Thu, April 20, 2006

So, here we are. It's down to two former La Minans and six former Casayans. The game is essentially over (at least in the minds of Shane and Aras). So there's nothing left to do but watch videos from home. I'm not going to deny what a delightful reward this would be for these people who've been separated from their families for weeks and subjected to the most tortuous physical and emotional abuse this side of Camp X-Ray. But, in terms of exhausting my already dwindling strength, which could become very important in an upcoming immunity challenge? I don't think I'd try as hard for the family video as I would for the toothbrush or the cheeseburger. Maybe if my family sent an episode of The Colbert Report.

(Of course, this time around, they've added a PBJ to the family video reward, just to further nullify my already flimsy argument against it.)

The reward challenge is actually one of the more entertaining and well designed. Hell, at this point I'll get excited about anything that doesn't have a balance beam or a cage maze. (Next week: carry a stack of your family videos through a cage maze on a balance beam – for remmunity!) Courtney and Danielle lay on planks dangling from bungee cords a few feet off the ground, Mission: Impossible-style. They are pulled around a square pen like Macy's balloons by rope teams consisting of – respectively – Bruce/Sally/Terry and Shane/Aras/Cirie. The goal is to pull and stretch the prone ladies around the pen so they can retrieve, in order, 15 numbered flags from various notches in the four corner posts and three of the four logs along the perimeter of the pen floor. Then, the flags must be slotted into 15 holes along the remaining floor log. (Coach Probst demands cooperation and teamsmanship!)

It's kind of a tie, until Aras knocks flag 1 out of his team's log by swinging his rope too quickly, which means Dani must drop everything and go back to put it right. The team never quite recovers from this mistake, and so Terry, Sally, and Bruce win, along with Courtney who is virtually slingshotted off her plank when they all simultaneously release their ropes in celebration. Hee.

What's strange is that we never get to see the videos. I thought weepy, sentimental garbage like this was the sort of thing Survivor was desperate to shoehorn into the program at this stage. (It's Burnett's last opportunity to showcase his SentiWeep technoglogy before the Promenade of Bygone Contestants in the final three.) Sure, we see the "preview clips" from each video – just enough to see that Sally's supposedly estranged parents are present and smiling – but we never see the actual videos of the winning foursome. Very odd.

Stranger still, Aras is sent to Exile Island. It's hard to figure out this move by Terry and Sally – on the one hand, maybe they think it'll be easier to work on the rest of Casaya without him around, but why would Terry want to risk Aras finding the empty mini idol hole and discovering for sure that Terry has it? Also, Aras asked Casaya to exile him, because he wants to look for the mini idol. It seems like Terry should be more suspicious when Bruce and Courtney are like, "Yeah! Send Aras!" Plus, why would anyone pass up a chance to exile Shane at this point? Hurry, before it's too late!

What follows is truly hilarious – and no, I don't mean Shane's elaborate ruse to make Cirie look at his penis by pretending he's afraid of a rash on his scrotum. (Ingenious – I'll have to file that away for later.) Even with the cleverly edited "owl double take" footage, this whole sequence is just a giant waste of time.

No, what's hilarious is Aras on Exile Island. First, he demands exile so he could sniff around and see what Terry is hiding. He's certain that Terry doesn't really have the mini idol, so he wants to get it for himself. Then, he finds the increasingly obvious mini idol clue list – which has only become more obvious since Terry left – and can't figure out what it's telling him. Then comes the beautiful part. Fed up with looking, he decides to give up, but, being Aras, he must rationalize this so that it seems like a really brilliant tactical move. He decides that since Terry sent him to E.I., that must mean Terry already has the mini idol, because he wouldn't risk Aras finding it if he weren't already certain of its whereabouts. So, Terry must have sent him for the sole purpose of weakening him. Which means searching for the mini idol would be a waste of time – "there's no sense in me looking for it." This is beautiful, because it's a 180-degree reversal from the reason he begged to be exiled in the first place, and because Aras is so sure of himself – as he always is – that he can't even conceive that he might have reasoned that out incorrectly in his paranoid haze. Seems to me, even if you think that's why Terry sent you, the very best use of your time would be to search anyway, just to be sure. If you're concocting paranoid theories, why stop short of: "Terry sent me because he wanted me to think he already has the idol and there's no point looking for it, but actually he doesn't. So I should look!"?

Then it's the immunity-or-feast choice from last time (Steph and BJ's Return: The Re-Survivoring). Ordinarily, I would blanch at this dopey device, as I do at so many others, except for its proven ability to seed dissent within the dominant alliance. As usual, it does not disappoint. Everyone instantly chooses the feast, except Terry, Sally, and Aras. Aras says he's concerned he might be going home – but, more importantly, he's the only Casayan to stand up and try to keep immunity out of the hands of Sally and Terry. If he'd taken the feast, too, Casaya would have all but guaranteed that they'd be forced to vote out one of their own. But they're not thinking that far ahead – they just want to eat. (And, presumably, they all know Aras is too full of himself to choose the feast over the challenge.) Courtney, Cirie, Danielle, Shane, and Bruce stuff their faces as fast as they can, while Terry, Sally, and Aras swim out into the ocean to memorize an underwater pictogram code and swim back to reproduce it on land. (And, by the way, ow! It's no fun opening your eyes in salt water, and damn hard to see anything if you do.) As Terry emerges first from the ocean, Coach Probst announces his arrival. And Courtney, her mouth overflowing with cheeseburger, gives a pitch-perfect Phoebe Buffay "Oh no..." This is the sort of thing that would redeem her, if she were at all redeemable. Aras gets out of the water next, and he assembles his puzzle first, but of course it's wrong. Terry finishes moments later, and his is correct. (You better believe they teach fighter pilots how to memorize things.)

So, Sally tries to form a women's bloc to vote against Aras, which would spare Terry having to give her one of his immunities. And this fails, so Sally goes home. She says she doesn't hold it against Terry that he didn't donate an immunity, which is nice. It's a great way to retain her jury vote even though he didn't sacrifice himself in order keep her there. Pretty much the closest he could have come to guaranteeing her a final four slot would've been to throw the dangling sloth immunity challenge and let Nick win, then deploy the mini idol, felling Aras and diminishing the Casaya numbers advantage. As fun as this would have been, it wouldn't have guaranteed La Mina to beat Casaya (who'd still have a 5-4 advantage). And, without the numbers, La Mina hurts him more than they help him: they're tough to compete against (not to mention hungry for immunity). I think Terry's playing it as smart as he can. He's still at a significant disadvantage, which requires a lot of immunity wins, but he's playing the mini idol close to his chest. Every week another La Minan gets evicted and he doesn't step up to donate the mini idol, Aras becomes surer and surer that he doesn't have it, which will prove handy in a number of ways. Now, Terry just has to keep winning immunity – and the nice thing is, as soon as he loses it, he can deploy the mini idol and eliminate Aras, his biggest threat in the final two, and his greatest competition in the remaining immunity challenges. It won't be easy, but it's not entirely unfeasible.

Next week, apparently Shane wants to "turn the game." Well, this is certainly going to throw a wrench into the plans of Aras, who was hoping for next week's episode to be in the form of an Eight Is Enough-style sitcom, with him as the benevolent and all-knowing Dad, raising these hapless kids. It should be entertaining to see what Shane's brilliant plan is. Maybe the video glimpse of his kid has him thinking of quitting again. Also, footage implies that Bruce is the one on the stretcher. If true, this would be the most sinister Survivor bait-and-switch ever. They knew we'd think it was Shane or Aras. (Or at least Courtney!) How dare they trumpet the medical emergency of the game's most boring player as a big event! A pox on Burnett's first born!

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