Slap Oh, look: we're leaving from Los Angeles again. And gee, it's the Griffith Observatory. I crushed a werewolf between the closing doors of the telescope dome there once. Oh, the memories.

Slap The double Express Pass. TAR is, at its heart, a meritocracy with a serious luck factor: you generally travel on skill and pray not to get the wrong cab. Encouraging alliances or just trying to keep a weak team on the course in order to knock a stronger one turns this into something more MB-like, and that's not coming across as a positive.

Clap For new territory: give us countries we haven't been to before, and the landscape here is striking. Bonus points for the freefall shots of the island, which made me want to book a flight there in mid-episoe.

Slap First time on the Race that one person has taken a skydive while their partner went out to meet them at the landing point? Seriously? How very short your memory is.

SLAP The sandcastle Roadblock. Tasks of this nature are always randomizers that depend more on luck than skill, so it eliminated the flight gap. The fastidious need to rebuild castles added still more time and made sure the entire field would have an equal theoretical chance at frustration: potentially amusing for normal weather, but not in that climate. As KidFlash said, they were begging for a heatstroke victim. For hours on end. And when a task leads to a triple quit in the name of what those teams thought was strategy, you may have gone too far.