Mon, October 17, 2005

What happens to a dream deferred? Or, better yet, what does it look like? In Bobby Jon's case, it apparently looks like a name scrawled on a piece of scruffy parchment with a Sharpie. Waxing poetic at this week's Tribal Council, he tells Probst that he hates voting at TribCon because it's like killing a dream. He prefers to, in his words, "keep the dream alive." Yes, indeed. Keep the dream alive. Get it a feeding tube; fix up its room. Welcome to Survivor Bobby Jon-style: cameras drink in the tropical paradise, as fifteen plucky twentysomethings with excellent bodies greet three decrepit old people in front of a volcano, a waterfall, or a sizeable tree. Then, Probst walks in with eighteen checks for equal shares of a million dollars, distributing them with a smile. All the contestants embrace, shake hands. Rupert stops by to bellow triumphantly. Then the rest of the hour is Murder, She Wrote bloopers from the CBS archive. Aces!

While we're on the subject of TribCon – why is such hay being made over these votes that don't conform to strict "former Yaxha"/"former Nakum" lines? Probst, the editors, and generally everybody make this out to be a loyalty problem, but I think it's just the same problem Survivor always has: the sub-alliance problem. No matter how well you've bonded as a team of nine, there will always necessarily be sub-groups that are closer. Randomly redistribute the team members and it's not definite that the groups that have previously been teamed together are necessarily close. Sure, sometimes they are. But sometimes they weren't getting along anyway (Judd and Margaret for example). Why should they band together now, just because they have the same colored "previous buff" stain on their midsections? Really, this sort of team shuffle should be seen as an opportunity. Loyalties tossed to the wind, the teams both have a chance to regroup and drop the weaker players.

But have they? No. Lydia and Margaret keep living it up at New Nakum, and Rafe and Amy (strong of heart, but weak of shattered ankle) remain in the midst of Yaxha 2.0. The teams don't vote strictly along former-teammate lines – of course not; what hope does Danni have in the mix with Brandon, Blake, and Bobby Jon? – but they pay just enough lip service to the concept that it creates unnecessary rifts all over the place. Why not just acknowledge that we're all one team now, and then vote normally? Nobody gets a prize if more of their original team makes it to the merge. You just win a million dollars, or you win less than a million dollars. The goal is to pick the people who give you the best chance of winning immunity (so there are fewer chances for your name to be voted), and then – once merged – to pick the people who represent the least threat to you in the competition for the final three. Then, finally, to select the person whom everyone on the jury hates, or the person whom you've managed to convince the most jury members that they should hate. Where in any of that does it matter who you bunked with the first night? Nowhere. Exactly. And it makes even less sense to vote based on who "deserves" to be in the final four. (Especially now – it's currently the final 13!) Trying to craft a "deserving" final four is preposterous – you're basically giving up. Craft a final four you can beat, then beat them.

Of course, it also helps to have people on your team who are not total idiots. In the reward challenge, teams must delegate one of four tasks to each participant. Cut a rope (using a rock) to release some handles; cut a log (using an axe) to release some more handles; insert the handles into a turnstile device and turn it to raise a cart; cut the rope (using a machete) to send the cart, with the rest of your team inside it, back down the hill. Yaxha appears to divide these tasks up pretty intelligently – selecting for brawn in the first two stages, then letting everyone else bring up the rear. Nakum... well, it's hard to say. All we see is that they select Jamie for the rope-cutting task, and then he does that until well after Yaxha has already won. And, in a way, you have to be happy that Yaxha takes the prize, since this week it includes a crocodile-free swimming cage, and according to Probst's opening narration, Yaxha "dodged deadly predators" last week, in the form of lake-borne crocodiles near their dock. I think Probst is on assignment from CBS to inject maximum intrigue into the smallest things, because "dodged" really implies "encountered" and "avoided," whereas what Yaxha did would more accurately be described as "noticed."

Still, I don't think Jamie is such a bad choice for the rope-cutting before the task. That's just bad luck: it looks like something he could do, but he fails. Can't blame the team for that. However, they all bear some responsibility for being absolute dolts once he begins to struggle. Brandon's over at Yaxha, hacking through that rope like Jay Leno through a lame monologue. Why stand on pride and refuse to follow his strategy? Jamie should look at Brandon's rope and copy him shamelessly. And the minute Jamie doesn't, everyone else should be screaming at him to do so. The task isn't impossible – Brandon shows us that. It just needs the right approach. Given floor seats at an exhibition of the winning method, why not learn something? Morons.

Fortunately, though, while almost nothing else has served as a wake-up call for Stephenie's struggling team, watching their opponents sail past them in a cart while they wait for the very first stage of the challenge to be over – well, it finally gets their attention. However, while I believe challenge performance depends mostly on will and luck, Lydia believes it hinges almost exclusively on morale. So she turns into a batshit hybrid of pep squawker Jamie and Palau's manic singer Wanda, boogying around camp, singing a ridiculous impromptu version of the Mighty Mouse theme song, and forcing me to picture myself squeezing the life out of her throat with my bare hands. (While, also, picturing Andy Kaufman.) If anything, this should cause Nakum to consider throwing the immunity challenge just so they can send her packing.

Instead, their determination to beat the losing streak overcomes their need for peace and quiet, and they dominate the catapult-and-rope-net task. Good for them! Now let's all relive last week's Judd-based swing-votery over at Yaxha, this time centering around Danni. (As much as I adore her, I still say always vote for the swing vote. And I'd adore her a lot more if Yaxha could win a few chitlins-and-chocolate-cake reward challenges in a row. I know I say this all the time for comic effect, but seriously: she's too skinny.)

The thing is, Blake is probably the best vote for everyone, and the only one too stubbornly "principled" to see it is Bobby Jon. Impressively, even he relents: Blake gets every vote except Brandon's and his own. In the TribCon pre-interview, Probst is still on Intrigue Patrol ("Did you guys notice? It's less humid than it was yesterday!!"). He refuses to drop the party-line-voting concept, and harping on that is only going to make things more contentious at Yaxha after the vote. How different it is to meet new people! How imbalanced the numbers are! How "unexpected" it is for the tribes to be shuffled! (Really? It's about as unexpected as a challenge involving rowing.) Then, when it's over and Danni has voted with people who were not on her team two weeks ago – gasp! – Probst cautions that it's "a big shift." Whatever, ass. If the contestants are actively engaged in their voting decisions, rather than lazily voting by rote, that's a good thing. Quit stirring the pot.

In the post-TribCon confessional, Blake is astonished that he, a glimmering physical specimen, could be eliminated from Yaxha. For one thing, dude, they have four left. You're not that valuable, and maybe? You don't win as many friends as you think by having a twenty minute conversation about how big your girlfriend's boobs are. Amy and Danni were visibly irked, Gary was jealous, and Brian could be seen remarking quizzically, under his breath, "Boobs?" (Meanwhile, by sheer coincidence, Brandon and Bobby Jon were both thinking the exact same thing: "Dude, my girlfriend has udders.")

Next week: Amy gets whiny about falling down during the Raiders of the Lost Ark challenge, and if you slow it down on TiVo, you can see that Nakum is celebrating victory in the background while Jamie and Bobby Jon get homoerotic. Let's hope it's another immunity!

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