Top Gear - The Patagonia Special [DVD] [2015]

Great special. Tons more stuff in the video than what was on tv. Make sure you have the region free player. Wont work on u.s. players

A good special

meh, this is my least favorite of them all but will still keep in my collection. Seemed to be pointless and drone on for most of it.

This is the Top Gear special that had to be called off due to local problems. To wit, an outburst of violence by some sort of rabble rousing Argentinian Falklands War veterans group and seeming young, bored, unemployed and easily led local lads. But all that kerfuffle happens at the end of the show. So, to start at the beginning as it were;# This special sees the lads all grabbing a V8 car and reporting to a lovely inland town in Argentina blessed with gorgeous mountain vistas. Richard has a beast of a ‘yank tank’ muscle car. Jeremy takes a Porsche and James turns up in a Lotus(!).# All three then have to head to the house where Butch Cassidy lived at one point. Which sends Jeremy in particular into raptures.# They then head south to the bottom of South America with the target of Ushuaia with the intention of playing a game of car soccer with locals.# The usual shenanigans are partaken of on the way south, the lads spending time in both Chile and Argentina and finally using a ferry to move the cars from one point to another in the channels at the bottom of South America.# Then, when they are getting near their destination they end up holed up in a hotel room with angry Argies stalking the lobby area of the hotel and checking out the various vehicles. Finally a meeting occurs between the head of the veterans group and the producers and the upshot is that they are effectively ordered out of Argentina on the threat of trouble. Despite the fact that Argentine police were called to attend to the situation.# The final part of the show is given over to showing the crew leaving in convoy and at one point having to run the gauntlet of rocks and other projectiles from obviously semi-organised groups of men who could not be old enough to be actual Falklands War veterans.And that’s the end of the show pretty much. It certainly shows that in some economically less well off parts of the world people cling to such issues. It also means that the program running time is shorter than a normal Top Gear Special usually ran to by this stage. So they have beefed it up with giving an enlarged version of the Australian drive they did as part of the last series ever done with Hammond, Clarkson and May. This is a nice enough piece and given much of the footage in it wasn’t used as part of the segment in the series it is worthwhile for the Top Gear anorak.So why only three stars? Well, to tell the truth the idiotic set ups are boring at this point. The ‘oh we’re lost so have to drive through this marsh’ gambit, the whole ‘Oh we’ll have to ride these horses into town for whatever reason’ and the ‘we’ll have to modify our cars’ routine are all overplayed, tedious and not really all that amusing or entertaining anymore. They’d be better off just getting on with it. Not to mention the personalities in the show are generally so utterly set in concrete with so little wriggle room for change even the interplay is getting repetitive. It’s lost its freshness. Completely.