By Iain Harrison

First off, I must apologize for being away. Without giving too much away, I spent last week north of Los Angeles with Chris Cerino, George Reinas, Kelly Bachand, Adam Benson and Peter Palma and the opportunities to comment on the show were somewhat limited due to the amount of time we spent without any contact with the outside world. I'll it leave you to figure out what we were doing.

We're well into the “difficult” middle episodes of the current season now. Those quotation marks are there not to denote the competitiveness of the challenges, but rather the difficulty the producers are facing at this point to come up with ideas that are fresh and captivating. Every competition show goes through the same evolution—early episodes are interesting due to the new characters and plot twists. Of course in the later episodes, most people have chosen favorites and are on the edge of their seats cheering on 'their' guys. So, how do you counter these mid-season doldrums? Easy, roll out the big guns.

In the team challenge, the presence of Jack Dagger made for a good dynamic, as the guy is a natural instructor and showman. I met him for the fourth time last week and he always bubbles with enthusiasm for his craft. The teams produced a close-run result with the Blues being sent to elimination and being forced to send two of their best shooters to battle it out with the awesome Hotchkiss Mountain Gun. I hesitate to guess at the amount of muzzle energy this gun produces, but I'm guessing it would dwarf my .50 BMG several times over.

While Jarrett seemed to have the edge in the practice session, Mike's conduct in the elimination challenge once again illustrated the mental aspect of the sport. He never once looked over to see what his rival was doing, concentrating solely on his own performance and made measured, economical movements whenever it was time to run the gun. There was one point where he swabbed the bore with the mop, flipped it and then ran a dry patch in one continuous motion that was pure poetry.

In this week's episode, one thing that struck me immediately was the presence of a commercial from a firearms manufacturer. Not a sporting goods retailer that happens to stock guns, not an ATV company that caters to sportsmen, but a real, honest to goodness riflemaker. This is cause for celebration—it means that the network is getting over their fear of alienating the non-shooting audience, probably because that part of the population has expressed no objection to seeing a trade in firearms. This means we're winning.

Next week you’ll see yours truly return to the set with Chris Reed as honorary team captains and we both found it pretty hard not to grab a gun to start sending rounds downrange.