his cast in bikinis in Survivor: Siberia.

Advantage: Bertram Van Munster. Well played, sir, having your racers dash in their underwear through the Siberian streets. Sure, he couldn’t really keep that going for more than 20 minutes before his contestants’ appendages would start snapping off from frostbite—Cara wouldn’t look quite so attractive with black patches spreading across her face and her leaving her own brittle toes in her wake—but at least he tried.

But it’s not about the flesh with Van Munster. In fact, you have to respect his refusal to bend to the societal pressure to sex his show up. He kept his show in Siberia for two weeks running: that’s two weeks of parkas, with just a short break for a pixellated thong. I don’t think there’s a TV executive alive who preaches, ”You know what sells? Layers!”

The second Siberian leg began with Jodi and Christie leaving first at 12:36 p.m. But departure time was moot as they were headed to the Siberian Railroad for a 400-mile trek. Their train didn’t leave until 10:46 p.m., so everyone caught up: Another tip o’ the hat to the show’s new streamlining—once it was established after the second team’s start time that everyone would bunch up again, they didn’t bother showing us everyone else leaving. Bravo!

Everyone got sleeper cabins on the train: Mark was undoubtedly quite comfy in his bed, but Kisha, on the other hand, crabbed about how her legs stuck over the edge. As someone who is six foot seven inches tall, I can’t blame her for complaining. I spend about 73 percent of every day bitching about how clothes never fit me or how I hit my head on a low doorway or how the leg room sucks on this flight or in that theater. But I should note that a pattern is emerging with Kisha: when the season started, Jen looked like the complainer, but now there seems to be a sibling shift. When the sisters were first dashing toward the train station, Jen commented on how Russia is beautiful, to which Kisha replied, ”Beautiful, my ass!” I don’t think the Siberians will be rushing to put that slogan on their license plates.

There was an interesting moment when Mike was talking to Margie and Luke in their cabin in the morning. Mike said he slept like crap, and Luke made an exaggerated sad face and ran a finger down his cheek like a tear. ”Thanks Luke, real compassionate,” said Mike. It did seem like a mocking jab, but then I wondered: what if Luke felt legitimately bad, but the animated expressions that are a part of sign language came off like sarcasm? That would be an unfortunate miscommunication, and a real drag at funerals: You want to tell people that you’re sorry for their loss, but it comes off as, ”Waah, waah, the big baby misses his dead parent. Boo hoo for you.” Or, maybe Luke was just being a dick. It takes a deafer person than I to figure that out.

NEXT: Beware the sinister deaf kid!

Mike followed this interchange by telling Margie that he’d underestimated Luke, who made fast work of Kris and Amanda last week: ”He’s gonna create a whole new archetype: the sinister deaf kid.” About time we got some new archetypes on this show beyond ”bickering hot couple” and ”bitchy hot women.” Might I suggest a few? How about, ”gregarious homeless gay couple”? Or ”mouthy zoologists”? ”Benevolent meth-heads?” Come on, let’s shake this show up!

Getting off the train, everybody dashed to get a cab (with Kisha and Jen dashing in the wrong direction). Jaime and Cara ended up with a cabbie who was smoking. ”I love how he has time to smoke a cigarette while we’re in a race,” snorted Jaime. I’m guessing that the cabbie was equally annoyed by how they were in a race while he was trying to smoke a cigarette. Jaime needs to realize that the rest of the planet is not a support system for two ex-NFL cheerleaders trying to win a million dollars.

They all arrived at the Detour, which Phil described as ”two unavoidable aspects of Siberian life.” One was driving a giant snowplow through an obstacle course, while the other involved finding a bride and driving her through the snow and ice to her wedding. Okay, I get how snow is unavoidable, but transporting brides? Can you not swing a dead cat in Siberia without hitting a bride who can’t get a lift to her own ceremony? I guess that explains that old Siberian saw, ”There are only three things you can count on in life: Death, taxes, and the back of your car stinking like bouquets.”

Luke and Margie and Cara and Jaime once again paired up to find the snowplows, and Tammy and Victor glommed onto the convoy. However, every time Margie or Cara would get out of the car to ask for directions, Victor would overhear what they were told and then peel out ahead of everybody else, alienating himself from the other teams. Hey Victor, while there is no ”I” in ”team,” there is also no ”You’re a jerk.” Seriously, stop looking for it.

Mark and Michael were trailing behind, and just as they were saying how they’d hate to drive in this town, they arrived at the clue box, telling them to drive in this town. It was just like one of those sitcoms where the person says something like, ”There is no way I am going to sell hot dogs. I don’t care what you say, there is nothing you can do to make me sell hot dogs!” and then the picture flips around and there he is behind a cart saying, ”Getcher hot dogs here!” All this comedy-cliché moment was missing was a needle-scratch sound effect; unfortunately, the producers were saving that for later in the show, when some locals did a double-take after seeing Mike run past in his undies. Although I can’t say for sure if that was a sound effect or just some background noise caught by a sound guy in his car: Siberian car manufacturers haven’t figured out how to get a DVD player into a car, but each one does come with a gramophone duct-taped to the dashboard.

Which brings me to a side note: last week some posters took me to task for relentlessly mocking Siberians, even as I constantly criticize teams for being Ugly Americans. I cop to that hypocrisy. Perhaps it’s because Siberia has become such a synonym for a depressing place of banishment (”That guy is playing so badly that he’s going to be booted out of the NBA to the Siberian Basketball Association”) that it doesn’t even feel like a real place anymore with real feelings; it’s like Atlantis. But perhaps I’ll be more sensitive now that I’ve spent time with its countrymen via The Amazing Race, and seen that they are interesting, multifaceted people who enjoy comedy theater, naked running, and getting drunk and grabbing women’s butts.

NEXT: Striptease, Siberian style!

For all the trouble that people claimed to be having driving stick-shifts, nobody seemed to have very much trouble with the snow plows. In fact, the teams that opted for that half of the Detour had more trouble finding the plows than they did driving them. Jaime and Cara were ignored by a team of guys in red jumpsuits (”They don’t understand English!” whined Jaime: how dare they not learn her language while she’s trying to win a race?) and Margie just sat in an abandoned truck, waiting for a starting pistol to go off. Did they not think to look for the enormous plows sitting at the starting line of a clear obstacle course? The only people who found it quickly were Mark and Michael. They’d opted for this challenge over brides because, as Michael chuckled, ”Brides are always more technical (than plows)…I don’t need to go find another one.” You can hear more comic insights like this on the brothers’ new comedy album, ”You Might Be a Tiny Stuntman If…”

Mel and Mike easily found their bride, and got her in the car. Jodi and Christie, on the other hand, got slightly lost and made the mistake of asking a band of roving drunks for directions. It became clear that the locals were giving them fake directions, so they backed away. ”God, they were wasted and they had disgusting teeth,” said Jodi, possibly quoting a Tom Waits song. ”One guy touched my butt and asked me my name,” said Christie, possibly quoting a Janet Jackson B-side.

Mel charmed his bride during the ride by saying, ”You’re so beautiful.” Mike chimed in, ”Wouldn’t you rather have her than a snowplow?” Hearing this from a father/son team would probably sound like the creepiest come-on ever if A) Mel wasn’t gay, or B) the bride remotely understood English. Over in Christie and Jodi’s car, however, their bride started to look like a hostage as the women went to the wrong church and got lost. ”She thinks we’re trying to kill her,” said Christie. Perhaps that was due to the fact that Jodi constantly looks like she’s pissed off about something: is that the face you want to see on your fake wedding day? It’s like having Bill O’Reilly as your chauffeur.

Then came the Roadblock, in which one teammate had to run 1.4 miles in their underwear. The clue just said, ”Who has stamina and absolutely no shame?” and didn’t yet reveal what the task would entail. After Cara read it, Jaime just gritted her teeth, winced, and shook her head no. What was she more averse to, the stamina, or the lack of shame? I sense it was the latter, because she has endless reserves of energy when it comes to yelling at Siberian passersby who don’t have the common courtesy to speak English. Tammy also picked the task, leading an increasingly giddy Victor to say, ”I was jealous, because I actually wanted to run down the streets in my underwear!” He’s so irrationally upbeat: perhaps it’s like people who have a near-death experience and then take great pleasure in the smallest facets of life—except in Victor’s case, any moment he isn’t leading his sister on a 63-mile goose chase the wrong way up a mountain, he’s in a state of euphoria.

The temperature was –4 degrees Celsius, which, by my vague recollection of high-school science, is about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. When Tammy and Luke were the first to enter the stretching tent, she said, ”I guarantee Luke is not wearing underwear as small as mine.” He turned out to be wearing tighty-blackies, and not that I was looking, but I was surprised to notice that you could see his package as he ran. In those temperatures with no clothes, shouldn’t his scrotum have receded to somewhere in the back of his throat?

NEXT: Phil takes a cue from Ryan Seacrest

Cara proved to have even less stamina than Jaime, and spent much of her race walking. She joked that she would have been motivated to run faster had anyone cat-called, but no one did until one guy came up and tried to hit on her. Again, I’m trying not to judge Siberia, but from what I’ve seen, it seems like a pretty gropey country. I don’t know what their regional flag is, but I do suspect it’s been dipped in vodka and then twisted into a rat tail and snapped at a woman’s rear end.

The race ended by another theater, this one filled with dancers performing the classic ”Rite of Pit Stop” ballet. Luke finished first, earning him and his mom a trip to St. Lucia. They were quickly followed by Tammy and Victor, then Jaime and Cara. Next came Mike and Mel: Mel attempted to give his beloved son a big hug when he finished, but Mike squirmed away, clearly just wanting to finish this leg and get his damn clothes back on. Then came Mark and Michael, who, upon entering the theater, couldn’t quite track down Phil, even though he was standing right near them with a camera crew.

Meanwhile, the two lagging teams were just getting started. First came Jen, who was really starting to come into her own. And I’m not just saying that because she doesn’t wear underwear. At the end, she asked the camera crew, ”I look hot in my underwear, can’t lie. Do I not look hot in my underwear?” For the first time I saw how she and Kisha might be fun to hang around with, provided they didn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry.

Christie and Jodi, however, looked in no mood to be merry. They finally found the church, and dropped their bride off to reunite with her groom, who looked to be in the ninth grade. When they finally arrived at the Roadblock, Jodi slammed her own finger in her car door, so Christie jumped into the race, thong and all. Considering that a guy groped her when she was fully clothed, it’s astonishing that she wasn’t clubbed over the head and dragged into a waiting car as she ran down the street in tiny underwear, but she should count her blessings. When they arrived at the pit stop last, it was revealed as a non-elimination round, as Phil tried to do the patented Ryan Seacrest bad-news switcheroo: ”I’m sorry to tell you (cue sad face)…you’ll be the last team starting the next leg of the race! (cue happy face)” Come on, Phil, I know you’re part of the EW.com family, but you’re better than that shtick. With every reality host now practicing the good news U-turn, I’m worried that soon they’ll be saying, ”I’m sorry to say, you have not not not not not not not not not not been kicked out!” and then providing the player with a paper and pencil to do the reversal math to try to figure out whether or not he or she is still in the game.

What did you think of Siberia, part 2? Did the surprise foot race make you reconsider the importance of always wearing clean underwear? And do you think Luke will start a trend of sinister deaf guys? And should I reconsider my harsh treatment of Siberia? Should we all take a group vacation there? Also, I’m gonna ask a favor: please keep your graphic lecherous observations to a minimum about how hot some of the contestants looked in their underwear: Remember, Mark wants to be respected for his mind, not his body! And one final thing: as usual, when it comes to Phil’s blog on EW.com, you should skip…everything else but it! Seriously, read it now!