Sat, December 13, 2003

Well, I suppose it's pretty clear that I'm just not cut out for this. TiVo makes me lazy. Yes, blame TiVo! That's the ticket! These past few weeks, I have been able to TiVo Survivor at home, which meant less pressure to take good notes at McThursday when I was watching it live, and therefore slowed down the whole writing process. So much so that my previous column – brilliant and entertaining though it was – lacked several key rants that I really should've remembered to include. And then this week, between travel and loss of sleep from travel, I just ran out of time. So now with the finale airing tomorrow (along with the all-important reunion – let's watch fifteen people beat Jon with rusty chains!), I have two and a half episodes to catch up on. Yow! (Okay, fourteen. Rupert will be too busy pouting and rolling his eyes.)

This week, we continue the parade of bad strategy – actually, complete ignorance of the possibility that strategy even exists. Which relates to a large problem that I had with last week: the four girls had an unparalleled opportunity to create an alliance against Johnny Schemescheme, Burton, and Lackey Lil, but they squandered it by not thinking strategically at all. There's even a theory that says Sandra was suspicious that Jon's whole grandma ruse was a lie. (I'm not entirely certain, but Miss Alli thinks so, so I won't dismiss the possibility.) So, why would any reasonable person (with an interest in winning the game) gamble that clear majority against a chance at a shakier alliance the following week? The ladies are four and the guys are three, there's no beating that. But if they play along with Jon, they risk becoming three and three, and the most they can gain is a low position in the Jon/Burton alliance. Silliness! I guess it aggravates me because I want them to play smarter and win, but when they don't play smart they don't deserve to win so it leaves me just wanting everyone to lose.

Sigh. Anyway.

You may have noticed that CBS is advertising the Survivor home game with the slogan "Reality for the living room." What? So far, my living room has always felt pretty real as it is. I don't see any need to enhance the reality of its living roomyness. Isn't the whole point of reality unscripted action with regular people? I don't think we've ever used a script in my living room (I don't have the time to get "off-book") and the biggest celebrity appearance to date was the guy with the broken English whom the landlord sent to fix my window. On the plus side, I got his autograph. I have now officially redoubled my enthusiasm to get on Survivor. (Twice zero? Zero!) I want to bring the home game as my luxury item so I can constantly be saying "Man, this is like the Survivor home game – on an island!"

This week, we open with Christa and Sandra expressing some doubts about their decision to side with Jon and help him break up the nice little alliance they had built. Sandra still doesn't say anything about whether she thinks Jon lied about his grandmother, so I'm less and less sure about that. But maybe. Anyway, this is exactly the reason I was screaming my head off for them to stay with their four-on-three alliance. That way, no second-guessing the next day! In this game, you have to be alert. "Once bitten twice shy" is a luxury you can't afford. No bites at all should be the goal. These two are still not shy, despite being bitten repeatedly. They've been bitten so many times, it factors out to about one bite per bug bite. Come on, girls! Wake up and get shy!

Instead, it's off to the reward challenge! Yet again, it's a food reward, but this time instead of maddeningly splitting it between two people, it's infuriatingly shared among three. At some point, it'll just be "everybody gets the reward except Sandra." And I? Will be fine with that. Probst fires up the pirate-themed overhead projector, because it's another of those challenges that involves about fifty individual steps spread across multiple platforms. Something like "swim, swim, untie a paddle, swim, more paddles, swim, dive for a barrel, swim, knit an afghan, swim, swim, file form 72-R, swim..." Sandra (aware of an opportunity to talk about herself) mentions again that she isn't so much fond of the swimmy-swimmy. Needless to say, she "randomly" ("Wink, wink," say the producers.) draws the role with the most swimming. I can see where the lack of swimming prowess might be a self-fulfilling prophecy for Sandra – she doesn't swim hard because she doesn't believe she can, or because she feels like she's given fair warning, so why try? However, it could just as easily be the fact that she goes into the swimming challenge in full dress. Christa and Darrah have skirts on, which aren't exactly easy to swim in, but at least it's beach attire. Sandra looks as though she could be leading a tour of Mount Vernon in mid-January. Anyway, the frustrating complexity is quickly washed away, because Darrah's and Christa's tops are quickly washed away. Yes, this challenge incorporates the Sunken Barrel Dive of Gratuitous Breast Baring, and all your favorites are here. (Now this would be nice in my living room!) Christa may not get as far as Darrah in the game, but she can take some comfort in the fact that it requires more pixelation to cover her bare chest. It's a shame I don't work in post at Castaway Productions LLC, because the raw footage of topless Darrah diving for barrels might just qualify for Permanent Desktop Background status. The kind of background that you just stop checking your email because it will get in the way of the desktop. In Europe, they have naked people doing the weather report. We can't see a little innocent skinny dipping in the spirit of competition, but they've got nude meteorologists. And they hate our president. I should just be living there. But I digress. This is exactly what happens when you vote out the last actually cute girl halfway through the show. Desperation sets in. At least Christa and Darrah's toplessness makes up for Lil's granny-panties. [Shudder.] Darrah's team wins big time, while Sandra continues to make a big show out of how bad she is with water. (Hey, genius. Didn't you sign up for a TV show that's all about getting voted off an island? What were you expecting? It's not about getting voted out of an Islands restaurant, although I have nearly had that happen to me.) Probst neglects to ask if anyone wants to give away the reward, and Darrah, Jon, and Lil are immediately off to their spa day. (You should not, by the way, assume from this that I've seen my granny in her panties. Although, if my friend ever visits me on a reality show, I'll instruct him to lie that I have.)

During the ultra-boring reward portion of the reward challenge. Wait! Footage of – surprise! – Darrah showering again. Ah, Darrah showering. They will never not show this to us. Okay, Jon's combing his hair; now it's boring again. During this, Christa and Sandra take advantage of their alone time with Burton to confirm that he and Jon will be making good on whatever shady deal they made with Jon last week (for no good reason! – sorry, I'm still dealing with it). Burton seems caught off-guard, and keeps repeating that he doesn't know what to tell them because he hasn't had a chance to speak with Jon. Here could possibly be a dying glimmer of strategy from Burton. He's made his deal with Jon and the way he can make the best of it now is to play to the future jury for the duration of the game. So maybe he's acting like he's Jon's puppet in order to make the soon-to-be-ousted Christa and Sandra go easy on him later. He does repeat it a lot, like he's really trying to sell it, but judging from the way he acts when Jon gets back, pouncing on him to review strategy as soon as he steps off the boat, it's hard to tell if it's an act or not.

Anyway, if it is an act, it backfires at least in part. His apparent lack of commitment to the "final four" deal irks Sandra, who feels like Burton owes her something for not eliminating him at the previous TribCon. (Preposterous! He owes you a smack in the head for being stupid enough not to eliminate him. Keeping someone around doesn't put him in your debt, it puts you in a threatened position because now you've kept that person around.) She pipes up that she's really seriously considering voting for Burton after this. Ah, yes. Now it's really the last straw. As opposed to last week, when the dynamic was almost identical except that you had a guaranteed voting bloc. Smart girl, she.

And that's pretty much it until the immunity challenge, except that Lil actually says to Jon at dinner, "You're a whole lot more smarter than me." Whee! Considering there are roughly seventeen grammatical errors in that sentence, I'd say so. Of course, this praise is just for correctly identifying brochette, so clearly Lil's troop doesn't earn a cooking badge either. (It's just Mad Libs and macaroni angels. And, of course, frowning.) And Burnett gives Darrah a bikini, proving that he hates us and wants to hurt us.

The immunity challenge is actually pretty awesome, and not just because Christa manages to show that she's as awkward trying to fire a rifle as she is handling a slingshot. First of all, it's a welcome change that each competitor is trying to win the challenge by knocking down his or her own flags, rather than choosing from the other contestants and trying to make them un-win. Also, it's simple. It's got fire, which is the good side of the pirate theme. I can live with pirate-themed challenges as long as they involve blowing things up. And all you do is shoot at the target. No bells to ring, no three-volume manuals to read before starting. Stand. Point. Shoot. Done. And, Darrah cleans up. This I like to see, because she was Little Miss Below Radar for a long, long time, and now she's seriously in a position to win this thing. It would be an okay outcome, too, I guess. Not that she deserves it at all. For a while, I would've said that she sort of deserved it, but not now. Hers has been an interesting path. First, she laid low, not standing out enough to be eliminated during the dog days of Morgan. Then, she was cute when it was the cute-girl-or-old-lady decision, so she coasted through that one. Well played. Since the merge, it's been back to laying low, and her drawl probably helps keep her around, because Tijuana seems like more of a strategist and therefore an easier target. Now, in the weeks when she might be a considerable second choice for elimination if immunity went the wrong way, she's snatching up immunity left and right. Go Darrah. I also like that she accommodates Christa's loopy prediction that her cheerleader background makes her a contender for immunity. I suppose if there's anyplace where cheerleaders would have rifle experience, it would be Mississippi. (These old-fashioned muskets were probably borrowed from the collection of Darrah's grandpappy in the first place, but not without sending him into a forty minute tirade about the War of Northern Agression.) But, as I said, she really doesn't deserve a million dollars here, because when Jon comes to her and says, "You and me, baby. Final two." She actually says that Jon's a snake and a liar, but that there's no way he's lying to her. Arg! Just once, I'd like someone to smile and believe him, and then the moment his back is turned, look into the camera and grin, "No way do I believe that punk." I would hold out hope that she's doing exactly that, and just doing it with more commitment than most of the terrible liars on this show, but... she's Darrah.

Speaking of lying, it's hilarious that Christa interviews, "Everybody has [lied], and everybody has done it well." Technically, I believe everybody has just been really stupid and not suspected anything, so everybody has been really easy to lie to. I would love it if someone were actually doing it well, because that would mean lying inside the game and outside. Actually keeping one's mouth shut, even in interviews, and never letting on. It's a dodgy strategy, inasmuch as it equates to fewer opportunities to be on TV gloating about what a great liar you are, but it did pay off for a certain Mr. Richard Hatch.

Probst starts off the lovely TribCon roundtable by talking about honesty, and makes the interesting (to him) point that everybody admits to having lied, but everybody trusts completely in the alliance they have. He fails to realize that he hasn't asked each person who has lied and who has been lied to. It's easy for someone to believe that the alliance is honest within itself and lying to the outside. Probst is too busy giggling about the perceived irony. Then, he switches the topic to how being disliked is a valuable commodity at this point in the game because nobody wants to go into the final two against someone who's universally adored. I think everyone plays up Lil's Universally Adored Status a tad much anyway, because Morgan obviously hates her guts, but the point is to be polite and not say "She's dead weight; we keep her around so we have someone to vote off later." Saying something like that may influence her vote around jury time. Somehow, Probst's message catches on, because Christa suddenly starts pitching herself as someone that nobody likes, presumably to keep herself around. I don't know that it's necessarily wise to be attempting that campaign strategy, especially in front of the jury, but you certainly don't do it when Jon is still in the game. Nobody is ever going to beat him at being despised.

Of course, it doesn't work for her. (Come on. Nobody waits until TribCon to decide the vote. It's locked in before the row over.) Christa is gone, and the reason is that she and Sandra screwed up last week. This week, they had to have Darrah's vote to force a tie, and Darrah didn't want anything to do with them, because last week they bailed on their agreement with her and Tijuana. On her way out, Christa appears to flash Fairplay Fingers back at the assembled final five. Is this her way of calling Johnny Grandmalie on his shit? After all, he swore on his grandma that he would vote Lil and Darrah off before Christa or Sandra, and Sandra saw him say it. Darrah and Lil heard about it at the Five Star Dinner of Plentiful Brochette, if they hadn't already gotten word from Christa or Sandra. So now everybody knows that he either lied about Granny Springer dying, or doesn't hold to promises that he swore upon her cousin-brawling, chair-throwing grave. Let's hope that is what she means, and let's hope the others pick up on it. It's like the "why did Santiago have to be transferred off the base if you gave the order that nobody should hurt him?" paradox; Johnny Codered (Johnny Lacticacidosis?) has played the granny card one time too many, and now he's trapped in a house of granny cards with no way out. Considering that the footage from next week depicts him blubbering "I swear on grandma, I swear on grandmaswearswear sweargrandmagrandma!" I'd say there's a chance that the ladies will look upon yet another voting majority and finally handle it with some aplomb. I would say that Lil might finally get a clue about the visible sub-alliance of Jon and Burton (precisely the same mistake which got Rupert, Christa, and Sandra in trouble) and go free-agent. Especially since Burton basically told her he was backing out of any deal to take her with him to the final two, and then Probst underlined it for her at TribCon. I would say that, but... it's Lil.

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