Last week’s heartbreaking loss of Team Body Break—Hal and Joanne—still fresh in our memories, this week the final five teams set out from Regina, Sask. with Jet and Dave maintaining a seemingly unshakeable hold on first place. Behind them are the Tims, sisters Vanessa and Celina, and brothers Jody and Cory, while the evil doctors Brett and Holly bring up the rear en route to their home province: Quebec.
Navigating La Belle Province adds an additional degree of difficulty, as not all of the teams can speak French. Actually, Jet and Dave are the only team without at least one French-speaking member, though their earnest obliviousness is comical—says Dave, “I’ve been working on my French. We want to be the champignons (mushrooms) at the end of the race.”
Jet and Dave score seats on a flight that lands in Quebec City via Toronto before anyone else, but the brothers and doctors get wise and find a faster connecting flight through Montreal, tightening up the field behind the frontrunners. Even though Hal and Joanne were eliminated from the race, their legacy of sly airport manoeuvring clearly inspired their remaining competitors.
The teams begin arriving at their first stop, Levis Forts, hours before it opens, forcing everyone to sleep by the entrance and cancelling out any head starts. Jet and Dave get bored waiting for everyone, so they decide to have a little fun by planting a phony clue directing other teams to look in the cannons. Jody and Cory take the bait, running madly from cannon to cannon while Jet and Dave follow, hardly able to contain their laughter. Eventually they reveal the joke, everyone has a good chuckle, and they all retire to wait for the fort to open.
Despite losing any advantage they had, Dave and Jet still find the first clue and retake the lead as they race to Chateau Frontenac. They board the first ferry and the sisters catch up just as the boat leaves the other teams behind, creating a half-hour gap.
Once they reach their destination, the teams meet their first Detour: a choice between sculpting figures out of ice and using French words to point out differences between a painting and a famous Quebec mural. Jet and Dave take the smart route and start hammering at their sculpture while the sisters initially take the other option—Vanessa apparently has a photographic memory, which would give them a massive advantage—before inexplicably changing their minds.
The brothers and doctors also opt to analyze the painting, solidifying a horserace between the two teams that seems to endure throughout this leg of the race. They finish their task at nearly the same time, leaving the Tims to try to chip away at their sculpture and the rest of the pack’s lead.
The next Road Block task seems simple—take four crepe orders, cook the crepes and serve them to the waiting customers—but language becomes a huge barrier as the hungry patrons may only place their orders en Francais. Dave is confident in his cooking ability, but is completely lost in trying to take orders. Cory seems at ease both tableside and in the kitchen, but for some reason his dishes get rejected time and again—we find out later the dishes were fine, he just wasn’t delivering them all together like he was supposed to.
Vanessa, on the other hand, is completely hopeless with her crepes. As Dave jokes, “Can I get my crepe…destroyed? She’s never going to make it in the crepe world.” But she seems to at least be able to figure out what she’s supposed to put in the crepes with the exception of one elusive ingredient: “cerises.” More on that in a minute.
In case we had forgotten, Brett and Holly make sure remind us all what they do for a living—who knew they were doctors? They only mention it every chance they get—pointing out that they only cook three or four times a year because they’re so busy saving lives, of course. But Holly’s still more successful with her crepes than Vanessa, so they finish with the brothers nipping at their heels again.
Tim Jr. and Vanessa continue cooking head-to-head, but without thinking, Tim hands the sisters the lead by translating the ingredient Vanessa couldn’t figure out—cerises means cherries, not strawberries. The sisters complete the challenge and take off, leaving Tim to kick himself for not being more competitive.
A brief stop at a lacrosse practice on the historic Plains of Abraham is little more than a formality as each team maintains their position after playing a little catch and firing in a couple of goals.
At the Pit Stop, Jet and Dave add a pair of round-trip tickets to Europe to their collection—they already won tickets to anywhere in Canada on the last leg—as they rack up another first place finish. They’re welcomed to the province of Quebec as well as a sentiment familiar to many hockey fans: “Bring back the Nordiques!”
The brothers and the doctors hit the finish line so close together host Jon Montgomery is forced to call it a draw, while the sisters take advantage of Young Tim’s error to finish fourth.
But wait, is this déjà vu? The last time the Tims finished last was in a non-elimination leg, and somehow they managed to narrowly escape elimination again. Even when it seems like everything is going wrong, they just can’t seem to lose!
Next week we follow the teams to Nunavut, where the Tims face a road block, Holly dodges a falling block of ice, and hopefully we’re in for a blockbuster finish.
