Quote Originally Posted by TheDuckRocks View Post
It broke my heart to see the conflict between Mark and Mallory. The difference from being able to feel secure enough to leave your things behind to go for a dream million dollars and the reality of knowing that the few things you have might be gone forever by a bad call was brutal. I think it reflected much about our inability to see the other person's life situation.
I frequent a few other message boards and usually once or twice a year someone will post a new "twist" as in lets have random pairings of teams. Mark and Mallory are the prime example of why (with the exception of Eric/Danielle S11) the Amazing Race only allows teams with pre-existing relationships. Despite forcing the whole new "team Kentucky" it was pretty evident that despite Mallory's excitement to Race, Mark really had no interest in running the Race with her.

I guess I'm going with tough love and blaming this on Mark. Yes, Mallory is 99.99% at fault for leaving the bag on the ground, although you can understand in part why as she assumed that after they got the toy car in the trunk, that he'd pick up his own bag. But since she'd carried it that far, I can understand too why Mark assumed she had it the rest of the way. Good teammates will usually do an inventory every time they go somewhere (have passports, money, route instructions, bags etc.) and they obviously didn't do that.

All that said, yes Mallory was the source of the problem, but the solution and ultimately elimination I think resides on Mark. I watched the scenes a dozen times over and it was very apparent that no argument that Mallory could come up with was going to persuade Mark to abandon the bags and carry on. After unsuccessfully trying to get him to change, Mallory finally says "we will be eliminated" and unbelievably Mark's response was "I don't care, we need to go back for my stuff". Despite Mallory having the teams money, passports, route instructions, his motion sickness medicine, Mark finally used the lame excuse "its not even my back pack". Despite getting to the roadblock ahead of two other teams, you could tell by Mark's body language he had given up. There were other teams I wanted gone first, but when I heard preseason that Mallory was running with Mark, I really didn't need to see them for that long, so nothing lost with this elimination.

Cowboys - the good/bad/ugly. I have no idea how you can leave the pitstart an hour ahead of the last place team and arrive after them. They never seem to do things small, big wins, big mistakes, and they were extremely lucky, even with an EP to survive that opening blunder. That said, giving the country girls, arguably one of the weakest teams in the field, the 2nd EP was brilliant strategy. Not only did they give it to a weak team, they did it in a moment that required them to use it immediately, meaning the cowboys now possess the only remaining EP. The girls can think all they want that they charmed it out of them, but it was strategy, pure and simple.

Meghan -not sure how stupid one can get, but she seems willing to show us. Helping John, the only other team behind you, complete the roadblock was one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. I know they were friends/allies from their prior season, but as she found out the hard way, that meant nothing as John/Jessica outraced them to the pitstop. Meghan/Joey were lucky they weren't the last team.

I guess I'm hoping for Margie and Luke to go next. His near breakdowns over the simplest things already are really getting annoying and he hasn't attempted a roadblock yet, so somekind of tantrum/breakdown is coming I'd wager.

I came into this season cheering for John/Jessica, but so far, less than stellar performances from them, so we'll see.

Bunch of teams carrying Travelocity Gnomes in the previews, so we'll see how those play out.