Previously on Dubai Bye, Big Meaty Lawyer: Teams discovered that Dubai was both hot (in the desert) and cold (in the artificial ski environment). The world’s most anticlimactic Fast Forward jumped Spiky and Perky to the front of the pack, while a total inability to execute any part of the day’s instructions without going the wrong way, tripping on something, misreading the signs, or stopping to kick stuff and forgetting which direction to go doomed What’s-His-Bicep and Massachusetts Millie to a quick trip home. The Globetrotters lent a hand to Mika and Canaan to stop them from freezing to death in Dubai’s Winter Wonderland. Let us see whether there is some karmic reward for their kindness, or whether it turns out that they wasted it on Scaredy-Pants Jones and The World’s Weeniest Blowhard!

Credits. Sphinxie! I’ve missed you. I wonder if we will be seeing you again. [BOMP.]

Phil explains to us that Dubai has gone from Expanse Of Sand Dunes to Booming Metropolis in fifteen years. That’s what you get for introducing the Frappuccino to a population of perfectly happy Bedouins. We are at a “luxury resort” that constitutes the pit stop.

8:17 AM. Spiky and Perky prepare to leave. Their hair continues to signal that while much in Dubai has changed, the power of mousse has not been diminished. Their clue tells them to choose one of a bunch of waiting briefcases and proceed to the Boardwalk Marina at the Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club. There, they’ll search the boardwalk for the clue box. (Don’t underestimate how hard that last part is sometimes.) Perky tells us that she’s never been so stressed out, and Spiky clarifies that Perky is not a relaxed girl, so that’s saying something. Huh. I hadn’t really pegged her as “intense” based on events thus far, but all right. Spiky also refers to Dubai as “Island Vegas,” calling it “very fabricated.” I’m not sure what that means, but I think we can agree that elements of Vegas are indeed fabricated, including most of the food. Spiky and Perky also introduce one of the themes for this week, which is that it’s extremely hot in Dubai. Spiky even mentions how much he is sweating, and when you can make a droid perspire, you are cranking things up, meteorologically speaking.

They reach the club and find their way to a Roadblock, which requires someone to paddle a little inflatable boat out to a yacht and collect a watch from a sheik. (Much the way inflatable boats have functioned in ancient societies since time immemorial, as in the famous case of the Trojan Dinghy.) Then they return to the shore, where they have to figure out that the time the watch is set to — 8:35 — is the combination to the briefcase, which contains the next clue. Spiky says that he took the Roadblock, because he’s familiar with “the logistics” of rowing an inflatable raft. I think the “logistics” are basically “remain upright,” but perhaps he has room for that on his Day-At-A-Glance calendar.

9:59 A. Brian and Ericka. Brian insists that Ericka can “rough it” if necessary, but Ericka tells us that she starts the day with her makeup all done, and over the course of the day, it sort of melts. But she doesn’t see any reason not to at least try. Hey, me neither. Start the day with a spatula; end it with a scraper.

Meanwhile, Spiky is having a hard time rowing the boat. I’m not sure what kind of body of water they’re in, but it does have the appearance of rowing against a current of some sort. Quick, Spiky, what are the logistics? Hurry!

10:42 AM. Big Easy and Flight Time take off. Big Easy refers to Dubai as “too hot,” “extremely hot,” and “hot.” I’m not sure what he’s getting at. HOW’S THE WEATHER IN DUBAI, BIG EASY?

Finally, Spiky reaches the yacht and gets his watch.

10:45 AM. Gary and Matt. As they leave, we learn that Matt redid his hair color last night — and his dad helped him. Now that is some father-son bonding.

When Spiky returns, Perky asks if he got “the treasure,” so apparently that’s how the clue refers to the watch in the course of, I suppose, explaining that you use the treasure to figure out the combination. Spiky figures out that it’s 8:35 on the watch, so he has no trouble opening the briefcase. Their clue sends them to the Abra Station, a water taxi port. In the cab, Spiky points out that rowing the boat wasn’t easy, so some teams may struggle.

Brian and Ericka reach the marina and he does the Roadblock, because, as he explains, she “doesn’t do water.” Well then. Doesn’t do water, doesn’t do cold, doesn’t do hot … perhaps Ericka was expecting The Amazing Race Around A Giant Terrarium.

11:34 AM. Sam and Dan. They explains as they leave that they are still in this stupid alliance with Maria and Tiffany, so they’re sticking with that. They feel like if they have to, they can out run every team “except possibly the Globetrotters.” The professional athletes? Yes, probably. They would like to see the Globetrotters knocked out. I congratulate them for concluding that the one team they could not outrun would ideally be eliminated at some point. They are catching on! Sam thinks they’ll maybe ride on a yacht, or “be in a music video.” I’m sorry … a music video? He hears “yacht club” and thinks “music video”? Isn’t he too young to even remember “Rio”? Come to think of it, isn’t he too young to remember music videos?

As Brian clambers onto the yacht, Ericka remarks that “he’s so cute.” It’s good to retain this kind of affection for your husband, and to express it while he is doing all the things you do not so much wish to do. I still kind of love her, but I admit that this leg is not her finest.

Speaking of the Globetrotters, they find that their cab driver has taken them to the wrong club. But he assures them that he knows where the right club is. So … miscommunication? Big Easy wasn’t so much Big Enunciate?

Brian returns to Ericka, and he figures out the combination. In the cab, she bandages up his blistered hands, saying, “Mama’s got you.” Hey, she’s at least all over the nursemade skills.

Gary and Matt reach the Roadblock, and Gary takes it. Unfortunately, he’s “a canoer, not a rowboater,” so he’s unable to get used to the motion when he’s trying to row backwards, as he’s meant to. Thus, he lies on his stomach in the dinghy and paddles it like a canoe. Huh. Well, it’s improvisation, anyway. It’s not a terrifically long distance, and it’s not like it’s an outrigger that’s going to go wildly off-course. It’s practically floating in a tire; you just have to move any way you can.

As Spiky and Perky approach Abra Station, he says he sees the clue box. “No you don’t,” she says, thinking she knows what he’s looking at and it isn’t the clue box. But then she realizes he does see it, and she says, “Oh … I do, too.” Fortunately, she is appropriately sheepish. And by “appropriately sheepish,” in this case, I mean “really quite sheepish.” The clue is for a Detour, which sends them to a marketplace to perform one of two tasks. In Gold, you have to use a scale to count out exactly $500,000 worth of gold, which means dealing with the changing exchange rate displayed on the wall. In Glass, you open a crate full of parts that can be assembled into 12 hookahs. You have to assemble all of them perfectly to match the ones you see as examples before you’re done.

Spiky and Perky think the entire idea of an exchange rate sounds “confusing,” so they decide to pursue the hookah option. Math is hard!

Gary reaches the Roadblock yacht. He gets his watch.

At 11:47 AM (an hour and fifteen minutes behind the last team before them), Maria and Tiffany finally leave. They pray to leave Dubai, but their prayers are not answered. There are so many worse things that could happen than remaining in Dubai, ladies.

11:54 AM. Mika and Canaan. Mika explains that she’s never played team sports or “really ran in my whole life,” so she isn’t necessarily as competitive as Canaan. This has clearly been very well thought out: “I’ve never really ran in my whole life and I am afraid of water and heights, so you know what would be the perfect next reality show for me to try? Something with lying around. Or, barring that, something with racing and terrifying stunts.”

Gary figures out the combination to the briefcase, and they’re off.

Big Easy takes the Roadblock for the Globetrotters. Flummoxed by the paddling, he eventually gives up and just paddles with his hands. Hee. He interviews that in New Orleans, you can’t go boating in the Mississippi. True, but nevertheless: lame.

Spiky and Perky find the hookahs. They open the crate and start pulling out the pieces.

Ericka, meanwhile, is window shopping from the taxi. Priorities, people. You can do tasks anywhere, but cheap crap for tourists is hard to come by.

“You’re going down in history as the biggest man ever in a lifeboat made for a five-year-old!” Flight Time calls out encouragingly to Big Easy as he paddles with his hands. That’s what you need, is a buddy who will encourage you in your hour of need. Sam and Dan arrive, and Dan takes the Roadblock. Dan winds up paddling with his hands as well.

Spiky and Perky continue to put together hookahs and even start to bicker a little. SIGNS OF LIFE! SIGNS OF LIFE!

Brian and Ericka have chosen the gold. They do not, however, seem to know that they are allowed to ask for a calculator. And in fairness, if you try to tackle this as long division, you’re essentially dividing five digits into eight (once you take care of the decimal points), and that is a very unwieldy math problem. I’m fairly decent at math, and I timed myself doing it and gave up, not done yet, at two minutes, because I think if it takes two minutes to do, you’re going to lose the exchange rate before that. And it’s not like only the last digit of your divisor changes, either, so you can’t really do much approximating that’s going to be useful. I think you would have to be very strong in math to do this without a calculator in the time you have available.

As Big Easy and Dan both paddle back toward their partners with their watches, Flight Time yells out “Do it for the hood!”, which causes Sam to yell, “Do it for the suburbs!” WOOOO, SUBURBS! When Big Easy returns, Flight Time tells him to pull his pants up, but Big Easy says, “From the hood, remember?” Hey, nobody is too cool to pull his pants up. That’s an important rule that I always wished was better understood when I rode the subway in New York a lot and wound up with a lot of young men’s behinds at eye level.

Maria and Tiffany run toward the Roadblock, and because it involves any exertion whatsoever, Tiffany has to do it. Maria is saving all her energy for … something. Else. Other than Roadblocks.

At this point, Big Easy hits his major snag, which is that he knows he’s looking at the face of the watch for a three-digit combination, but rather than thinking “8:35,” he’s thinking more literally about the numbers displayed on the watch — the two that the hands are pointing to, and the date. It’s not a terrible guess; it’s just a different way of looking at the same thing. It’s hardly absurd to think that when you’re supposed to be reading a watch face to get a code, you’d use the numbers that the hands are pointing to. Unfortunately, he gets brain-lock and cannot get himself to step back and think about it from another angle, which is what he needs to do. I think the fact that he has trouble reading the number on the date portion also keeps him from figuring it out as soon as he otherwise might, because he convinces himself that something is wrong in that department, when in fact he is shopping in the wrong department to begin with, if I can stretch my metaphor to that point.

Dan, on the other hand, reads the “8:35″ and gets moving. In their cab, Sam says he wants the Globetrotters out, so this is fine with him. Sam and Dan are one of my most disappointing teams ever, I have to say. They’re bland, but they’re not even smart and bland. They’re kind of dumb and bland and efficient, which is my least favorite thing.

Meanwhile, Tiffany rows her boat, while congratulating herself in an interview for doing things men do, like rowing inflatable boats. As you undoubtedly know, women fought very hard in various suffragette rallies for the right to row inflatable boats, so she is stepping into a storied part of feminist history, to be sure.

Mika and Canaan get to the Roadblock. Big Easy continues to struggle, not happy about seeing this trailing team catch up. “We stay here long enough, Lance and Keri might show up,” Flight Time jokes. Canaan takes the Roadblock, naturally, as Mika points out that “it’s water,” adding in an interview that she’s “pretty scared of water.” Hey, how scared can she really be?

Tiffany’s briefcase opens.

Spiky and Perky keep working on the hookahs.

Over in the Wonderful World Of Long Division, Brian has the right first digit — a five — but he has too many zeroes, thinking that the number of ounces will be five thousand and something, rather than five hundred and something. “Damn, we need a calculator,” Ericka says, but she doesn’t apparently ask for one. She mutters sadly that her American education has dumbed her down so she can’t do math without a calculator. Heh.

Flight Time encourages Big Easy to rethink how he’s looking at the watch, but before that has a chance to happen, Canaan pops his briefcase open (with a helpful Mika wondering aloud whether there’s a different “Muslim clock”), so now it’s just the Globetrotters, in last place. And now, Big Easy is worried.

Commercials.

Finally, when we return, Big Easy — who has admirably declined to panic this entire time — figures out that he’s reading the time on the watch, not the literal numbers on the face of the watch. He tries 8:35, and the briefcase pops open. “Don’t worry about it, we can go catch ‘em,” says Flight Time. In the cab, Big Easy beats himself up. “Talking about ‘for the hood,’ the hood’s mad at me now! The hood say, ‘what the hell’s he doing? Read the watch, dummy!’” Aww. It’s been a long time since I saw a team take that kind of adversity quite that well, I’ve gotta say.

Spiky and Perky are almost done with their hookahs, except that there are pieces sitting around that they haven’t used, and Phil was explicit in the explanation that you have to use all the pieces.

Brian and Ericka, meanwhile, are still struggling with the gold. He wants to switch to the hookahs, but she still thinks he’s “really smart at this kind of stuff” and can do it. In my experience, when someone tells you they’re really, truly not going to get this math problem? You should usually listen.

Spiky and Perky learn that their hookahs are not done right.

Brian and Ericka learn that their gold guess is not right. Man, this seems to be a tougher-than-usual Detour.

Matt and Gary decide to go to the hookahs, too, and when Matt explains what a hookah is, his father says, “We used to call it something else.” GARY! I am shocked. You can see where his kid got the instinct to have pink hair. Rebel!

Spiky and Perky again ask for an inspection on the hookahs, and again, they are out of luck. “Fudge,” says Spiky. I wonder if he really said “fudge,” or if they dubbed him saying something really wicked, like “piffle.” Perky doesn’t understand why the hookahs aren’t okay because they’re “close enough.” (”In this Detour, teams will choose between Close Enough and Eh, Whatever.”)

When Brian and Ericka are wrong about the gold again, they give up at last. Meanwhile, Spiky and Perky finally figure out that the gold washers they’ve been neglecting have to wind up somewhere. At last, once they’ve attached the washers, they are cleared to leave. The clue tells them to head to the Atlantis Resort (woooo! more about that later) and find the Leap Of Faith, which Phil explains is a six-story-tall water slide, at the bottom of which they’ll get their next clue. On the way there in the cab, Perky says the hookah thing was “so stressful.” I can think of things that may be more stressful, at least for some people. DUN.

Brian and Ericka start on the hookahs.

Sam and Dan get to the Detour clue box and pick the gold. Tiffany and Maria, shortly thereafter, choose the gold, too.

The first time Brian and Ericka have their hookahs checked, it’s a no go.

Mika and Canaan reach the Detour clue. Two times in a row, she tears part of the clue off, throws it on the ground, and tells him to “pick that up.” Do people forget that they are on camera, and that things like “Pick that up!” will not look good? At any rate, they don’t know the gold exchange rate (and apparently don’t understand that it will be displayed on the wall), so they pick the hookahs.

Brian rearranges one of the hookahs, but he thinks it’s not right. Ericka encourages him to “try anything.”

Matt and Gary arrive at the Glass Detour and start unpacking their crate.

Dan and Sam arrive at the jewelers, where the Gold option is. They have — hey! — a calculator, which they apparently threw in their stuff just in case they had some use for it. I’ve always thought that what would be handy on this race would be partnering with a lady with a big purse, but a dude with a big backpack full of random crap will do just as well. Unfortunately, they don’t have any idea how to use the calculator to solve the problem. I maintain that, at least at first, Brian was doing the right math — that’s why he came up with a five as the first digit. I think the multiplying he was doing later was an effort to see if he could estimate the answer by multiplying instead of dividing. These guys, on the other hand, don’t understand what to do with the numbers — that they need to divide the 500,000 by the exchange rate. So for my money, they’re dumber. Brian needed a calculator; they appear to need a third-grade math teacher.

“I just don’t understand their exchange rate.” Sigh.

Maria and Tiffany show up, fortunately for the boys, and their great facility with money means that they understand that in order to figure out how many ounces you can get for $500,000, you divide $500,000 by how much an ounce costs. (I have just strained my eyeballs from all the rolling.) And fortunately for the girls, the boys have a calculator. So they each have half the ability to do this, meaning that they cooperate and can do it just fine.

Flight Time and Big Easy choose the hookahs, figuring they’ll catch up with someone — and in fact, they’ll catch up with several teams, possibly. Mika and Canaan, for instance, are just getting to the hookahs, where Brian and Ericka are really frustrated.

Meanwhile, Sam and Dan and Tiffany and Maria collaborate to finish the Detour and receive the clue for the water slide.

Speaking of which, Spiky and Perky are almost there. They interview that they’re actually both afraid of heights, but they go anyway. When they’re done, they get a clue that says they are to search for Dolphin Bay Beach, which is the part of the pit stop where the resort is.

Here is where I will explain that the minute I saw the Atlantis, before they said its name, I thought, “Wow, that looks a lot like the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, where I spent a lovely day all by myself, doing crosswords and wandering into the incredibly blue water now and then, during the only vacation of its kind in my lifetime.” Seriously, if anybody ever offers you the opportunity to lie around in the Bahamas, don’t think to yourself, “I am not so much a Bahamas kind of person,” because you might miss the opportunity to discover that it is not for nothing that rich, idle people enjoy that sort of recreation.

Anyway, Spiky and Perky are at the pit stop mat in no time, and Phil welcomes them as team number one. They each win a personal watercraft, WOOOOOO!

Okay. Back to the competition. When Flight Time and Big Easy get to the hookahs, Brian and Ericka, Matt and Gary, and Canaan and Mika are all still there, at various stages of completion. Brian and Ericka still have something wrong with theirs, and they still can’t figure out what. I cannot muster the energy to make some sort of joke about how it seems like they may have already hit the hookahs, but rest assured, it has occurred to me.

Commercials.

When we return, Matt has to sit down and take a break, just to recover from the extreme heat. And then, Brian finally figures out that the striped bases have to go with the striped hoses. They are finally done and get to leave.

Flight Time and Big Easy decide that if Brian and Ericka are just leaving, this isn’t going to go quickly and they aren’t going to make up ground. It’s actually not a bad piece of analysis, except that they don’t know that Brian and Ericka tried the other Detour first.

Tiffany and Maria go down the water slide. Sam and Dan follow. The girls check in first, and then the guys show up, and it’s all a big happy reunion. And in an interview, Tiffany talks about how “fine” the boys looked in their suits. I can’t help wondering whether these girls are still living in fantasyland where this alliance contains the promise of smooches. I bet they’re not.

For the gold task, Big Easy goes next door and borrows a calculator. Giant friendly American in need of tech help!

Gary and Matt finally find the last couple of pieces they need for their hookahs, and they leave.

On the way to the water slide, Brian explains that he’s afraid of heights, while Ericka is afraid of water. When they get there, he presses her to go first, figuring that if he goes and leaves her alone up there, she might not go at all. “I’m only doing this for you,” she says unhappily before going down the slide. Brian follows. They find their way to the pit stop and check in as team number four.

Flight Time and Big Easy continue working on the gold weighing.

Canaan and Mika are finally done with the hookahs. As they head out in the cab, she expresses concern about what this Leap Of Faith thing is going to be, and he says they probably have to “jump off something.” We flash back in black and white to previous mentions of her fears of water and heights. If you have watched this show a lot, you undoubtedly suspect, as I do, that she is about to make a big deal about being afraid of water and heights, and then go down the slide anyway, and then talk about how proud she is of herself, because that’s what generally happens in these situations.

Matt and Gary go down the water slide. Welcome, you are team number five.

So now, it’s just Big Easy and Flight Time and Canaan and Mika.

In the cab on the way to the slide, Canaan tells Mika that she has nothing to worry about — after all, she can wear her “floaties.” Um, really? She brought floaties? Floaties are not a good sign. Floaties indicate both infancy and a misunderstanding of physics, as two things the size of blown-up Ziploc sandwich bags are not actually going to keep a grown adult from sinking. They arrive at the resort and find their way to the stairs leading up to the Leap Of Faith.

When they get to the top, Canaan’s first idea (and one of his better ones) is to get this over with so quickly that she doesn’t have time to get scared. Unfortunately, she is scared before that can happen. She stops probably twenty feet before the top of the slide. “Stop it; hold my hand,” he barks. Her back is up immediately: “Don’t tell me what to do.” “This is not going to be bad, get up there,” he says. She doesn’t want him to push so hard.

He strips off his shirt and throws it aside, saying, “We’re not losing this race because of this. Get your butt on the slide. Let’s go.”

Note that he chose, from the beginning, to treat the fact that she was scared — not her ultimate refusal to do it, but the fact that she was afraid to do it — as completely ridiculous. He didn’t try, “Hey, I know this is really, really scary for you, and I totally understand, but this is all about doing things even though they’re really scary. I know you can do it, and I’m going to be right behind you.” He showed zero sympathy for her fears from the very beginning. There was no effort to work around the fact that she was scared; it was just basically, “Pretend you’re not.”

And the thing is, you can’t take a rational approach to defeating anxieties and phobias. You can’t tell people who are truly terrified of heights that they’re being stupid. They aren’t doing it on purpose. I don’t think Mika wants to quit. Her reactions, from here on out, are flawed in many ways, and she can absolutely be faulted for being here at all. But the mere fact that this is really, really frightening to her is not her fault. Or at least you can’t know whether it is. People with genuine phobias are not panicking because they’re sissies; it’s exactly like telling someone who’s genuinely depressed that they should snap out of it. I’m not afraid of heights or water, but I am mildly claustrophobic, and it has nothing to do with rationally believing that there’s a high likelihood that the (for instance) incredibly crowded club jammed with people is going to burn down and trap me inside. It’s a panic response. It’s like getting mad at people for breaking out in hives. Once it happens, the panicking person retains some responsibility to handle it as well as possible (which she doesn’t), but the thing itself — which is what he’s mad at her for — is not a character flaw.

I’m not saying it would have worked for him to take a different approach, but the one he picked was pretty much guaranteed, I think, to make everything worse.

At any rate. the more he tries to order her around, the more she stands there with her feet planted, getting more and more scared. He is not being a calming presence.

Finally, Flight Time and Big Easy finish up the gold task.

“It’s water, and it’s a slide. GET IN THE WATER!” Canaan barks. “This is my worst nightmare,” Mika mutters. Canaan pauses to blow up her floaties — while they’re on her arms — saying, “A million dollars. To go down a slide.” Which, of course, isn’t the deal: even if she does it, they probably won’t win. If the million bucks were waiting at the bottom, you might be looking at a different calculus. Or, to be honest, you might not.

In the one moment where he seems to be doing anything right, Canaan says, “Let me walk you to the slide.” This, I think, is the approach that was most likely to work. One step at a time, you try to break it down into things that are less scary. Legitimately trying, I think, she walks over to the slide. When they get over there, he says, “Start by sitting down.” She asks him to “calm down,” which … I don’t understand at all, because … well, for several reasons, including that he’s clearly not going to calm down. But I think you can sense how panicky this all feels to her, given that she seems to read him as no less calm than she is.

“Start by sitting down,” he says, pulling her toward the slide as she starts crying. When they get close to the top of the slide, she loses her nerve and tries to pull away, off to her right. He yanks her back, over to the left, trying to force her down onto the slide, or at least physically restrain her from backing away. This yanking motion, when she is perched at the top of a six-story water slide she is terrified to go down, sends her into what’s obviously a true panic response, and she screams, “Help me, help me,” to the attendant standing by the slide. Canaan, even after she screams, doesn’t take his hands off her, but keeps them locked around her arms, trying to force her to sit on the slide.

Okay. Do I see this as physical abuse in the same way as hitting? Of course not. But you cannot physically overpower another adult to get your own way. It may not be abusive, but it’s disturbingly disrespectful.

It’s not even just the fact that he put his hands on her. Even if there’s no touching, you can’t physically block the door to keep another adult from leaving a room. You can’t pull the phone cord out of the wall so she doesn’t call someone you don’t want her to talk to. You don’t get to physically restrain other adults from exercising their will just because they’re not doing what you want them to do. I mean, you can take the keys away from a drunk driver to avoid injury, but not going down the slide isn’t dangerous to anyone; it’s just not what he wants. He’s trying to physically force her to do something that he wants her to do, even though she doesn’t want to. Her reasons, and how good they are, are not the issue. She gets to decide whether to go, and you can be angry about that choice, or you can blame her for that choice, or you can judge her for that choice, or you can resent the money it cost you. You can never forgive her for what she decides. But you cannot interfere by force. That’s why I hate this scene. It’s not just the fact that trying to push her into a sitting position — or even just trying to physically hold her at the top of the slide — is idiotically dangerous and would have been even more so if he had actually succeeded in forcing her down while she was trying to get away from him. It’s that he doesn’t have the right to overrule her. He has the right to hate her if he chooses, but the rules of basic bodily integrity dictate that it’s her choice to make.

You can try to convince, cajole, bribe, wheedle, beg, whine — hell, you can browbeat her, if that’s the kind of person you want to be. But you can’t take the decision away from her.

Anyway. His response to her developing panic attack is to yell in her face, “YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE US LOSE THE RACE!” I should point out here that, in addition to being disrespectful, his entire approach is very, very stupid. People who feel panicky panic more and more as they have less and less control. Once they have this confrontation where he grabs onto her and tries to physically move her, they are no longer on the same side, and she’s legitimately afraid of him every time he walks toward her. She tenses up every single time he takes a step in her direction, and that means that he can’t come over and be soothing, he can’t come over and be supportive. He has to stay back, and every time he tries to come over and give support — where he might otherwise be able to rub her shoulders or something, something to get her to relax — she freaks out because of that moment where she screamed and he still didn’t let her go.

When we return from commercials, Canaan has decided — too late — to go with a better approach, which is to just sit down near the slide and encourage her to start by just sitting down also. But he can’t fake patience, so he goes over and takes hold of her arm again. Of course, now, she thinks he’s going to start trying to push her down the slide every time he touches her, so she tells him to stop and “do not force me.” He briefly backs off. Now, she stalls for time by talking to herself about why people want to “do this stupid stuff” in the first place. Hmm. For whatever reason you showed up yourself, missy?

She starts to sit down, and then she says, “I can’t do this,” and she pats her belly. A couple of commenters I saw took the position that this looked like she was saying she couldn’t because she was pregnant. I’m sure that’s not what it was, I’m sure it’s just a reference to butterflies, but I see what they’re talking about. “I’m begging you, you are breaking my heart,” he says. He tells her that she’ll regret it if she doesn’t do it, and that actually seems like it’s penetrating a little bit.

Flight Time and Big Easy are on the way.

With Canaan far away and leaving her alone, Mika voluntarily sits on the slide. “That a girl,” he says. She has her hands on the bar. And then she looks down and says, “I can’t do this.” He comes over and tells her how to grab the bar, but she tells him to stay away. He’s all disgusted, like, “Mika, TRUST ME,” and she says she doesn’t. Because quite understandably, she doesn’t. And she’s right not to, because his next move is to go over and squat down behind her and try to pull her hands off the bar. There’s no way they could have gone down together; this “I’m going to sit behind you”  business has no purpose except that he wants to pry her hands off the bar and push her down. But again, they’re past the point where his physical presence, whether or not it might once have been comforting, does anything except make her more scared. So now, with him behind her, she’s scared again, and she makes him get up and go away. “I hate my life right now,” she says. She is seriously the least sympathetic panic victim of all time.

Flight Time and Big Easy arrive at the Atlantis.

“I can’t do it,” Mika says. “Yes, you can,” Canaan insists. “I CAN’T DO IT!” she wails. Oy. And then she says, “Why? Why?”, which I don’t even understand, and Canaan tells her to shut up and go down the slide (basically).

Flight Time and Big Easy head for the Leap Of Faith.

“This is ridiculous,” Canaan says angrily. “Canaan, why do you hate me?” she asks. Aaaaaaargh. He answers, “Because you’re being a complete moron.” I don’t think “moron” is the issue, dude. The part where she’s saying “Why?” and “I hate my life” is ridiculous, obviously. She’s handling it horribly. But the part where she’s too scared to do it, which is what he’s talking about, really has nothing to do with being a moron. It has to do with panic, and if you’ve never had panic/anxiety issues, I think it’s extraordinarily difficult to understand it when other people do. She’s sitting on the slide; she intends to go. She’s trying. She went over and sat down and put her hands on the bar when he left her alone. She’s not stilled by a desire not to get her hair wet.

And finally, Big Easy and Flight Time arrive at the water slide. Canaan interviews that the way this works, once another team shows up, you have two minutes to do the thing, or else you have to step aside. I think that’s amazingly generous to Mika and Canaan, who had apparently been at the slide for 45 minutes already. If I wrote the rules, they would say, “If you’ve already been there more than two minutes, then when the next team comes, you have to step aside.”

But that’s not the rule, so now the pressure is on Mika. “You have two minutes,” Canaan says angrily. “Your life is going to change in two minutes.” Canaan starts telling her that she “can do this,” but she’s long ago stopped feeling like they are, in any way, on the same side, so there is no trust here at all and his assurances mean nothing. I’m not sympathetic to her overall, in any way, and I’m especially unsympathetic to her decision to come on the race in the first place. But the panic part itself — the part where she genuinely bugs out when he puts his hands on her — that’s not rational, and you can’t just berate her out of it. As I said, I think it’s very hard for people who don’t have something that makes them panic — not “get scared,” but physically panic — to understand that this was probably just as frustrating for her as it was for him. I guess I’d put it this way: if you broke your leg and then you whined about it incessantly, then I could be upset that you whined. But if I were mad at you for being unable to walk on your broken leg, then that’s pretty stupid. And he’s mad at her long before the whining starts. He’s mad at her for being scared and not letting him talk her out of it.

As Canaan keeps telling her to go and she looks like she’s considering it, Big Easy bellows, “Don’t do it!” “Don’t listen to him,” Canaan says. “Don’t do it! I wouldn’t do it!” Big Easy says. “It’s high. It’s a long way up here.” “You guys, come on, that’s not cool, y’all,” Canaan says. Yes, that’s not cool. Grabbing her and dragging her toward the slide until she screams? Totes cool! Big Easy just keeps jawing that if she’s scared, she shouldn’t do it. He even tells her that if she’s scared, they’ll walk her down from the slide. Okay: heh. Much, much too late, Canaan tries to play the “I believe in you” card, and he’s like, “Oh, they say you can’t do it, but I know you can.”

“Time’s up; step aside,” says the attendant. And as soon as Mika can step out of the way, Flight Time is tucked, rolled, and whooshing down the slide. As Big Easy follows, Canaan’s all, “I thought you were decent, Big Easy. You’re a piece of crap, man.”

Oh, man. Look, I sort of wish that hadn’t happened. I wish there had been the same outcome without taunting her. But that was really mild taunting, all things considered, and the purpose was to psych her out and win the game, not to wound her for life. And I guarantee you that if we’re talking about making her miserable, what Big Easy did was peanuts compared to what Canaan did. Big Easy interviews that he didn’t enjoy that she was crying, but … it’s a race. They were on the edge of being eliminated. If a psych-out helps, then … that’s what you do.

So now Flight Time and Big Easy are done. Canaan tells Mika he’s going down the slide now. When he’s at the bottom, she’s still at the top, whimpering, “I wish I was in Nashville, doing anything but this.” Yes, yes. So she doesn’t do it at all. As she slowly starts down the stairs, she says, “He’s going to hate me.”

Improbably, Flight Time and Big Easy land on the mat and are not eliminated.

Mika and Canaan come to the mat, and they are eliminated for … sucking, and being last, and so forth. In an interview, Canaan praises himself for finding “freedom in forgiveness,” and if he’s lucky, Mika will find freedom in forgiveness, too.

Executive Producer? Jerry Bruckheimer.

Next week: Ericka is upset, and Flight Time and Big Easy dance. Aw, yeah.