[05x01] September 16th, 2022 - A Scandi Flick

Ferrari333SP

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Fantastic episode; I was laughing with tears at several points. Some really cool cars as well; amazing how that Mitsu kept chugging along despite all its mishaps. They still seem to enjoy each other's company as much as ever. Here's to many more years of Grand Tour adventures (with hopefully more than 1 series a year, haha)
 
Fantastic episode; I was laughing with tears at several points. Some really cool cars as well; amazing how that Mitsu kept chugging along despite all its mishaps. They still seem to enjoy each other's company as much as ever. Here's to many more years of Grand Tour adventures (with hopefully more than 1 series a year, haha)
Exactly my thoughts a bit of everything annoying each other as usual, team work to save the Evo towards the end and yes proper LOL moments especially when Jeremy tried to de-ice his car with fire.
 
I also thought it was right back up to their old standards after the understandably underwhelming Covid ones. Some of the joking around has more of an edge now, though, like when Jeremy showed up at the pizza place. He seemed genuinely angry.

Also they actually took the car modification seriously and did a good job for once. The RS4 looked great.

Fantastic scenery and filming as always! And of course the timeless sense of humor which is just as good as ever. Here's to many more.
 
I don't share the other posters' sentiments on this episode. Yes, the scenery was fantastic, and James' accident was thrilling. The rest of the show was fairly ho-hum. The gags have become overused, and the themes and plotlines are becoming pretty boring. Clarkson's Farm, and Our Man in have been much more interesting and entertaining to watch.

Maybe, in an upcoming episode, they can find a way to duplicate this scene from Happy Days.


View: https://youtu.be/Tk_y_r5cXZs
 
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In 2007 we watched Hammond travel to the north pole on a dog sled. In 2022 he’s pretending to not know how ski, and falls over while trying to go up a ski slope using an anchor lift and a silly little sled.

What BS.
 
Personally, I found that moment to be absolutely hilarious; who cares if he actually knows how to ski/using the lift to get to the top. The different ways he failed to use it had me in stitches; it's a specific kind of comedy you either get or you don't
 
The first third I thought was brilliant! But then, it all got too silly. All this shed-nonsense didn't do this episode any good.
I have kind of got my personal is-this-episode-any-good-indicator. Whenever my wife (who isn't interested in cars whatsoever and just watches because she thinks the guys are funny) questions if the current scene is genuine, it's usually not a good sign. That means that even if it was genuine (and it proably wasn't), it wasn't believable. This happend quite a bit in this episode.

I think all three of them make very good shows on their own, at the moment (Okay, JM in Italy wasn't brilliant, but that's just because Italy isn't exotic enough. Send your man to south america please. ;)). But as a trio, it seems like they still think they'd have to cater to 8yo. Come on, you're not at the BBC anymore. Show us your true potential!
 
Everything good I had to say about their France special they have decided to omit here. Unfortunately. Nevertheless, it's amazing to see those gorgeous landscapes and having the three around doing their now Youtube-quality scripts at least makes for some comedy that you can see coming from a mile away.

There is, IIRC, one other special in the pipeline. Hopefully it'll be heavier on the fun/interesting trivia parts of the equation. Less on the tired gags, and then it can provide something interesting between the Excellent Our Man in Italy and S2 of Clarkson's Farm.
 
The best parts were the least planned.

The overused, prepared gags were not interesting, while the banters have got at least funny.

Great scenery, and anyway, I never felt the need to look at the clock, which means it had a good pace.
 
It was a good episode. The cringe was the "what is ski lift" bit. I don't get who finds that funny, especially for how long it lasted. It felt like it was time filler, not for any other reason.

I did not find James crashing like that funny either, my opinion they should have not shown interior video. Videos of people crashing with more than just a safety belt and it's planned is fine, but that was just bad. If it takes to nearly permanently injuring themselves, don't do it.

Otherwise the trip was good, scenery, the car choices were awesome, i liked the cabin trailers a little as well. Where it lost me was pretending that Richard actually rode is cabin all the way down.
 
Underwhelming.

And what surprised me the most, in a negative way, that they absolutely undersold the stunning scenery with poor cinematogaphy. :(

What's more, during the some parts of the episode it felt like I was watching them not actually driving the cars, as the camera angles were so poorly set up that it made me think they filmed the interior shots separately. Perhaps it's just the expectation that they fake it that had been slowly creeping in for quite some years now. Only the fact that James very obviously crashed himself - twice - causes me to think that they really did drive themselves, but they did a poor job showing it. That said, from personal experience I know that driving in snowed-in nothingness is very difficult to catch on camera.
Together with the obvious lameness of many old, tired and clearly not spontanous jokes, I'm just.... underhelmed.

Kudos to the people editing the rather exciting trailer. They certainly fooled me.
 
Found some time today to watch it, in short I would say it was good entertainment. But even as someone who doesn't really mind/looks for continuity errors and/or over scripted scenes in shows like this, I found there was too much of it.
Off course much is scripted, fake and edited, just as in many other shows, but it was the not even trying to hide/cover that that bothered me the most. At some points it made it too hard to just enjoy the show and not focus on how staged it all is.
I did genuinely enjoy some parts, and as I said it is good entertainment, but not exactly up to the level I expected.

I really did like/enjoy James May in the workshop going over the damage in true James May style :ROFLMAO: no emotion, just summing up what's wrong in a strangely funny way. "This is the intercooler pipe. *shows the mangled pipe* As you can see, the airflow is not going to be as the manufacturer intended."
 
Bit pants really, wasn't it? I enjoyed the French episode much more than this.

Felt like after James' accident they had to come up with increasingly bollock-sy ways to exclude him from the fast driving scenes, culminating in putting his car into that perfectly circular hole in the ice.

Give me their solo content any day...
 
Watched this special a couple of nights back, and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. At some points, it really made me feel like I was watching old Top Gear, not GT. I loved the choice of cars too - always a big fan of the STIs and Evos - and the scenery was breathtaking as well.

That said, there were some things I didn't enjoy (which ironically is also in the spirit of some of the later TG specials). Some of the jokes felt forced and unnecessary (Clarkson putting Hammond's keys in ice and the whole caravan catastrophe) that I saw coming from a mile away, although some did make me laugh (Hammond running behind May's shed trying to write on it).

At this point, I know most people don't care but I really wish they had done some genuine car testing instead of the usual antics. I'd have rated this a 10 if they had done a proper 3-way race or a time trial instead of that snow-ski-racing thing - the tunnel run was the closest to what I wanted to see, but it obviously didn't end well - and if Hammond and Clarkson had left their cars visually stock; I like liveries otherwise but I didn't like them in this episode. But I will say that seeing the Evo rise from the dead at the end culminating in the montage was good enough that I had to watch it multiple times. So over all, I'd rate this an 8 or 8.5.
 
It was OK. First half was probably the better one.

I think at this point it's just TG/TGT fatigue for me. If this episode had aired in 2007 I would have enjoyed it more, but after 20 years watching these guys it's just hard to get as much of a laugh out of the pretty predictable scripted segments.
 
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