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Glee Amazing Race: Eighth Leg - Pit Stop
Team How Did This Happen
"I need to stop," Quinn tells Emma three hours into the drive to Varanasi. They have another hour to go, and if she holds it in much longer then her bladder will burst and her kidneys will burst and she will die. Simple biology. "Do you need to?" she asks Emma as they pull into the first remote possibility for having a halfway-decent bathroom.
Emma shakes her head forcefully.
Quinn, far more gently than she would have at the start of things, says, "If you go quickly, it won't be bad."
Emma smiles at her. "I went at the zoo, while you were working. At the gift shop. I knew it would be well maintained. And then I just didn't have anything to drink afterward, until we get to the hotel."
Hey, if it works for her, it works for her. By this point Quinn's reaction isn't to be annoyed that Emma cares about dirt, but to be impressed that Emma, knowing her limitations, has gone for hours after a hot, humid day without taking a single drink. That's willpower. Quinn likes willpower. She hurries through using the gas station bathroom. No matter where you are in the world, they seem to be reliably "tolerable" and also reliably "and absolutely nothing better than that."
She's well aware that the Hummels might pass them on the road without them even noticing, but they'll almost certainly finish near the top. After so long spent just trying to cling to the race by their fingernails, Quinn would actually be okay with coming in as a strong second.
...No, screw that, she wants to be first. She zips back up, washes her hands, and then jogs back to the car and grandly tells Emma to direct her onward. They make their way to Varanasi and, with precise directions that never lead her wrong once, Quinn soon has them in the parking lot of the hotel. They run in, beaming at their strong performance over the leg, and find Holly in one of the restaurants. She is attempting to dance a Bollywood routine while the employees look at her like the complete weirdo she is.
"Hey!" Holly says when she processes they're there. "Wait, you two?"
"Yes?" Emma says uncertainly. You know, she's not a huge fan of Holly.
"Oh. Well, hey! Go you!" She gives the two a huge thumbs-up. "You're team number one!" The shriek of pure joy that Quinn lets out draws everyone's attention to her. Their eyes are huge. "As winners of this leg of the race," Holly begins, only to trail off as she starts shuffling through her index cards. "No, no, no, no." She pulls out a cell phone, dials, and asks a few questions to someone on the other end. "Yes, I know it's the wrong network. Can you still get him? I am having way too much fun torturing this kid and this would kill him."
Quinn and Emma eye each other dubiously.
Holly beams, hangs up, and announces, "As winners you've won a trip to New York City for a personal style consultation with Tim Gunn, after which he'll take you on a short shopping trip to put those tips to good use."
Quinn bounces up and down with joy. Free clothes! Emma does the same. Tim Gunn always looks so neat and well-pressed!
Team Inevitable Family Team
"Tim Gunn, huh," Kurt says dryly when he and his father check in about fifteen minutes after Quinn and Emma.
"Tim Gunn," Holly says cheerfully. "They seemed super excited. More than when Santana and Brittany won awesome skin care stuff and free gas for life. Did they mention that to you? They totally should have. In return you could tell them about your Super Bowl tickets. Or your Bruckheimer movies."
"Holly?" Kurt asks with a smile. "Have you ever considered applying for Survivor?"
"No. Why?"
"You really should," Kurt says, sounding for all the world like a Bond villain in the making. "I think you'd find it really... memorable." That implicit threat made, he stalks off toward his room and a shower. He needs to come up with more ideas to make sure he has that host spot locked in again. Damn, not even a single lion could have lunged at him?
That would have been perfect.
Team PTA
"Tell me my ass looks great," Carole says immediately upon getting to the hotel, checking in, and finding Burt.
"Uh," he says, because he can occasionally shut down into wanting to show no more public affection than Hank Hill and they are in an open hallway with passing guests and employees. (Burt and Hank would get along amazingly. It would be like that episode with the guy voiced by Drew Carey, who had Hank's same model of pickup.)
"She's still fired up about Angry Cheerleader saying she had on mom jeans," Shannon explains with a smirk.
"You, uh, look great," Burt says with a furtive glance toward the passing employees.
"That's not what I asked," Carole retorts.
Shannon smirks, folds her arms across her chest, and waits.
"Yourasslooksgreat," Burt says. They are in another country, Carole! Save it for the bedroom!
She grins hugely at him. "Good. Let's go find the hotel bar."
Team PTC Worst of the Week
Brittany is getting a little annoyed at India, to be honest. She still hasn't seen a buffalo stampede or met Pocahontas.
And what is Holly even wearing?
"Hey!" Holly says brightly as she checks them in as number four. "Do you want a little forehead dot, too?"
There is really no part of this sequence that isn't offensive to the viewing audience.
Teams Dudebro and Awkward Dating Exes
"I gotta pee, dude," Puck says insistently from the back seat.
"We can't stop." Finn stares intently at the road in front of him. His hands are locked around the wheel. He is not going to miss a turn. (Yes, they're on a highway, but eventually he is not going to miss a turn.) He is not going to hit someone. He is going to be an awesome driver and get them there as team number five. He is still in quarterback mode, it's the fourth down with two yards to go, and they need a touchdown to stay in the game.
Granted, staying in the game will knock out Rachel, and then she'll be mad at him and his life will be hell, but he's pretty sure she's pissed off at him already. But consider: he doesn't know how much worse it could get with her, and he knows that losing is always bad. Always. It's probably better to stay in the game and take his chances with Rachel.
"I GOTTA TAKE A LEAK," Puck says more loudly and Finn snaps out of his daze.
"Here," Finn says and passes him an empty sports drink bottle. It has a conveniently wide mouth.
"...Seriously?" Puck asks. "You want me to piss in a bottle?"
They are guys. They can do that. They need every advantage they can get.
Meanwhile, in the car full of short people, Rachel is asking Blaine for directions as they approach possible exits. She thinks she stays on this highway but she wants to be totally sure. "Blaine? What direction is next?"
"Right," he says confidently, and with some surprise at the answer she follows his directions and takes the offramp.
"Where now?"
"Right again."
Rachel hesitates. There's no intersection that will allow for another right turn, only a t-junction that would let her turn left. "Are you sure you're reading that correctly?"
"Yes. Now left."
She doesn't know what's going on, but she follows Blaine's directions due to how confident he sounds. It's been a good day for him, right? He's probably pulled himself together and is ready to take on the race again with confidence, vim, and vigor.
"No, wrong way, turn around and go back."
Okay, screw this. Rachel slams on the brakes and pulls them off to the shoulder. They are now on small, rural side roads while cars on the highway whip past them in the distance. "Let me see that," she mutters and leans back to snatch the map out of Blaine's hands.
Blaine was not holding a map. Blaine was working on a maze printed on his zoo gift shop bag. He looks at her with total innocence as she stares at him in disbelief. What? It's been a long drive, he was getting bored and she didn't want to play the license plate game.
"Oh my God," Rachel mutters as she guns them back toward the highway in the distance and finds the onramp by sight. She follows the road signs toward Varanasi, figuring that's a safer bet than trying to read the map and drive at the same time, and attempts to ignore Blaine's occasional words of wisdom from the back seat. By the time they approach the city limits she has heard far, far more than she ever wanted to know about the success rates of rhino breeding.
The editing begins to cut between the two cars: Dudebro with a lead given to them by their teamwork and... well, their bottle-pissing, and Awkward Dating Exes with one team member who's checked out of the race at a seldom-if-ever witnessed level but the other very, very capable of reading a map to find a certain hotel somewhere in this city. Finn: he looks intense. Rachel: she looks intense. Puck: he looks intense. Blaine: he thinks giraffes are adorable.
A car pulls up in front of the hotel. Holly, in the hotel, pops a grape into her mouth and waits for team number five. And that team is... Puck and Finn. They run in, looking tense and worried (although Puck does stop along the way to chuck something in a trash can), and take their spots on the mat. They look absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that they are eliminated.
"I'm sorry to tell you," Holly begins, and they both slump, "that... you're going to have to deal with leaving in the middle of the night again, because you are team number five and are still in the Amazing Race."
"Yes!" Finn crows. "...She's going to kill me!"
Puck nods solemnly. "She totally is."
Then, a quick cut to sad music as Rachel runs in alone, has to run back and grab Blaine, and drags him toward the mat. He comments on how nice the hotel looks during the entire trip there. "Don't say it," Rachel pleads with Holly when they make it to the mat.
"I gotta," Holly says apologetically.
"No you don't!" Rachel says. "You can just ignore this leg. It can be one of those non-elimination legs that you're supposed to have."
"Not with as many teams as we started with," Holly says, but Rachel is already arguing her case.
"You can't possibly get rid of me," Rachel insists. "I'm your star. I'm your featured attraction! Your ratings will plummet. Plummet!"
"Actually," Holly says, "we've got the hot girls who make out with each other when they get drunk and bored at pit stops, the adorable father/son team with the added dramatic bonus of wondering whether the kid's going to randomly hurl himself off a cliff to make for good television, the nice middle-aged ladies that a big part of the CBS viewing audience connects with, the scrappy underdog women who are both totally hot, to boot, and the cute, dumb alpha males who bring in the younger viewers. What demographic are you, exactly?"
"I'm... I'm...." Rachel, flustered, tries to think of her argument. "I am a hotbed of tolerance and political sensitivity!" Holly squints at her; are those, like, actual words? "I am the most talented, most capable—"
"Hey, where'd your partner go?" Holly wonders, and Rachel facepalms when she looks to see that Blaine has just wandered off without a good-bye. "Well, anyway, you're the last team to arrive and I'm sorry to say that you're—"
"Don't say it!"
"—Out of the Amazing Race."
Rachel's shriek echos through the hotel. In the hotel bar, as she sucks down a strawberry margarita, Santana pulls out her Big Sheet O' Vengeance and crosses out the second of three names on the list.
As for the third name on that list, Kurt—freshly-showered—is busy eying the new arrival in the hotel bar. "Blaine," he begins very, very gently. "What are you wearing?"
Blaine adjusts his baseball cap from the gift shop. "An elephant."
"I can see that. Why?"
"They were out of giraffes." Seriously, he's decided that he really, really likes giraffes. That is his takeaway from the Race, as his brain neatly locked away all the suffering and heartache and stress: giraffes are just super.
Finn sidles up to Kurt and whispers something about how he needs Kurt to find him someplace safe to hide before Rachel finds him and yells at him for knocking her out of the race. Also, their parents and Coach Beiste are drunk off their asses and are about to sing karaoke in front of everyone, and he's pretty sure they've got about twenty seconds until they're dead of embarrassment.
Kurt stares at the stage as the three, giggling, fire up a song from their youth and the first words are sung.
"We're going," Kurt mourns as the three adults onstage proceed to make absolute asses of themselves on camera.
"They should have dedicated that to you," Finn giggles. Oh, Finn. You're just asking for payback, between that and randomly dumping water on Kurt last leg.
Blaine says he'll come up later; he wants to watch the show. That's where Rachel finds him: sitting in a hotel bar with a stuffed elephant on his head, happily tapping his toes along with drunken karaoke.
If she'd only been paired with Kurt, this never would have happened. Quinn, even: their antagonism could have driven them toward ever-greater heights of performance. Or a clone of herself. That would have been perfect. And she would truly have a duet partner able to keep up with her.
Hmm.
Maybe she needs to sign up for some science classes next year.
"I need to stop," Quinn tells Emma three hours into the drive to Varanasi. They have another hour to go, and if she holds it in much longer then her bladder will burst and her kidneys will burst and she will die. Simple biology. "Do you need to?" she asks Emma as they pull into the first remote possibility for having a halfway-decent bathroom.
Emma shakes her head forcefully.
Quinn, far more gently than she would have at the start of things, says, "If you go quickly, it won't be bad."
Emma smiles at her. "I went at the zoo, while you were working. At the gift shop. I knew it would be well maintained. And then I just didn't have anything to drink afterward, until we get to the hotel."
Hey, if it works for her, it works for her. By this point Quinn's reaction isn't to be annoyed that Emma cares about dirt, but to be impressed that Emma, knowing her limitations, has gone for hours after a hot, humid day without taking a single drink. That's willpower. Quinn likes willpower. She hurries through using the gas station bathroom. No matter where you are in the world, they seem to be reliably "tolerable" and also reliably "and absolutely nothing better than that."
She's well aware that the Hummels might pass them on the road without them even noticing, but they'll almost certainly finish near the top. After so long spent just trying to cling to the race by their fingernails, Quinn would actually be okay with coming in as a strong second.
...No, screw that, she wants to be first. She zips back up, washes her hands, and then jogs back to the car and grandly tells Emma to direct her onward. They make their way to Varanasi and, with precise directions that never lead her wrong once, Quinn soon has them in the parking lot of the hotel. They run in, beaming at their strong performance over the leg, and find Holly in one of the restaurants. She is attempting to dance a Bollywood routine while the employees look at her like the complete weirdo she is.
"Hey!" Holly says when she processes they're there. "Wait, you two?"
"Yes?" Emma says uncertainly. You know, she's not a huge fan of Holly.
"Oh. Well, hey! Go you!" She gives the two a huge thumbs-up. "You're team number one!" The shriek of pure joy that Quinn lets out draws everyone's attention to her. Their eyes are huge. "As winners of this leg of the race," Holly begins, only to trail off as she starts shuffling through her index cards. "No, no, no, no." She pulls out a cell phone, dials, and asks a few questions to someone on the other end. "Yes, I know it's the wrong network. Can you still get him? I am having way too much fun torturing this kid and this would kill him."
Quinn and Emma eye each other dubiously.
Holly beams, hangs up, and announces, "As winners you've won a trip to New York City for a personal style consultation with Tim Gunn, after which he'll take you on a short shopping trip to put those tips to good use."
Quinn bounces up and down with joy. Free clothes! Emma does the same. Tim Gunn always looks so neat and well-pressed!
Team Inevitable Family Team
"Tim Gunn, huh," Kurt says dryly when he and his father check in about fifteen minutes after Quinn and Emma.
"Tim Gunn," Holly says cheerfully. "They seemed super excited. More than when Santana and Brittany won awesome skin care stuff and free gas for life. Did they mention that to you? They totally should have. In return you could tell them about your Super Bowl tickets. Or your Bruckheimer movies."
"Holly?" Kurt asks with a smile. "Have you ever considered applying for Survivor?"
"No. Why?"
"You really should," Kurt says, sounding for all the world like a Bond villain in the making. "I think you'd find it really... memorable." That implicit threat made, he stalks off toward his room and a shower. He needs to come up with more ideas to make sure he has that host spot locked in again. Damn, not even a single lion could have lunged at him?
That would have been perfect.
Team PTA
"Tell me my ass looks great," Carole says immediately upon getting to the hotel, checking in, and finding Burt.
"Uh," he says, because he can occasionally shut down into wanting to show no more public affection than Hank Hill and they are in an open hallway with passing guests and employees. (Burt and Hank would get along amazingly. It would be like that episode with the guy voiced by Drew Carey, who had Hank's same model of pickup.)
"She's still fired up about Angry Cheerleader saying she had on mom jeans," Shannon explains with a smirk.
"You, uh, look great," Burt says with a furtive glance toward the passing employees.
"That's not what I asked," Carole retorts.
Shannon smirks, folds her arms across her chest, and waits.
"Yourasslooksgreat," Burt says. They are in another country, Carole! Save it for the bedroom!
She grins hugely at him. "Good. Let's go find the hotel bar."
Team PTC Worst of the Week
Brittany is getting a little annoyed at India, to be honest. She still hasn't seen a buffalo stampede or met Pocahontas.
And what is Holly even wearing?
"Hey!" Holly says brightly as she checks them in as number four. "Do you want a little forehead dot, too?"
There is really no part of this sequence that isn't offensive to the viewing audience.
Teams Dudebro and Awkward Dating Exes
"I gotta pee, dude," Puck says insistently from the back seat.
"We can't stop." Finn stares intently at the road in front of him. His hands are locked around the wheel. He is not going to miss a turn. (Yes, they're on a highway, but eventually he is not going to miss a turn.) He is not going to hit someone. He is going to be an awesome driver and get them there as team number five. He is still in quarterback mode, it's the fourth down with two yards to go, and they need a touchdown to stay in the game.
Granted, staying in the game will knock out Rachel, and then she'll be mad at him and his life will be hell, but he's pretty sure she's pissed off at him already. But consider: he doesn't know how much worse it could get with her, and he knows that losing is always bad. Always. It's probably better to stay in the game and take his chances with Rachel.
"I GOTTA TAKE A LEAK," Puck says more loudly and Finn snaps out of his daze.
"Here," Finn says and passes him an empty sports drink bottle. It has a conveniently wide mouth.
"...Seriously?" Puck asks. "You want me to piss in a bottle?"
They are guys. They can do that. They need every advantage they can get.
Meanwhile, in the car full of short people, Rachel is asking Blaine for directions as they approach possible exits. She thinks she stays on this highway but she wants to be totally sure. "Blaine? What direction is next?"
"Right," he says confidently, and with some surprise at the answer she follows his directions and takes the offramp.
"Where now?"
"Right again."
Rachel hesitates. There's no intersection that will allow for another right turn, only a t-junction that would let her turn left. "Are you sure you're reading that correctly?"
"Yes. Now left."
She doesn't know what's going on, but she follows Blaine's directions due to how confident he sounds. It's been a good day for him, right? He's probably pulled himself together and is ready to take on the race again with confidence, vim, and vigor.
"No, wrong way, turn around and go back."
Okay, screw this. Rachel slams on the brakes and pulls them off to the shoulder. They are now on small, rural side roads while cars on the highway whip past them in the distance. "Let me see that," she mutters and leans back to snatch the map out of Blaine's hands.
Blaine was not holding a map. Blaine was working on a maze printed on his zoo gift shop bag. He looks at her with total innocence as she stares at him in disbelief. What? It's been a long drive, he was getting bored and she didn't want to play the license plate game.
"Oh my God," Rachel mutters as she guns them back toward the highway in the distance and finds the onramp by sight. She follows the road signs toward Varanasi, figuring that's a safer bet than trying to read the map and drive at the same time, and attempts to ignore Blaine's occasional words of wisdom from the back seat. By the time they approach the city limits she has heard far, far more than she ever wanted to know about the success rates of rhino breeding.
The editing begins to cut between the two cars: Dudebro with a lead given to them by their teamwork and... well, their bottle-pissing, and Awkward Dating Exes with one team member who's checked out of the race at a seldom-if-ever witnessed level but the other very, very capable of reading a map to find a certain hotel somewhere in this city. Finn: he looks intense. Rachel: she looks intense. Puck: he looks intense. Blaine: he thinks giraffes are adorable.
A car pulls up in front of the hotel. Holly, in the hotel, pops a grape into her mouth and waits for team number five. And that team is... Puck and Finn. They run in, looking tense and worried (although Puck does stop along the way to chuck something in a trash can), and take their spots on the mat. They look absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that they are eliminated.
"I'm sorry to tell you," Holly begins, and they both slump, "that... you're going to have to deal with leaving in the middle of the night again, because you are team number five and are still in the Amazing Race."
"Yes!" Finn crows. "...She's going to kill me!"
Puck nods solemnly. "She totally is."
Then, a quick cut to sad music as Rachel runs in alone, has to run back and grab Blaine, and drags him toward the mat. He comments on how nice the hotel looks during the entire trip there. "Don't say it," Rachel pleads with Holly when they make it to the mat.
"I gotta," Holly says apologetically.
"No you don't!" Rachel says. "You can just ignore this leg. It can be one of those non-elimination legs that you're supposed to have."
"Not with as many teams as we started with," Holly says, but Rachel is already arguing her case.
"You can't possibly get rid of me," Rachel insists. "I'm your star. I'm your featured attraction! Your ratings will plummet. Plummet!"
"Actually," Holly says, "we've got the hot girls who make out with each other when they get drunk and bored at pit stops, the adorable father/son team with the added dramatic bonus of wondering whether the kid's going to randomly hurl himself off a cliff to make for good television, the nice middle-aged ladies that a big part of the CBS viewing audience connects with, the scrappy underdog women who are both totally hot, to boot, and the cute, dumb alpha males who bring in the younger viewers. What demographic are you, exactly?"
"I'm... I'm...." Rachel, flustered, tries to think of her argument. "I am a hotbed of tolerance and political sensitivity!" Holly squints at her; are those, like, actual words? "I am the most talented, most capable—"
"Hey, where'd your partner go?" Holly wonders, and Rachel facepalms when she looks to see that Blaine has just wandered off without a good-bye. "Well, anyway, you're the last team to arrive and I'm sorry to say that you're—"
"Don't say it!"
"—Out of the Amazing Race."
Rachel's shriek echos through the hotel. In the hotel bar, as she sucks down a strawberry margarita, Santana pulls out her Big Sheet O' Vengeance and crosses out the second of three names on the list.
As for the third name on that list, Kurt—freshly-showered—is busy eying the new arrival in the hotel bar. "Blaine," he begins very, very gently. "What are you wearing?"
Blaine adjusts his baseball cap from the gift shop. "An elephant."
"I can see that. Why?"
"They were out of giraffes." Seriously, he's decided that he really, really likes giraffes. That is his takeaway from the Race, as his brain neatly locked away all the suffering and heartache and stress: giraffes are just super.
Finn sidles up to Kurt and whispers something about how he needs Kurt to find him someplace safe to hide before Rachel finds him and yells at him for knocking her out of the race. Also, their parents and Coach Beiste are drunk off their asses and are about to sing karaoke in front of everyone, and he's pretty sure they've got about twenty seconds until they're dead of embarrassment.
Kurt stares at the stage as the three, giggling, fire up a song from their youth and the first words are sung.
"We're going," Kurt mourns as the three adults onstage proceed to make absolute asses of themselves on camera.
"They should have dedicated that to you," Finn giggles. Oh, Finn. You're just asking for payback, between that and randomly dumping water on Kurt last leg.
Blaine says he'll come up later; he wants to watch the show. That's where Rachel finds him: sitting in a hotel bar with a stuffed elephant on his head, happily tapping his toes along with drunken karaoke.
If she'd only been paired with Kurt, this never would have happened. Quinn, even: their antagonism could have driven them toward ever-greater heights of performance. Or a clone of herself. That would have been perfect. And she would truly have a duet partner able to keep up with her.
Hmm.
Maybe she needs to sign up for some science classes next year.
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