That said, I wish there had been a way to ditch it this time. At least now we know why Nick's been getting the villain edit: given the way he fucked up both this episode and the next one, the producers would have been justified in digitally altering his image so that he had swastika-shaped horns and a half-eaten baby. His quitting -- excuse me, his attempt to quit -- is a giant fuck you to them, Vicki, the other teams who never gave up and still went home before him, all the people who tried out for this season and didn't get cast, everyone who will have to compete against him in the next leg, and everyone who watches this show to see people compete. All right, now I'm done defending Nick.

Anyway, Vicki's as blown away as her level of exhaustion will allow her to be, while Nick just stands there looking blank. Phil warns them that there will be a Speed Bump for them in the next leg. Plus there's that six-hour penalty to contend with, which will force them to arrive at the airport only three hours in advance of the flight out of here that everyone else will be taking. Vicki says, 'We're gonna do what we can do. We don't want to quit the race." Nick's looking at her like, "Speak for yourself." She adds that Nick's temper makes everything ten times worse. "But we are a team so we're gonna have to do it together." Nick's just standing there looking like he's waiting for the cameras to shut off so he can ask what it's going to take to get him off this race for good, which is a question I've been asking since October. In a post-leg interview, Vicki says they'll have to do better; "You didn't deal with anything today good." Nick apologizes, saying he wants to be better to Vicki every day. And Vicki actually, at long last, has the backbone to say she needs to see changes rather than more sorries. "I didn't come here to quit," she declares. She may just have brought the wrong partner, then.

M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, follow him on Twitter, or just e-mail him at M.Giant[at]gmail.com.