‘The Amazing Race Canada 3’ finale review: Is this the ending you saw coming?
One of the struggles for a reality competition show is that unless you want to be really underhanded, you cannot really control the outcome of your show. It’s up to whoever manages to do the best job, and also keeps themselves safe from elimination on a weekly basis.
This season on “The Amazing Race Canada,” that team was Gino & Jesse. While there have been little moments here and there where the brothers looked vulnerable, it always felt like they were going to be a hard team to beat in the end. They’ve dominated especially in Canada, and provided that they don’t make any glaring mistakes, they are just faster and in better shape than any other team out there. Nobody can catch them.
We feel like what we saw over the past few weeks was the show doing almost everything that it could to make you feel okay about a team winning who stole a cab from both Nick & Matt and then later Simi & Ope. It showed us part of their story, their struggles growing up, and the bond they have as brothers. We feel like they are probably good guys, and we’re not bummed out about the win for that reason. They never did anything maliciously on the season other than try to stay alive, and we don’t know how we would react in certain situations if we were there.
The struggle of course with the show is that when the frontrunner wins, you do lose some of that drama, and while Nick & Matt were fairly close throughout, there was almost no doubt the moment that you realized that all of the mental competitions were done in British Columbia.
One other element that did hurt this finale to a certain degree was Brent & Sean falling out of it almost right away thanks to a struggle at the first Roadblock, having to ride a bicycle across a very narrow beam. This looked extremely difficult and we don’t know how we would have done, either, but we really didn’t see them in the same frame as almost anyone the rest of the way, despite the efforts to make it look like the teams were close. They probably did catch up a little, though, thanks to Gino & Jesse not erasing their math challenge results completely.
We’re not going to blame the show too much for having a predictable finale, since we’d rather the most dominant team win than someone else winning thanks to a fluke like Gino & Jesse getting a bad cab driver something entirely out of their control. It just means that this was probably as a whole the most mediocre season of the Canadian show to date. That doesn’t make it bad; it’s just a reminder of how crazy and awesome the first two seasons were. The only qualm that we had with the final leg is that we would’ve put the memory / skill task last, mostly since that make it really all about who did their homework the most before the finish line. Grade: B+.
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