Well Eric and Danielle won the $1 million dollars in last night's finale of the Amazing Race All-Stars and now they can go their separate ways. She'll be all the better for it. Incredibly, the bickering couple were the team that thought most alike when they needed to, allowing them to solve the final clue separately, then have a 2-minute head start over the Beauty Queens and Team Shmirna in a race to the finish line.
To quickly recap: the three teams departed Guam on two flights that connected through Tokyo to their next destination, Hawaii. Charla and Mirna land an hour first, and are able to secure the first helicopter flight to the Detour event, but the flights are scheduled to be only ten minutes apart so their lead shrank quickly.
The Detour for this event is Over or Under. In Over, the partners must each paddle on a paddleboard to a buoy holding their next clue. In Under, they must take a boat to an underwater cave then swim into the cave to retrieve a clue.
Charla and Mirna opt for the paddling, little person Charla reallly excelled here. She tore around the water while her cousin struggled. Eric and Danielle arrive at the challenge second and, seeing Mirna struggling, decide to do the underwater task, as did the Beauty Queens.
Next came shipwreck beach, where the lagging teams were able to overtake Shmirna as they kayaked out to the shipwreck in rough surf and retrieved a clue from a buoy. A very physical task and this is where the BQ's had real problems dealing with each other. Dustin and Kandice have kicked ass all season and ran an excellent race, but they really tore into each other trying to complete this task. Their only meltdown was after the kayak when they argued and exchanged hurtful comments all the way to the airport.
Arriving at the final destination, San Francisco, the three teams taxid over to the Old Mint for the final challenge. One team member went into a room to review 4 questions about how the team felt personally about teams that they had raced against. For each question, they will pick a number corresponding to the team they feel is the best match for the question. The answers to the 4 questions was then used as a combination to a safe. The other team member then had to come in and correctly guess the same answers in order to open the safe and retrieve the clue. If they are correct, they could depart immediately, but if they continued to guess wrong, they had to wait ten minutes to get their clue.
Then it was a race of the taxi cabs - always a let down for a AR finale. Eric and Danielle arrived first and when Phil told them they were allowed to call their family, Eric is handed a phone first and calls his old fratboy partner Jeremy. Jeremy said odd things like "we won!" (is Eric splitting his share with Jeremy?), and then happily tells Eric that he will be spanking him when he gets home. You might want to rewind the Tivo and check that. Yup, that's what he said.
Too bad for the beauty queens who came so close. As they ran in and saw Eric and Danielle there, one of them said, "Yup. We didn't win. Damn."
Charla and Mirna came in third but it was such a close race that they could have won it all. It was surprising that they didn't know each other's thoughts on the other teams well enough to ace the final task.
Next season, let's hope AR returns to it's old format of new racers, more streneous tasks, more gross eating challenges, and less airport time.
