The Grand Tour Season 4 Episode 1

[Rode Neagle]

Somesay it's the greatest car show... in the world. Others say it started well but had a very patchy first season. All I know is that The Grand Tour came back to Amazon Prime on Friday for a second season.

As possibly the most-pirated TV show ever, you probably don't need me to explain the concept behind The Grand Tour to you. But just in case, it involves Top Gear alumni Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond driving cars in different places around the world, funded via Amazon's deep pockets after Clarkson's behavior finally proved unacceptable to the BBC.

And the celebrity deaths segment is gone, too, but special guests still make an appearance, competing against each other in a Jaguar F-Type on a new part-paved, part-dirt course. This week we got Baywatch's David Hasselhoff and someone called Ricky Wilson (no, I don't know who that is either). I could have done without this bit entirely, for it drags on and on.

The season-opening trip involves our three heroes driving in the past, present, and future of the supercar. The setting is Switzerland; perfect for stunning aerial shots of sinuous mountain passes and exhausts spitting fire in long tunnels.

And then there's Hammond. As a harbinger of the future, he is equipped with the Rimac Concept One. It's a hand-built electric hypercar from the same company that supplies EV engineering know-how to companies like Koenigsegg, as well as "Monster" Tajima's Pikes Peak race car. Hammond's need to be within range of a DC fast charger places certain geographical restrictions on our intrepid adventurers, including the requirement that our meat-and-booze hounds have to spend several days staying at a (dry) health spa.

For the most part, their adventures are all quite funny, and the scenes with the cars in action look and sounds like everything you'd want them to be. It's not really a spoiler to say that everything ends in disaster since footage of the incident has been on YouTube since June, but it all ends in tears for the EV. Which makes me wonder why people keep letting Hammond drive fast cars, because he keeps destroying them and ending up in hospital.

I'll be honest, I spent most of the episode swearing at Hammond through the TV, knowing what was ahead. And I do find Clarkson's current character iteration to be a tired parody of his older, funnier self. But the majority of the show was entertaining enough to remind me why Amazon cut them such a fat cheque in the first place.

Last week, I gave my impression on the first episode of the second season of The Grand Tour, as well as my hopes for the remaining 10 episodes. Now, a week later, the second episode has come out, and it was time to see if The Grand Tour had actually improved on the first season, or if Hammond exploding a concept electric supercar in the first episode made it a bit more interesting than the others.

The boys tried their hand at desert travel in the last episode, Sand Job, which was released in February and which saw them battle extreme heat in less than optimal rides. There were surprises, literal minefields, and even an encounter with some Ebola-carrying bats.

Speaking of the location, Clarkson said: \"I love deserts, so I've always wanted to do the Sahara, but it's difficult to go there; you can't go to Mali or Libya or Algeria or Chad. You can't go to the top of Nigeria.

The Grand Tour seasons 1-5 are available to watch on Prime Video now. Try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days. Plus, read our guides to the best Amazon Prime series and the best movies on Amazon Prime.

Speaking of the location, Clarkson said: "I love deserts, so I've always wanted to do the Sahara, but it's difficult to go there; you can't go to Mali or Libya or Algeria or Chad. You can't go to the top of Nigeria.

After Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May moved on from Top Gear, everyone wondered what their next adventure would take them. Happily, The Grand Tour was soon announced by Amazon and was very similar to Top Gear in many ways. The main difference was the size of the budget given to the trio to spend per episode.

Thanks to this large amount of money, Clarkson, Hammond, and May were able to produce more exciting and bigger scale episodes than they had ever done before. This resulted in special episodes becoming more and more frequent. Indeed, the fourth season of The Grand Tour will consist only of specials. To celebrate this, we've ranked all of the specials so far.

In Season 1, viewers were still trying to adjust to the show's format. The first episode put their fears at ease (mostly) but the second episode had the unenviable task of introducing the traditional 'challenges' in a new light. Although it's not technically a special, "Operation Desert Stumble" was the show's first attempt at showing Clarkson, Hammond, and May outside of the tent being totally stupid.

Unfortunately, while a bit entertaining, the episode fell a bit flat. The series was trying too hard to be something different and resulted in the entire challenge feeling forced. The trio had to rescue hostages and take them to the embassy while fighting off insurgents. There was a distinct lack of vehicles present and even the banter felt wooden.

The Grand Tour special episodes are known for their creativity, and also their hilarity, as they often involve the presenters using old cars or general vehicles and placing them well outside of their comfort zone. However, in this special, Clarkson, Hammond and May broke away from that formula and bought 3 grand touring cars for a drive from Georgia to Azerbaijan.

Since there were no real perilous obstacles for the trio to face, the whole episode felt a bit tame compared to their other adventures. There were still a couple of highlights, such as May breaking Stalin's cupboard and the 'real world race' but other than that, the episode just felt a bit dull. However, the stars of the show were, of course, the cars, which looked absolutely amazing.

This special was miles better than the previous entry but unfortunately, this space still had to be filled. Basically, Clarkson, Hammond, and May were told to go on holiday in the United States in RVs. Not willing to share, they each branched off and bought their own and modified them to their liking. May made his RV into a pub, Clarkson transformed his RV into a toilet/speedboat hybrid and Hammond bought a van and made it worse.

It's always fun to watch the presenters create obstacles for themselves, and there were a lot of things that went wrong in this special, which was a very good thing. However, the one constant thread that ruined an otherwise great Grand Tour special was the weird thing with Jeremy and the show's ex-racing driver, the American. It just felt incredibly forced and detracted from the episode's sense of fun.

Season 2 of The Grand Tour suffered a lot of incidents behind the scenes. Firstly, there was Hammond's near-fatal car crash, which he miraculously survived almost unscathed. Then Clarkson fell ill for a while and so as a result, Season 2 had a shortened episode count (although 11 episodes are still fairly impressive).

One of the drawbacks of this season, however, was that it only featured one special. To be fair, Season 1 had one special as well, but it took up two episodes. "Feed The World" was a sort of mini special but despite that, it was surprisingly good. Tasked with transporting fish, the boys still regained their childish sense of humor and the special was all the better for it.

This was the first special of Season 3 and it really set the stage for what was to come. It was a traditional special in every sense of the word as Clarkson, Hammond, and May were given the simple task of becoming wildlife photographers. The trio was in top form as they made constant jokes about Colombia's certain trading export, as well as being totally useless at actually taking photographs.

There were loads of great moments in these couple of episodes, such as Clarkson's encounter with a group of people who really liked donkeys and the trio's attempts at photographing the animals. There were also some highly dangerous obstacles, such as rackety old bridges and the king of all hailstorms. The only drawback of this special was that it started out fairly slow and didn't truly pick up the pace until the second act.

The most recent special on this list, "Seamen" was a welcome return to The Grand Tour, after the show had been off-air for almost a year. Currently, in its fourth season, the series decided to try something new with this special and so it ditched the car element in favor of boats. This idea was risky but they managed to pull it off. It helped as well that the specials had been less about the vehicles in recent years.

Clarkson, Hammond, and May were given the challenge of journeying across Cambodia and Vietnam by boat. Cue lots of swearing, jokes and basic faffing about. It was incredibly entertaining to watch, as the lads clearly had no control over their boats. Even Clarkson, who was the only one who remained enthusiastic about the challenge struggled to keep his boat under control. It made for a truly great episode.

Season 1 of The Grand Tour was a fairly shaky start to the show. The main issue was that it was a car show fronted by Clarkson, Hammond, and May, yet it somehow had to be different from Top Gear. In this season, the show overdid it with the differences. There were some entertaining bits but a lot of the messing around felt forced.

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