'The Amazing Race' season finale recap: Hippie, Hippie, Hooray!

Up until this point, it looked as if Ron and Christina had the race locked up. Even with various editing tricks (making it seem like the other teams were right behind them on the glacier even though we never saw anyone ascending at the same time as Ron and Christina), it was clear they were running a good race and, barring any slipups, would be the victors. And then came what I like to call the Most Poorly Worded Challenge Ever.

The final roadblock involved picking 10 items encountered on the race out of a group of 15, based on a list of highly confusing criteria. I played Phil's instruction over multiple times, and it still came out sounding like a Zen riddle. (''If it sounds easy, think again,'' said Phil. Okay, Phil, but what do I do if it sounds like the rantings of a dyslexic carnival barker?) The rule that really broke me was to pick ''One item of transportation resembling the shape of a stick.'' I dare you to diagram that sentence. That sounded like the producers wrote what they needed and then had it retranslated in every country along the route and finally back to English.

Among the 15 items to pick from were a goat, a chicken, and a Japanese man wandering in circles, pretending to be cleaning a train station à la the Osaka clue dispenser. These guys should call their agent: Do you really want a gig where you have equal billing to a pair of stilts? The only way this job could have been more demeaning would have been if Bertram van Munster had shoved tiny clues up each of their asses and then told the contestants to go find them.

This confounding puzzle was where Christina stumbled. She seemed to be on top of it, but as often happens in this type of game, when she got one item wrong, she began rearranging everything, making it worse. It was a sign of how badly this was rattling the usually calm Christina that she kept saying ''frickin','' channeling the ultimate panicker, Jen. If this had gone on much longer, I fear she would have slipped even further into Jennitude. Perhaps she would have turned to the Japanese train-station worker and snapped, ''You're a cleaner — you're supposed to clean up my problems! Or did you leave your scrotum in your other jumpsuit?''

And then, out of nowhere, Rachel finished the puzzle first, and she and TK were off. Christina eventually finished it, and the final dash was played out as if they were neck and neck. But as we all know by now, if you never see two teams in the same frame together, they're not notably close. And once they'd stopped by the Salmon Hooker (yet more ignominy for the underwater kingdom!), it was TK and Rachel who sped onto the mat, past all their previously vanquished competitors. (Oh, Ari and Staella, we hardly knew ye...and that was probably for the best.)

As for Nicolas and Donald, they came in third, but we'll never know how far behind they actually were. We never saw Nicolas solve the puzzle: The last we saw of him at that challenge, he was in the background, tugging on a donkey, and as we learned in episode 1, that never ends well. I suspect that Nicolas never finished but the producers huddled together and said, ''Every minute we wait here is another minute the Goths will say, 'We like the mat because it sounds like ''bat,'' which likes the dark, just like us!' '' Five seconds later, a PA was likely dispatched to the roadblock to yank the donkey reins out of Nicolas' hands and send him and Donald straight to the mat.

I kind of wish Christina and Ronald had won, and I think the producers had their hearts set on it, too, considering how the show was so loaded with quotes about what a better father Ronald had become. Though in their eagerness, they left in one too many: In the final tearful (and touching) moments, Ronald said, ''For once in my life, when I say the words 'I love you,' I mean it.'' When I heard this, I said, ''Wait a minute, that seems retroactively really crappy,'' but my wife told me to leave him alone, it was a sweet moment, and he'd just misspoken. Well, I'm just sorry she doesn't like the real truth flavor.

What did you think about the finale, the winners, and the season as a whole? Post below!

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