An ok episode. I'm not that much of a fan of those pure luck challenges, as they are, as someone else wrote, not that interesting to watch and in the worst case can litereally take all day (as we could see with Mai and Oliver). And this leg even had 2 challenges that had a strong luck components, the dig for the souvenir one was way too alike to the BR-Disc one.
I can understand the need to cram as much as product placement into it, and challenges are a "natural" way to do it (hey, they haven't even used those obnoxious stickers in the provided car's windows they had in season 2), but if it's a "make or break" challenge early in the race (leg-wise) I regard it as a little unfair. They simply could've not used 1000 but maybe 100 or 200, which would've shortened the maximum time needed for the challenge.
I also regard tatooing as a rather unfair challenge, as it obviously stays for you after the race, and it wasn't even logically put in. It was done way better in TAR 12, where the clue read something about "local art" and the tattoo were two F's for fast forward. No clue how true the local art thing is, but it provided a tie to the location (as do the "local delicatessen" challenges which are often used for the fast forward). Here it was just: Go tattoo yourself, mentioned already in the clue, so there was no real elemet of surprise. It's clear that the producers don't want the "eat 1kg of bugs" or "take a bungee jump" challenges as fast foward, as they've been used too often, but tattooing s just taking it too far for me. I don't know what they could use as "extreme" challenges otherwise, maybe just some intense labor task or something like that (I personally would like to see a "spend 2mins with a martial artist in the ring" challenge, but it looks like we'll get to see that in TAR 13 Ep 3
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It's going to be interesting how the next leg will be, seeing that Sam&Vince seem to be like 10hours+ in front. I guess there will be a delay the start the next leg when they wait for an airplane etc, seeing that Taiwan is probably not big enough to warrant 2 legs (but then, I haven't looked at the spoiler thread, and there wasn't a preview broadcasted either)