The Mole: Like Family Guy, But Funny

Hey kids! Apologies for the lateness of this recap, I am on vacation and internets are sparse. Or a seagull stole my computer. Something like that. I don’t remember, I’m too drunk. Anyway, on to The Mole!We begin this week still in Mendooooza, where the players are asked to break up into two teams, a Smart team, and a Dumb team. They are then to run around the village and solve a series of mathtastic riddles. They must remember the answers that they get without writing anything down, and once they get all the numbers they must get back to the starting point and enter them all into a computer. If all of them are right, they get $30,000 added to the pot. The Dumb team, which contains Nicole and Craig, unsurprisingly gets the harder challenge, because they were dumb enough to not realize that this is how the game is played. “YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS BY NOW!” Jon screams in unbridled frustration. Oh calm down, Jon. Don’t get your evil cape in a twist.

“WHO SHOT THAT SPITBALL?!”

(Side note: Someone claiming to be Jon Kelley wrote a couple comments on the post last week. I am highly dubious, but just in case it really is SmugJon “The Smuganator” Kelley (and I won’t believe it until I see a government-issued photo ID) and he actually does read these silly little recaps, then I just wanted to give him a brief shoutout. Welcome Jon! And thanks for reading! I hated you at first, but as I have mentioned as of late, your smarmy face now constantly warms the cockles of my shriveled heart. If it is in fact you. Forgive the heavy skepticism, but the internet is full of lies and deceit, much like The Mole. I’m sure you understand. And in the more likely case that it was not Jon, then congratulations, anonymous poster. Your faux smugitude got my attention, and on the bright side has led to an open welcome to the real Smugatron, should he ever decide to visit and tell allll of his famous friends to come on over to our little corner of the internet and hand out some real jobs to a handful of starving yet unfathomably talented and devastatingly attractive bloggers. We’ll make it worth his while.)

“ARE YOU BRIBING ME?!”

Anyway. The teams take off to their respective destinations, and immediately Mark and Clay get into a pretty intense Mathematics Throwdown. Mark insists it’s one number (the correct answer), while Clay throws out a lot of odd math and insists that he is a Math Beast. Man, I wish that was the name of our math team in high school. That sure as hell beat ours, which was, pitifully, the Purple Team. The Math Beasts would be so much cooler. I can picture the t-shirts now. A rabid wolverine shooting division signs and sigmas and cosines out of its mouth. Dude, too cool!

After Mark convinces Clay that he’s right, they continue on to their second number. Meanwhile, Craig and Nicole have already moved on to their third, which requires them to stand near a playground and stare at all of the children playing there, all while carefully evading the Mendoza Pedophile Police Force. While adding up the numbers, Craig either makes a mistake or slips in a deliberately wrong number, which definitely ups his Suspicious Factor, and certainly does nothing to decrease his Child Molester Factor.

“Help me count the swings on the swingset, little Renaldo.”

While the Dumb team continues to live up to its name by asking a local how many months are in a year, the Smart team proceeds to demolish its good name by getting lost and going eight blocks the wrong way. Though this little detour does provide an invaluable Spanish lesson, as Mark, looking for a big green box, yells at some random woman, “GRANDE, VERDE….SQUARE!” Wow, Mark. You’re practically Dora the Explorer.

“Muy bad! MUY BAD!”

Craig and Nicole finish their puzzles and return to the loving arms of Jon and his Computer. They can’t enter the numbers until the other team arrives, however, and at the present moment the other team is way across town due to Paul’s inability to read a map. By sprinting, however, they make it back with seven minutes to spare. They all enter the numbers, and it turns out that the second and third digits of Craig and Nicole’s last answer are wrong (as labeled by a rather frightening red INVALID ENTRY). One team member has twenty minutes to run out and recalculate, or else no money goes into the pot.

Nicole is sent back out into the fiery hellhole of confusion that is Mendooooza, while the remaining players look at the screen and Jon’s triumphant Smugface. Clay, desperate to prove his previous claims of Math Beasthood, starts running over the numbers to find a pattern. As he’s starting to figure something out, Nicole returns, only to blurt out a number that couldn’t possibly be right, since it’s only one number off from the first guess, which had two numbers wrong. They immediately dismiss her and go with Clay’s guess instead, which turns out to be correct.

Later, Mark and Clay discuss their coalition and how they’re going a hundred percent on Nicole, but Clay looks dubious throughout the whole thing. Afterwards, he scampers off to Nicole and talks to her instead, where they both say that they went for Craig in the last quiz. Nicole says it’s nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and she feels that she can trust Clay because he’s the only other black person there, and she should be able to trust a brotha. What about Jon, huh Nicole? Is he not a brotha as well? You totally know Jon is crouched out in the hallway, listening into the room with a glass to the door, and sobbing uncontrollably.

The next day, the players fly out of Mendooooza (boo!) and into Buenos Aires. Jon meets them to describe their next mission, and tells them that they are each to pick the one other player that they trust the most. Oh, and this mission has a lot more riding on it than just money. Ooh, what? A trip to the moon? The meaning of life? A POLAR BEAR??

“The lucky winner will receive a date with me. Pucker up, buttercup.”

Alas, it’s just their stupid families. He tells Paul that as they speak, his wife and little daughter are arriving at the nearest train station. Paul, who I readily admit that I can’t stand, does begin acting quite adorable and goofy once he learns that he might be able to see them. “Who do I gotta kill?” he says. I don’t know, but you might want to consult with Nicole first. She knows how to do it without leaving any forensic evidence.

Craig and the player he trusts most, Clay, are up first. Clay will ask Craig a serious of prepared questions about his friend, Brendi, and then memorize the answers Craig gives him. Jon will then select five out of the thirty and ask him those questions (even if Craig did not provide the answers), and he must get at least 3 out of 5 right. If he succeeds, the train that contains Brendi will pull into the station, open its doors, and deposit her into his waiting, puffy arms. $10,000 will also be added to the pot. If he’s wrong, the train will continue on its way, taking Brendi into the bowels of Buenos Aires and probably depositing her off at some random discoteque.

Clay manages to eke by the questions, and after like five minutes of suspenseful music and dramatic pauses, the subway doors open. Craig and Brendi hug, and aww. They’re adorably fluffy together. Like a happy cloud.

The fun continues with Clay and Nicole, who memorizes Clay’s answers like a machine and reads them back just as machine-like. Though, to be fair, she looks more like she’s auditioning for one of those ringing-doorbell prize commercials.

“Ed McMahon says I may already be a winner!”

Nicole succeeds and Clay’s wife, a bored-looking girl named Kim, hugs him once she gets off the train. Next, Mark is up for Nicole, and he wins her her mother, who seems like a perfectly delightful woman who couldn’t possibly have spawned the demon that is Nicole.

Mark and Clay are up next, and I love Mark’s answer for his wife’s biggest pet peeve for him. “That I’m looooud,” he trumpets. Haha. I heart Mark. Clay bangs them out like a pro, and Mark and Brenda and her enormous belly full of child have a happy and tearful reunion. After that, Paul’s the only one left, roaming around the car like a caged animal and also, apparently, training for the Subway Olympics.

Will he stick the dismount? Find out in Beijing!

Paul does terrible on the questionnaire, apparently not realizing that it doesn’t matter how correct his answers are, just that he answer as many as he can. Or maybe Paul doesn’t know anything about his wife Tori? No matter. She and their daughter, Alexa, arrive on the train, and boy. I know I hate Paul, but that is one adorable family. He starts making all sorts of cute faces at her, while I ready my child-stealing sack. She’s reeeeally cute. But the best part is when they’re all standing there and waiting for the doors to open, Paul says in voiceover that he will throw Jon through the window if he has to, in order to get to his family.

Now, the image of this happening is hilarious enough on its own, but even funnier is the fact that if this actually happened, you KNOW it will be calmly and smugly narrated by Jon himself. “Paul decides to hurl me through the window. I execute a graceful head-first dive, and as the glass shatters around my bloodied corpse, a happy reunion commences.”

“Just watch the pants, Paul. They’re Armani, and are worth more than your life.”

Finally, after another Ice Age has come and gone, the doors open just as little Alexa does a little hand gesture and says “open sesame”. A giant family hug follows, and dammit, it’s friggin’ adorable. Whatever hate I had for Paul lessens slightly, but ONLY because he’s so cute with his daughter, who happily squeals that she lives in “Yonkas!” Aww.

“And daddy is what? An assclown, that’s right!”

So the players earn $50,000 and their loved ones for an evening. Mark says that it’s unthinkable for the Mole to have sabotaged this mission, and to do so would have been soulless. Which I more or less agree with, but two people – Paul and Craig – didn’t even have a chance to sabotage. Maybe they would. Or maybe people would have gone crashing through subway windows. Who knows?

Meanwhile, Nicole is having a lot of key Dr. Phil time with her mom, who tells her that she should just forget about it all and leave the game. Nicole blames her ostracization on the fact that she’s a black woman, leaving out the fact that she’s also a crazy psycho bitch. But never mind that. Mom says that all this unhappiness is just not worth it, and Nicole plans to throw the quiz and self-execute. Because she is a lady, and a lady knows when to leave. Yeah well, a lady doesn’t hand out death threats like tea doilies either.

At the pre-quiz dinner, little Alexa delights Jon with her pirate impression, which only endears them both to me even further. Cut in with the dinner is a series of interviews with the families about their Moley possibilities. Tori says that she thinks Paul could be the Mole, since he’s always full of surprises. Hmm. Clay and Mark’s wives don’t think either one is the Mole. Craig’s friend, Brendi, thinks he will either be the winner or the Mole. And then we get a hilarious exchange between Nicole and her mother, who is awesome. She says that if she were playing this game, she would inflict body harm. Nicole says she already did. Mom goes “You did WHAT?” and then they further discuss how Nicole would have the know-how to dispatch several bodies. Guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the insanity tree. Though if I were a casting director, I’d have Nicole’s mom on the phone within seconds of watching this.

“We’re CRAZY!”

Anyway, quiz time. Nicole rationalizes her decision by saying that throwing the quiz is not really losing, because she is choosing to leave rather than get beaten by the guys. Whatever, idiot. A forfeit is still a loss. The quizmaster once again indulges his/her fashionista tendencies, asking whether the Mole wore a hat in the first mission. I hope next week it asks whether the Mole was wearing a fedora or a sombrero. I also hope that there will be absolutely no reason to wear either one, and that someone is just feeling really festive.

Results: there is a tie. Nicole mutters a curse under her breath. Paul is safe. Nicole, who fails at everything, also fails at quitting. She is safe. The one to go home is…Clay! NOOOO!

Farewell, Clay. We’ll miss your Jesus talk and fancy lemon-hurling abilities.

As Clay leaves with his wife (who doesn’t appear to know what the hell is going on), Nicole tells her mother that she knew as soon as she sat at the computer that she couldn’t do it. And then her mom calls her Omarosa, which is hilarious because that’s what I’ve been saying from the start. Leonora, call me! Let’s do lunch!

Okay. Crap. CRAP! As anyone who regularly reads these recaps knows, Clay has been my main suspect for a while now. And I was wrong. Dammit. So now I don’t know. I still don’t think it’s Nicole. And I don’t think it’s Mark – but I would really like him to win. And as for Craig, I still don’t think it’s him, because I still think that he would be a liability for the producers. And I guess that leaves Paul, who I never suspected before but: he never looks nervous at executions. Yeah. That’s all I got.

I’ll guess we’ll see what happens tonight. In the meantime, I’m going to go lick some toads or something to make myself feel better. Next week’s recap will most likely be up pretty late in the week again, but after that I’ll be back and on time and ready for the big finale. Perhaps I’ll rent out a bingo hall or someplace fun to watch it. Any thoughts? Bowling alley? Roller skating rink? INDOOR MINI GOLF??