Topic: TAR 38 LIVE STREAMS AND COMMENTARY HERE! EP 9 11/19/2025

[Xoruz]

TAR DAY!!!  


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Have FUN everyone and for joining us!!

[RachelLeVega]

Got around to watching it on-demand tonight, and I have some thoughts. As much as I loved taking a trip down memory lane in Athens (having explored Monasteriki Square on my business trip, walking the olive tree-lined streets below the Acropolis, and trekking up to it), this is by far the weakest episode in all aspects of the race. Like in other recent past seasons, I don't like this takeover of open-conversation U-Turn events encroaching on the race. Not a fan of teams idling around when the whole purpose is traveling and running a race, and it felt like they were being held captive by the new Double U-Turn mechanism by openly admitting to "burning a vote". First time I felt the need to fast forward (➤➤) through when we could've gotten more of Athens. There was no need for wasting 20 minutes on this.

The tasks were relatively rudimentary, and as someone who is not a huge fan of the street begging tasks, the lineup fell flat on arrival. The Detour was lopsided with the laterna takers whizzing by thanks to locals giving 10 euros right out of the gate and the olive shop being a lot more elusive and more methodical to complete. The "boulder" could have had better execution - I feel like it's on par with the chicken costume from the last leg. The Roadblock, although surprisingly lethal to a dominant team, was rather straightforward and not that difficult, considering a lot of American sorority/fraternity organizations and U.S. high school and collegiate math regularly utilize Greek lowercase letters.

The moment Jack & Chelsie finally got out of their slump, made their highest placement yet, and Adam & Joseph and Izzy & Paige came trailing in and Phil said, "The three teams who were not U-Turned" felt really backhanded - as if over 95% of teams not U-Turned didn't make it through? I'm happy Jag & Jas could break a record of being the first team U-Turned to win the same leg, but this leg felt like such a letdown that it cast a large shadow over moments like these.

[Xoruz]

Certainly the more exciting vote on CBS last Wednesday. With the announcement of a Big Brother, a U-Turn Vote was almost expected. It was also a fitting location within Athens. Drama was also to be expected with how much they know each other. I wasn't expecting each team to vote for two teams. For having a U-Turn attached to it, the Detour was pretty easy. The hardest part of the busking task was just getting everything to the square. The olive judge was fun. It was surprising that the hardest part of the leg was the alphabet Roadblock with it taking out frontrunners.

[Pi]

I hope this U-Turn vote was done only because this was a Big Brother season and won't return in a normal season. Big Brother and Survivor already fill the niche of voting games... if you want "strategy" in the beginning of a Race episode, how about going back to airport drama?

I know it's easy to allege this when watching the episode sitting at home, but the Detour tasks felt too easy. Here, the fact that a team finished two tasks before some teams have got halfway through one was due to both the tasks being straightforward and some teams being not very good at navigation. (It feels like teams that aren't very good at navigation tend to not improve much at it over the course of the race; teams make the same types of mistakes in leg 9 as they do in leg 1.)

I'm fine with occasional perform-for-cash tasks for a nominal amount of money, but then there needs to be another challenging part to the task to pick up the slack. The most exciting part of this Detour task was some teams forgetting the stand, not the navigation through the streets. On the other side, the "memorize the 10 different types of foods" task seems to be a mainstay at this point. I get that it is easy and cheap to set up and can be customized to any country, but I'd prefer for it to not be an every-season task.

It's possible the Detours were meant to be easier considering the leg had a U-Turn, but think about how these U-Turns are conducted versus a traditional U-Turn. Previously, a team went from Detour Decision Point-first Detour-UTurn-second Detour-UTurn again-next clue, and now they can just go Decision Point-first-second-next clue. Less transportation time, plus the advance knowledge that you are going to have to do both, mean that the impact of a U-Turn is much lower than it used to be. I just don't like this format of the U-Turn. There's no "U-Turn" when you don't have to backtrack on the race course... they might as well call it a "zigzag" instead.

It's impressive to get first on a leg when you are U-Turned, but this was the first leg in TARUS history where a full 50% of teams running were U-Turned.

The Roadblock ended up being the most intriguing task of the leg. (Username get! Plus vindication for us math aficionados.) While I did initially cast it as being too simple, it did result in shaken-up placements, causing me to remind myself to not be too judgmental based off Phil's description alone. A Race can use a task every once in a while where performance isn't correlated to physical strength, and this one served in that role. Placements have been so similar for a while on this race and you get used to seeing the same teams finish quickly and the same teams take longer that this task was a welcome surprise.