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Glee Amazing Race: Eleventh Leg - Arrival in New York
YER A WIZARD, HARRY.
(I will seriously never be able to stop using a default Corny icon. After all this time, people would probably think I'd been taken over by a pod person.)
Holly's Voiceover
"Everyone made their way to the Ketchikan airport. Which, let's be honest, is not exactly a bustling hub of activity after they've been through Paris and Johannesburg."
Cut to a shot of Quinn methodically shoveling down a sandwich from the small lounge she and Emma found. She wants to stay fed, hydrated, and well-rested during the course of their long trip to New York, so they will be ready to hit the ground running. "Are you fine with me being team captain?" she asks Emma between bites.
Emma looks up from her notebook and offers her a napkin. Quinn rolls her eyes a little—she's Quinn Fabray, she's obviously not being sloppy—but takes it without complaint. Okay, so Emma isn't good with sitting with someone who's eating with such intent. "How do you mean?"
"I took a squad to Nationals. I kept my eyes on the prize and I pushed people when they needed it. And we won. Are you fine with that?" She sees Emma's hesitation and adds, "I won't make you do anything that really scares you."
"Okay," Emma decides. She's already overcome so many challenges on the race, and she thinks Quinn succeeding as "captain" would do wonders for her self-esteem. "Captain."
Quinn grins at her, and then shovels in more food.
Over at another table in the lounge, TeamPleasant Middle-Aged Women PTA is having a similar discussion. "You're the coach," Carole agrees. "And it's the bottom of the ninth; we need to focus."
Shannon smiles at her and clinks their... well, soft drink cups together. "To showing them all what's what." She jerks her chin toward yet another table. "Are you wanting to work with them?"
Carole turns, sees her family members sitting there, and shakes her head as she turns back. "Burt and I talked... when he wasn't focused on something about a 'suicide watch.'" He was joking. At least, 95% joking. She thinks. He had that 'irritated and worried' expression on, and she never knows how to take it. He's irritated and worried a lot around Kurt; it's just a matter of figuring out who's his target of his irritation that time. (Usually, it's some jackass at the grocery store. It's occasionally Kurt when Kurt genuinely doesn't seem to understand why Burt has a problem with him going out in clothes that Burt recognizes as 'vaguely questionable' and Carole recognizes as 'covered in bondage straps.')
(Yes, Carole recognizes what those straps are.)
(She has learned not to be wholly open with her knowledge.)
(Yet.)
After all those parentheticals, Carole continues, "We're having a fair fight. Whoever comes in ahead comes in ahead, and we'll just see who does a better job of it."
Shannon can't argue with that approach at all, but an eyebrow pops up regardless. She just has to make sure Carole's aware of something. "Working together'd give you a better shot at the money." She'd like the prize money as well, but she doesn't need it. She's comfortable and places huge importance on fair play and well-earned victories; frankly, she'd rather go this route, anyway. But she knows that family's dealt with a lot more than she has this year.
"True," Carole admits. "But hey, we have all that hosting money, and they're obviously going to ask him back for another round." She looks at them again and grins a little. "Kurt's pretty entertaining."
Cut to that 'entertaining, worried, and irritated' table. Kurt is currently drawing a map of New York City from memory on a napkin. "Here's Coney Island," he says and points at a place on a blob that's supposed to be Brooklyn. "I think we're definitely taking the right approach by taking that JFK flight."
Burt squints at the 'map,' which is seriously just a bunch of squiggly lines. "Where's the other airport?" He sees Kurt draw another dot in the middle of squiggles, and wonders why he bothered asking. Cheap napkins and ballpoint pens: not the best combination for creating artwork on the fly. "So... further?" he finally speculates after trying to make sense of all the squiggles.
Kurt nods. "Further. Assuming all the flights land on time, of course, we'll be ahead."
Burt nods thoughtfully and then turns his attention back to his meal. They eventually walk to their gate, well aware that the Denver-bound flight has already left, and check to see if they recognize anyone else there. Quinn and Emma see them and nod. Okay, then. If this works out for the best, he and Kurt are ahead of Carole. Otherwise, she made the smart move.
Flights
For the first time, the airplane d20 matters in the race! Isn't that appropriate, that the potential for random luck came into play in the very last leg?
(Specifically, I rolled a d20 for all six legs being traveled. (Three flights on both options, Denver-via-Seattle-bound United and Los Angeles-via-Seattle-bound Alaska.) There were no critical failures, but there was a crit (20) on one leg of one of the flights.)
Even in the early morning, many flights are forced to circle the New York airports once or twice before they're allowed to land. It's a hub of global travel, after all; people arrive at all times of day or night. Shannon and Carole don't think anything about circling a couple of times before landing and once they're down they hit the ground running.
What they don't realize: the JFK plane, by pure luck, got a runway opened to it immediately. The ten-minute lead that Team Inevitable Family Team and Team How Did This Happen had on them? Is now twenty minutes, as those two teams pull up to the New York Aquarium in an effective tie.
Memory Task
That's right: it's time for a memory task to see who's been paying attention throughout the course of the race. The two front-running teams get to the aquarium and are faced with a task full of... letters? There are individual walled areas for each team, so they finally can't just look off each other's work. In those areas there is one wall marked with spaces, like it's a Hangman game. These sets of spaces are firmly attached to the wall and cannot be moved around.
On the other wall there are letters. A lot of letters. They will neatly attach to those Hangman-esque spaces.
Obviously, they're using those letters to make words. Opening the clue reveals which words they're expected to form: the proper names of nine airports they visited during the course of the race. The example of "O'Hare" is given for "Chicago," as of course that name doesn't offer them any help.
Now, if they've been looking at the nameplates of airports as they drove in, remembering what names came up on map searches, or noting the names of airports when they were booking reservations online, they should be in relatively fine position to tackle this task. It's not like these names are kept hidden. You just have to notice where you're going. That's the theory.
Whether teams did notice these names, and actually remember them? That might be another matter entirely.
The names they must reconstruct:
Ezeiza (Buenos Aires)
Carrasco (Montevideo)
Charles de Gaulle (Paris)
Saint Exupery (Lyon)
OR Tambo (Johannesburg)
Julius Nyerere (Dar es Salaam)
Jomo Kenyatta (Nairobi)
Lal Bahadur Shastri (Varanasi)
Gimhae (Busan)
(City names are for your own consideration. They don't have to add them. But they also don't have the cities identified for them, and some cites they visited are not included. Also, there's another formal name for the Buenos Aires airport, but this is the one that reflects its airport code and so would be easier for them to recall.)
There are exactly as many letters as they will need, and the spaces tell them exactly how many letters should be used for one name. "Charles de Gaulle" looks like "------- -- ------," in other words. If they do the most obvious ones first, then it's very possible to get a lot of letters out of play and make their task easier. The cities are also in order of travel. They might not know whether or not they should be trying to remember the name of the Johannesburg airport, but if they do, it will definitely fall after any names from South America or Europe.
This exam is open-book, so to speak. They can dig through old tickets, reservations, notes, and anything else they might have crammed in their bags to see if they can find the names of airports there. Once teams have started, however, they have to stay in their areas and only use each other and their belongings for reference. In other words they can't wander off, try to find a tourist with a smart phone, and use that for googling. (If they even could, that early in the morning.)
Okay.
Time to start.
[Poll #1761735]
(I will seriously never be able to stop using a default Corny icon. After all this time, people would probably think I'd been taken over by a pod person.)
Holly's Voiceover
"Everyone made their way to the Ketchikan airport. Which, let's be honest, is not exactly a bustling hub of activity after they've been through Paris and Johannesburg."
Cut to a shot of Quinn methodically shoveling down a sandwich from the small lounge she and Emma found. She wants to stay fed, hydrated, and well-rested during the course of their long trip to New York, so they will be ready to hit the ground running. "Are you fine with me being team captain?" she asks Emma between bites.
Emma looks up from her notebook and offers her a napkin. Quinn rolls her eyes a little—she's Quinn Fabray, she's obviously not being sloppy—but takes it without complaint. Okay, so Emma isn't good with sitting with someone who's eating with such intent. "How do you mean?"
"I took a squad to Nationals. I kept my eyes on the prize and I pushed people when they needed it. And we won. Are you fine with that?" She sees Emma's hesitation and adds, "I won't make you do anything that really scares you."
"Okay," Emma decides. She's already overcome so many challenges on the race, and she thinks Quinn succeeding as "captain" would do wonders for her self-esteem. "Captain."
Quinn grins at her, and then shovels in more food.
Over at another table in the lounge, Team
Shannon smiles at her and clinks their... well, soft drink cups together. "To showing them all what's what." She jerks her chin toward yet another table. "Are you wanting to work with them?"
Carole turns, sees her family members sitting there, and shakes her head as she turns back. "Burt and I talked... when he wasn't focused on something about a 'suicide watch.'" He was joking. At least, 95% joking. She thinks. He had that 'irritated and worried' expression on, and she never knows how to take it. He's irritated and worried a lot around Kurt; it's just a matter of figuring out who's his target of his irritation that time. (Usually, it's some jackass at the grocery store. It's occasionally Kurt when Kurt genuinely doesn't seem to understand why Burt has a problem with him going out in clothes that Burt recognizes as 'vaguely questionable' and Carole recognizes as 'covered in bondage straps.')
(Yes, Carole recognizes what those straps are.)
(She has learned not to be wholly open with her knowledge.)
(Yet.)
After all those parentheticals, Carole continues, "We're having a fair fight. Whoever comes in ahead comes in ahead, and we'll just see who does a better job of it."
Shannon can't argue with that approach at all, but an eyebrow pops up regardless. She just has to make sure Carole's aware of something. "Working together'd give you a better shot at the money." She'd like the prize money as well, but she doesn't need it. She's comfortable and places huge importance on fair play and well-earned victories; frankly, she'd rather go this route, anyway. But she knows that family's dealt with a lot more than she has this year.
"True," Carole admits. "But hey, we have all that hosting money, and they're obviously going to ask him back for another round." She looks at them again and grins a little. "Kurt's pretty entertaining."
Cut to that 'entertaining, worried, and irritated' table. Kurt is currently drawing a map of New York City from memory on a napkin. "Here's Coney Island," he says and points at a place on a blob that's supposed to be Brooklyn. "I think we're definitely taking the right approach by taking that JFK flight."
Burt squints at the 'map,' which is seriously just a bunch of squiggly lines. "Where's the other airport?" He sees Kurt draw another dot in the middle of squiggles, and wonders why he bothered asking. Cheap napkins and ballpoint pens: not the best combination for creating artwork on the fly. "So... further?" he finally speculates after trying to make sense of all the squiggles.
Kurt nods. "Further. Assuming all the flights land on time, of course, we'll be ahead."
Burt nods thoughtfully and then turns his attention back to his meal. They eventually walk to their gate, well aware that the Denver-bound flight has already left, and check to see if they recognize anyone else there. Quinn and Emma see them and nod. Okay, then. If this works out for the best, he and Kurt are ahead of Carole. Otherwise, she made the smart move.
Flights
For the first time, the airplane d20 matters in the race! Isn't that appropriate, that the potential for random luck came into play in the very last leg?
(Specifically, I rolled a d20 for all six legs being traveled. (Three flights on both options, Denver-via-Seattle-bound United and Los Angeles-via-Seattle-bound Alaska.) There were no critical failures, but there was a crit (20) on one leg of one of the flights.)
Even in the early morning, many flights are forced to circle the New York airports once or twice before they're allowed to land. It's a hub of global travel, after all; people arrive at all times of day or night. Shannon and Carole don't think anything about circling a couple of times before landing and once they're down they hit the ground running.
What they don't realize: the JFK plane, by pure luck, got a runway opened to it immediately. The ten-minute lead that Team Inevitable Family Team and Team How Did This Happen had on them? Is now twenty minutes, as those two teams pull up to the New York Aquarium in an effective tie.
Memory Task
That's right: it's time for a memory task to see who's been paying attention throughout the course of the race. The two front-running teams get to the aquarium and are faced with a task full of... letters? There are individual walled areas for each team, so they finally can't just look off each other's work. In those areas there is one wall marked with spaces, like it's a Hangman game. These sets of spaces are firmly attached to the wall and cannot be moved around.
On the other wall there are letters. A lot of letters. They will neatly attach to those Hangman-esque spaces.
Obviously, they're using those letters to make words. Opening the clue reveals which words they're expected to form: the proper names of nine airports they visited during the course of the race. The example of "O'Hare" is given for "Chicago," as of course that name doesn't offer them any help.
Now, if they've been looking at the nameplates of airports as they drove in, remembering what names came up on map searches, or noting the names of airports when they were booking reservations online, they should be in relatively fine position to tackle this task. It's not like these names are kept hidden. You just have to notice where you're going. That's the theory.
Whether teams did notice these names, and actually remember them? That might be another matter entirely.
The names they must reconstruct:
Ezeiza (Buenos Aires)
Carrasco (Montevideo)
Charles de Gaulle (Paris)
Saint Exupery (Lyon)
OR Tambo (Johannesburg)
Julius Nyerere (Dar es Salaam)
Jomo Kenyatta (Nairobi)
Lal Bahadur Shastri (Varanasi)
Gimhae (Busan)
(City names are for your own consideration. They don't have to add them. But they also don't have the cities identified for them, and some cites they visited are not included. Also, there's another formal name for the Buenos Aires airport, but this is the one that reflects its airport code and so would be easier for them to recall.)
There are exactly as many letters as they will need, and the spaces tell them exactly how many letters should be used for one name. "Charles de Gaulle" looks like "------- -- ------," in other words. If they do the most obvious ones first, then it's very possible to get a lot of letters out of play and make their task easier. The cities are also in order of travel. They might not know whether or not they should be trying to remember the name of the Johannesburg airport, but if they do, it will definitely fall after any names from South America or Europe.
This exam is open-book, so to speak. They can dig through old tickets, reservations, notes, and anything else they might have crammed in their bags to see if they can find the names of airports there. Once teams have started, however, they have to stay in their areas and only use each other and their belongings for reference. In other words they can't wander off, try to find a tourist with a smart phone, and use that for googling. (If they even could, that early in the morning.)
Okay.
Time to start.
[Poll #1761735]