Fri, May 7, 2004
It's German, for "The Boston Rob, The"
Who wants to bet the vein in my forehead explodes around 10pm Sunday?
Well, I've done it! I've bested my own (spotty) record from the Pearl Islands season, and covered all the All-Stars episodes so far. In related news, just four more days, and the content of this site can return to discussions of something other than the antics of these numbskull castaways. Burnett, being Burnett, is not willing to meet me halfway, though. He's going to make the last moments as painful as they can possibly be.
At this point, the game basically plays itself. There is an obvious sub-alliance of unprecedented permanence in AmbeRob; there's a nice odd number of contestants remaining (five) which lends itself to an upset in that there's no way to tie and the group is small enough that anyone can build a majority; the chief threats are clearly visible; and it's basically the last opportunity for anything other than random chance to influence the voting. (From the final four on, it's mostly who wins immunity – which admittedly involves a little more than chance, but barely.) However, even though this particular final five grouping lends itself to Strategy by Autopilot, these players still manage to fuck it up. Arksie said it best, the worst-played game of Survivor we've seen to date is the all-star team. Unbelievable.
We begin with such moments as Rupert and Jenna putting their heads together and conspiring to eliminate Rob if they can manage to get him to lose immunity. When they discover that Rob is standing right next to them and eavesdropping on what they say, they seize their first opportunity to play really poorly. Rupert stands up, having just told Jenna within earshot of Rob that "we've got to beat Rob," and says to Rob, "We've got to beat Big Tom." Rob plays it off, even though he knows Rupert is lying, because he is – while stupid – easily the genius out of these five players. And Rupert has handed Rob an advantage. Despite Shii-Ann's attempts to the contrary, Rupert is going to play secretively at this point and try to pretend that he's best friends with everyone. Rupert will continue to maintain that lying has no place in Survivor. Rather than playing everything out in the open – which would be a smart move since everyone knows exactly what cards everyone else is holding – Rupert wishes to play it coy, which means Rob can trip him up if he just makes Rupert seem like a liar. (More on this later.)
Whereas, what Rupert should do, is stand up and say "Yeah, that's right. We need you to lose immunity, and if you do, the smartest thing for us to do is eliminate you. It weakens your alliance and it gives us a fighting chance at the money. It's [nothing/absolutely – Rupert's choice] personal; this is simply the best strategic move for us. You'd do the same." If Rupert or Jenna wins immunity, then who cares if Rob knows you're voting for him? (He'd be an idiot to assume otherwise, although he is an idiot.) If you have the numbers and he's not immune, there's precious little he can do. Scratch that – there's nothing he can do. And, if he should win immunity, then you vote for Amber, and there's nothing he can do about that either. Why hide it? We're past that point of the game now.
But Rupert hides it, and this mini-drama and a thousand others contribute to a thick fog of paranoia that hovers over the island. Rupert exclaims, self-fulfillingly, "Paranoia will destroy ya," which just proves that he's been taking the Johnnie Cochran correspondence course. Ironically, paranoia very nearly does destroy Rupert (as I said, more on that later), and may yet do so in the final four. Because he allows himself to be a victim of it, instead of meeting it head-on and making it someone else's problem. I suppose he's too busy protecting his new coconut-gathering stick with the same ferocious jealously with which he hoards his spear.
It's time for the reward challenge, which combines the familiarity of every other reward challenge with the car-key-selecting intrigue of Classic Concentration. The baskets and catapults are back, in their third appearance this season. (Man, that Bush economy is hitting everyone hard!) And, on top of that, it's another one of those challenges in which one competitor is eliminated after each course, so that rather than rewarding endurance and strategy, it simply rewards the mastery of previously-tested skills in short bursts, which is statistically dissimilar from random chance. Rob, of course, wins reward – if you look closely, you can see the conveyor belt under him during the belly crawl portion of the race. I don't know why "stultifyingly predictable" is such a plus for these producers, but for whatever reason they seem to like it, and so Rob keeps on winning. Since he wins, they go ahead and make it one of those rewards where you can share it with someone else. They should just make it a reward where you can share it with Amber, whether you want to or not. They give him a truck and some snacks and allow him to watch a "drive-in" movie. Which is pretty dumb considering it the movie is The Lord of the Flies and not even the color one from the '90s – if it's not a movie Rob wants to watch (Celtic Pride, porno), does he get to just sit in the truck and skip it? Since he picks Amber to share it with, the producers scramble to come up with a car to give her as well. Usually, they just give one car away at this stage of the game, but since this season would be more aptly titled Christmas Morning with AmbeRob they make sure and give her a car. It's a shame Rupert didn't win this immunity; I think he would have identified with the Piggy character in the movie and burst into tears. Then, he'd have a pretty conch to go with his coconut stick and his spear, too. The great part about Rob winning is that he and Amber have to share a congratulatory hug in a way that tries to say "we're just celebrating the same way any of you would with anyone else on the team if you had won." It's that same awkward "we'd be hugging anyway because of the victory, but I really do want to jump your bones" hug like Maggie Haskins and that bastard Mike Hall shared after reaching the final four on Dream Job.
Since Rob and Amber head off to enjoy the movie together, this leaves the other three (as in, a number greater than two) contestants alone together for the night. (You can see what a moron Rob is, because even such dopes as Burton and Johnny MistruthSpin knew better than to leave the other players alone.) Then again, maybe he just knows his team. As seemingly compulsory as it would be for the unrewarded majority to plot against AmbeRob, they opt instead to sit quietly.
So, by and by, Rob and Amber return from their reward (which Amber describes as an actual date, even going so far as to consider the car she won a gift from Rob). There's much discussion about reward-winning etiquette, and how reward winners are always expected to bring something back to share with the others. ("We won cars. Here, we brought you floor mats!") Maybe it's just because I loathe these people, but I think that's dippy. You win the reward (however ill-gotten), you get the reward. The idea is that you're better equipped to keep playing the game. At this point, you need every possible advantage a lot more than you need friends. Anyway, Rupert is bitchy because they didn't bring back enough food, or good enough food, and they insisted on eating some of the measly caramels they did bring. You have to love the logic there: they're sharing the food with him, but he'd prefer if he didn't have to share it with them. If they wanted to eat some of these caramels, they should have eaten them on their own, before returning to camp! We shouldn't have to watch them eat while we eat! They should have to watch us eat while not eating! All right, take away the man's conch.
There's also this little exchange which, thanks to the editing, is riotously funny: Amber frets that maybe she shouldn't reveal to the others that she won a car, too. She seems to feel like it's better that they know now than find out later and think she was holding out on them. The flaw here is, they wouldn't find out until they got home and watched Survivor on TV – at which point, the voting is pretty much over. So, she decides that they'll really respect her honesty and she goes ahead and tells them. Dead silence. As hard as it is to imagine someone envying a Chevy Malibu, they manage to do it. I suppose it's not the car they're so jealous of – these days, winning a free tank of gas is a pretty big thing. If it has a new car around it, well, all the better.
Next comes the part where Rob uses Rupert's inability to understand the dynamics of Survivor against him. Rob makes up a pretty basic lie – telling Tom that Rupert told Rob that Tom has been telling Rupert he wants to vote against Rob. Tom immediately gets very defensive because (as he told Bo), his entire life at this point is wrapped up in making Rob happy with their alliance. (Tom even manages to mention that he believes that he and Rob are a potential final two. And dump Amber? Just what exactly does he think all those humping sounds are coming from every single night?) Any sane person would immediately say to Rob, "That isn't true. I haven't initiated any conversations with Rupert about eliminating you. So, either Rupert is lying, or you are." But Tom's far from sane; far from lucid in any way. So he confronts Rupert, in a rage.
It just disappoints me because I don't like when smug jerks like Rob say, "I'm going to set these two fighting against each other," and it works, especially when it could so easily be avoided. (Irony alert: Rupert later states that he knew Rob just wanted to get him and Tom fighting – in this case, why not say that? Instead, he fights with Tom. That'll show Rob!) Rupert and Tom bitch back and forth at each other over who first brought up the idea of voting against Rob. Considering its enormous strategic advantage, they should be clamoring to claim ownership of the idea, but instead they're trying to deny it. It's not just stupid, it assumes Rob is stupid. (Which he is, but you get the point. Just assume, whenever I talk about him in a way that seems to indicate intelligence or forethought on his part, that I mean relative to all these other dunces.) Rob knows he's a target, often taking pride in it. Denying you've considered him a threat is an obvious lie. Besides, if you have the numbers and he isn't immune, it's entirely moot whether he knows you wanted to vote for him, or whose idea it was. There simply could not be less at stake in this fight, and yet Rupert and Tom still go at it, which means Rob gets exactly what he wanted, which means I hate this show more than I would hate a re-make of The English Patient with Michael Gross, Julianne Moore, and Janine Turner, directed by Oliver Stone.
Then Rob wins immunity, despite trailing a couple of other competitors, by assembling a word jumble faster than anyone else simply because he knew ahead of time what it was going to say. I don't even mean the producers cheated this time, I just mean the damn jumble word is always something obvious and here – in a game in which every other word has been a team name from Survivor – the answer is? The name of his team! From Survivor! Why, with at least 30 seconds' head start on him, couldn't Amber figure this out first?! From here on out, it's unimaginable agony that I can't even bear to recount. There's a conversation between AmbeRob and Tom about his loyalty to their alliance that is simply off the charts in terms of abysmal strategy by all involved. It's lucky that, in the end, Tom is eliminated and not Jenna. Because if this conversation had actually resulted in such a clear victory for AmbeRob as an Amber, Rob, Tom, Rupert final four, I would have gone insane. As it is, the conversation does have the desired effect of eliminating Tom as a swing vote against Amber. With this done, AmbeRob can convince JennaRupe to cut their losses and just vote for Tom. (Note how this strategy hinges on the whole "vote off the person whose vote you absolutely can't get" concept, which I pointed out with frothing emphasis in the case of both Ethan v. Jerri and Shii-Ann v. Jenna!) This is almost as bad as losing Jenna, but based on the amount of disappointment that this show is dishing out, I'll take it. It's a nice, tidy two-two split for the final four, and anything can happen. (Anything, that is, which involves Rob winning every single immunity from here on out.) If there's a silver lining, it's that Tom was really feeling loyal to Rob, and now sits on the jury feeling very betrayed. Yet another reason why Amber will win an AmbeRob final two in a fucking landslide. In the final-statement last-minute question and answer period, everyone will ask Rob a difficult, mean question and then ask Amber, "What are you going to do with the million dollars?"
So, that's it. We tune in on Sunday to watch the endgame of this madness. Burnett says there's one more twist to come. He says it will shock us. He even says, "I guarantee it," which indicates that he got a two-for-one deal with Rupert's Johnnie Cochran tapes and received a set of George Zimmer's pamphlets, "How to Sell Anything." My guess for the twist (Have I been wrong so far? I mean, not counting all the other times?) is that they institute a special immunity challenge in the live Madison Square Garden show on Sunday night, and Rob wins it, so whoever his final two person is automatically loses. I wonder, if I gouge my eyes out, can I sue Burnett for medical damages plus pain and suffering?
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