Revisit special: I'm surprised how little time they spent on the dirt-drifting myth, given what a big production it seemed to be when they talked about it in the season-preview special. There, they talked a lot about how the dust flying around made it hard to steer or to let the camera people operate safely, so they finally had to resort to shooting the whole thing by drone. That wasn't even touched on here. The results were interesting; I wasn't expecting there to be any circumstance where drifting would actually be faster, because you lose forward thrust and create more friction, but I guess in that one kind of turn, it helps because you don't have to slow down so much. But there, I'd argue that it isn't the drifting itself that helps; it's just a side effect of not slowing down when you turn, not worrying about preventing a skid. So it doesn't show that drifting lets you turn faster, it just shows that not slowing down to avoid drifting lets you turn faster -- which is a pretty tautological result.
On the bulletproof-lighter revisit, I'm unsatisfied with the result, because they left out one key control test. Okay, they showed that the lighter could stop a slowed-down post-ricochet bullet -- but the myth is that the lighter actually saved the person's life. So they should've done a control test with a richocheted bullet and no lighter, to see if the bullet would still have been lethal at all. Failing to do that is sloppy methodology, and I think it invalidates the result.
The fish tank myth reminds me of the classic rifle-into-a-swimming-pool myth they did years back. That was their most effective demonstration of the principle here, that the faster a projectile enters the water, the more the water pushes back and dissipates its energy. I'm surprised they didn't show a clip of it, because I think it's one of their most iconic myths.
The myth about explosion shock waves cancelling in the middle turned out unexpectedly. It seemed credible to me that the shock waves might cancel, and I thought maybe the shrapnel would be the dealbreaker. But now that I think about it, I can see how naive that was. It doesn't matter if the waves were going in opposite directions; they'd have to be of opposite amplitudes to cancel each other out, one positive and one negative -- i.e., one an increase in pressure and the other a decrease. But both shock waves were a sudden, massive increase of pressure, so they were both positive and combined additively. I'm embarrassed I didn't see that right away.
I liked Adam's elaboration on "Failure is always an option" -- that it's more about the failure of their expectations than a failure of methodology. Although I don't think it's quite accurate; in the past, they often have used "Failure is always an option" to refer to breakdowns in their methods, like all the times their remote-controlled or cable-dragged cars and trucks ran away from them and destroyed yet another fence at the Alameda runway.
