The second episode of ‘Pechino Express’ hosted by Costantino della Gherardesca sees ten couples of travelers discovering the dangers of the island of Java. The first elimination also arrives and yes, this article contains spoilers. Let’s look at the pass and fail together.

We would really have to find a space on TV for Lillo: vote 4

It’s everywhere. Now he even pops up in Indonesia in the role of part-time special correspondent (after him, we will see Giulia Salemi and Guido Meda). Among the few comedians to really make people laugh, Lillo Petrolo has been the protagonist for years now of a media overexposure that makes him indigestible. More pervasive than Laura Pausini and Achille Lauro on 16 March, he has just been co-host of the latest soporific Sanremo Festival, currently broadcast on the first channel in a broadcast of which most people have only glimpsed the promo, but in the meantime here he is on ‘Pechino Express’. Not to mention the fact that at least three films are released every month with him in the cast (a rhetorical figure of hyperbole but we’re close, ed.). Here it boasts the same usefulness as Fru dei Jackal last year, i.e. on the outskirts of nowhere, and (it) gets tired by repeating the usual gags. Which have been accurate for at least a couple of decades, maybe three. The key is this: he pretends to know how to do something, from badminton to traditional Legong dance but then, surprise, he doesn’t. The impression is that the manager wants him to be a workaholic, while the public now fears that he might even come out of the refrigerated counter at the supermarket. More predictable than an Annalisa song, here the real problem remains only one: Lillo is not Nino Frassica.

Gaia De Laurentiis and her daughter Agnese continue to argue, very high stakes Giorgia Soleri: vote 3

The unpleasant contestants are the beating heart of ‘Peking Express’, the only reality show in which, thank goodness, no one cares about a good heart. In fact, often you don’t have to have it to continue the race. Unfortunately, however, Gaia De Laurentiis is not a villain who upsets the balance of the game, but a pot of beans forgotten on the stove. This journey for her, and for the public as well, is a way of the cross, every breath of wind is good for mourning and crying. At the beginning of the stage the Raccomandati (Chanel Totti and Filippo Laurino) awarded a Malus to her and her daughter Agnese who together form the couple of ‘Le Biondine’. De Laurentiis bursts into tears because ‘I didn’t deserve it, it was a gratuitous penalty, we were doing well, I gave my all”. The penalty in question is cleaning a pier. For ten minutes. We reiterate: for ten minutes. In any case something far from drowning in the Styx. During such ‘torture’ we turn to della Gherardesca begging him for ‘time for myself, I need it, here there are always cameras or in any case an eye of someone watching me.” Something impossible to imagine before leaving. It seems like Teo Mammucari in ‘Belve’. But then it gets worse because he has a tense relationship with his daughter (who should be canonized immediately, poor star). Once they reach the red book, it turns out that the Recommended have arrived first again. Gaia, as she continues hitchhiking, comments with many compliments to Chanel Totti and her adventure companion Filippo. “But how?! – exclaims the little girl – until recently you told them to fuck off!”. Very true, but mum starts with the reprimand anyway: “Agnese, what you say is very serious. It’s one thing to ‘fuck off’, it’s another to claim that I felt stabbed in the back by them. You put malice among people for nothing, this isn’t the right spirit”. There is no way to make her understand that it was a quick periphrasis to understand the same precise concept. Mother Gaia demands that quotation marks be respected even when she speaks one-on-one with her daughter. Daughter who, with the maternal lamentatio planted undeterred on the scruff of her neck, will soon wave the white flag: “Know that, as my mother underlines, everything I say is and will always be wrong in its ways”, she explains, turning to the camera, surrendered. The only moment we see De Laurentiis smile? While Agnese tears from tiredness. “Finally!”, he rejoices. Well, let’s summarize last Thursday’s consideration: let’s hope they’re just reciting a (boring) script. Here we are at full Giorgia Soleri altitude.

Francesco Paolantoni is ‘a mother-in-law’, he and Biagio Izzo are the polyglots of the edition: rating 8

Finally take a breath. Given the crybaby personalities on the field this time, when the montage shows the misadventures of Francesco Paolantoni and Biagio Izzo, it immediately appears Marian. The same goes for Jo Squillo and her elective daughter Michelle, although for different reasons. Unfit and incapable of anything, the two comedians are very exhausted from minute zero of this wonderful adventure, they even have their pupils in the shape of the word ‘retirement’, poor souls. But they never forget what their job is: to entertain. They don’t speak English, so while they walk around to scrounge up accommodation to spend the night, they have to stop due to urgent linguistic reconnaissance: “How do you say ‘search’?!”. All that comes to mind for Paolantoni is that ‘in French it’s like scerscthen I don’t know. They’ll make it anyway, no one knows how. They dance the traditional Legong dance basically just rolling their eyes in front of a sort of very severe Indonesian Alessandra Celentano. He lets them pass anyway and despite everything. Because even she enjoys seeing them. The next test will be to dredge a pond of mud to ‘look’ (but how do you say it in English?!, ed.) for a cowbell. Chased by farmers wearing buffalo costumes who aim at them to hinder them, plunging them into the depths of guano (which, according to the Albiceleste’s sense of smell ‘is actually really shit’, ed.). “But do you, Mr. farmer-buffalo, also make mozzarella?”, asks Paolantoni covered in guano to the furious helper. No matter how much he suffers, he has the demon of the joke in his body and that is stronger than any adversity. Then, but thank goodness they are multilingual, they will have to go shopping by memorizing six words in the native language and then recovering what is required. Paolantoni is not disheartened: “Basically it’s as if an Indonesian came to Naples and we told him ‘go get the cachìs!’. Having reached the finish line, seventh by pure miracle, even ahead of Fiona May, from Gherardesca asks the rappers why they had argued with the Albiceleste. While the two couples explain the altercation, Paolantoni gets involved, he can’t help himself: “Oh well, who have never said anything bad to the girls!”. Izzo gets on him in Parseltongue (i.e. whispering, but in a tone of maximum disdain): “You really are a mother-in-law, you have to mind your own business! What do we have to do with it here? Nothing! Eh, then shut up!”. It won’t happen, but we expect them to be in the final. Thank you.

Rappers in the wake of Antonio Zequila, “you can’t touch your mother!”: rating 6.5

A completely specious argument, but at least Gaia De Laurentiis isn’t crying. So we make it go well anyway. The rappers Dani Faiv and Tony 2Milli who last Thursday we saw spending their first Indonesian night at the police station (not arrested, ed.) reveal themselves, surprisingly, in the wake of Antonio Zequila (“Don’t mention my mother, ever again! Never again!”, you will remember well). During the journey, a single curse escapes the hitherto completely insipid Albiceleste, “Hijo de puta!”, as they see themselves overtaken by these two sons of the bars. They tie it to their finger forever: “You can’t touch your mother, you have to leave her out” says one, while the other nods, very sulkily. Now, it’s clear as day that the Argentine model-sisters had nothing against their parent, but the controversy continues to the finish line with the curly one who even complains about it to Costantino della Gherardesca’s face. Who, thank goodness, couldn’t care less. “In Argentina it is an expression that is used, a way of saying, but in Italy you don’t have it? Anyway, excuse us, it’s okay, we won’t repeat it again”, conclude the girls, believing it to be zero. And we’re on their side because really, ‘NO14″ (quote for lovers of Dani Favi’s vast musical repertoire, ed.). We humbly propose a name change for the touchy couple of ‘this rap: ‘I Chierichetti’ sounds much more appropriate.

Elisa Maino is inconsistent, but was opening her mouth out of contract? Rating 0

Here we are at the first elimination, fortunately sacrosanct. It’s the turn of the ‘I Creator’ couple, Mattia Stanga and Elisa Maino who at the end of the stage clash in a duel, a competition of masks and speed, with those other two funny guys, the Exes, and lose miserably, beaten to the punch. At least as compelling as following a snail race, if both factions involved had returned home, it wouldn’t have been a mortal sin. On the contrary. Steven Basalari and his partner (?) Viviana Vizzini have the gift of maximum epidermal repulsion: he only wants to invoice (and repatriate immediately ‘with a business flight’), she is behind him even if he treats her like a cockroach: “There are people who pay thousands of euros to hear me speak and you don’t even listen to me?! When I say something you don’t have to answer, you know that this stresses me out”, he thunders against her because the girlfriend (?) he would like to win back (?!) is not putting in the dough at the I sauce the same amount of oil as his grandmother. Let’s gloss over how much all of this, if it were true outside of a script, would be very problematic. However, if the mere sound of your voice bothers the person you are with, it’s time to run away, far away, far away from Indonesia together. That said, we come to Elisa Maino, beauty influencer with millions and millions of followers. If his adventure companion, Mattia Stanga, at least tried the panache card, he practically didn’t open his mouth during both stages of the journey, which has now reached its end. And what did she do there? Maybe the editing was cruel to her, or maybe the authors wanted to pardon the reality audience. Without proof to the contrary, we will never know. What will we remember, then, about the great, irreproachable couple from ‘I Creator’: in the first episode they won a spa stay. In the second they didn’t even manage to reach the red book, skipping all the tests that the other travelers underwent between dancing and guano. Conspiracy theory: Maino and Stanga signed to ‘be there’ until the second episode. No more. Then they had to repatriate to become an Instagram story again (and invoice with #adv, simply by breathing). Arms stolen from the selfie stick!