Sarge, as is his privilege, shows up to the challenge with the immunity necklace around his neck. He’s also got that same icy cold stare that he’s been wearing for three days now. “Wow, Sarge,” Probst says. “You look angry.” Sarge stares him down. “Are you an assassin?” he asks. “I’m a game-show host,” Probst replies. “You’re neither,” Sarge says. “You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.”
“Oooooo-kay,” says Probst. He decides not to talk to Sarge any more.
This is my weekly recap of “Survivor: Vanuatu, Islands of Fire.” It tells you all sorts of secrets, including who goes home and who’s an errand boy. To protect you from scary spoilers, the article is hidden out of sight on the other side of the jump.
It’s night 21 on the newly christened Alinta beach — I’m sorry, but it still sounds like a mid-sized sport utility wagon to me — and the tribe’s suffering from the most serious case of repression ever recorded by medical science. The ex-Lopevi tribemates went into tribal council thinking they were six votes strong, but Julie and Twila flipped at the last minute and gave the girls’ alliance enough votes to send Rory home without a tiebreaker. The remaining men are stunned and the girls are giddy, and nobody’s talking about it.
“So this is men against women,” Chris says to Sarge in front of everybody. “I’ve never had anyone waver in my alliance,” he goes on. “Tonight was the first time the alliance wasn’t true.” He’s straining so hard not to mention Twila and Julie by name that he’s in serious danger of rupturing a blood vessel.
Some time passes, and we find Chris staring into the fire talking, strangely, in a sort of disconnected third person. “I trusted Julie. I trusted Twila,” he says. Twila, on the other side of the fire, says, “I thought I could trust you all too, but it didn’t seem like it was goin’ that way.” Chris seems not to hear her. I’m seriously starting to worry about the guy.
“Every day you learn a little bit more about people,” Sarge says in that same disconnected tone. “Yeah,” mumbles Chris.
After the girls go to bed, the boys assemble for a half-hearted pow-wow around the dying embers of the fire. “The game’s not over,” says Chris, flashing a grin that makes me wonder if he’s been getting enough sleep. “Anything can happen.”
Sarge sits and stares.
The next morning, day 22, finds Sarge and Chris sitting by the fire pit like condemned men. Sarge talks about how he thought Twila was sincere. Chris says that he guesses it came down to gender lines, that it’s “just a woman thing.” Sarge takes a sip of his coffee and stares. He’s giving off a serious Colonel Kurtz vibe here.
Scout comes over and takes a seat opposite Sarge and starts to sing a little song. Something about “picking on the bones.” We pan over to Sarge; he’s so tense we can hear the gristle pop. Scout keeps singing. Sarge glances at her out of the corner of his eye, picking out the vulnerable places. Rabbit punch to the back of the neck, she doubles over. Knee to the bridge of the nose, she goes down. Step on her throat, crush the windpipe. Quick and quiet. Sarge is one scary son of a bitch.
“You think it’s a reward challenge today?” Scout asks, oblivious of the gruesome thoughts of murder spinning just feet from where she sits. Sarge screws up his face, bites down on the kind of profanity rarely heard outside Camp Lejeune. A second passes. Two. Three. “Yeah,” Sarge says finally, blowing it out as if the sheer effort of forming the word caused him physical pain. He nods. “It might be.”
Cut to the jungle clearing where, as Scout predicted, the reward challenge is all set up and ready to go. It’s a gruesome scene. Arrayed on one side of the clearing are bamboo stakes with human skulls on top, each one bearing a crudely written sign with the name of a player in the game.
The tribe slinks in, and I don’t know if it’s the overall mood or the unmistakable intimation of human sacrifice in the air, but this is not a happy tribe. Without preamble, Probst explains the rules of the game: It’s a trivia contest, with a morbid twist. Probst will ask the contestants a series of multiple-choice or true-false questions. Get one right, and you earn the opportunity to take a flaming torch and light one of the skulls on fire. Each player in the game has three skulls. When your last skull is alight, you’re out of the game. So even if you get every question right, you can still lose. Harsh.
At the risk of breaking the mood here, can I just take a second to talk about Perfect Eliza’s breasts? Regular readers of this column already know my opinion of Perfect Eliza’s breasts: They’re spectacular. They’re stunning. They’re works of art. But I find it curious that they’re constantly … perky. Either it’s colder than it looks out there in the middle of the South Pacific, or she really enjoys the game. My roommate, the MD, says that it could be just the knowledge that she’s on television that does it. It’s a parasympathetic response, she says. Or maybe sympathetic. She can’t remember. Which I think says volumes about the state of health care in this country, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s sympathetic or parasympathetic or what, but I’m having a wonderful time trying to figure it out.
Probst goes on to tell the tribe what they’re playing for. It’s a field trip, basically. The winner of the game will take a helicopter ride across the island to the top of a dormant volcano — volcanoes again; way to hammer a theme into the mud, guys — where he or … who am I kidding? Where she will enjoy a picnic of champagne and chicken wings. The chicken wings, incidentally, appear to have cilantro on them. They must have been flown in from Santa Monica.
There’s no banter, no chit-chat. Probst pulls out his deck of index cards and fires off the first question. “The word ‘Vanuatu’ means (A) land of fire, (B) land eternal, (C) land of spirits.” Knowing that the name of the show is “Vanuatu, Islands of Fire,” I guess A. I’m completely wrong, and so are most of the players. The correct answer is “land eternal.” Perfect Eliza, Sarge and Scout get it right.
Perfect Eliza weeps crocodile tears as she sets fire to Cyborg Chad’s skull. (I know, I know, that sounds really weird. Get used to it. I’m gonna be saying it a lot throughout this section.) “This is awful,” she says. “Sorry!” Cyborg Chad’s skull goes off like a highway flare. They’re apparently carved out of coconut husks or something. Either that or white phosphorus. Sarge sets fire to Scout’s skull, and Scout lights Sarge’s skull.
Now, let’s take a second to review the scoring in this game, because it’s confusing. Sarge, Perfect Eliza and Scout got the first question right, but now Scout, Sarge and Cyborg Chad are all one point closer to elimination. See? Confusing.
Second question: “The archipelago of Vanuatu consists of how many islands? (A) 18, (B) 83, (C) 28.” For some reason the number 11 shot through my head, so I get this one completely wrong. The right answer is B, and everybody gets it. Let’s run through this quickly: Perky Eliza lights Chris’ skull on fire, apologizing to him for it along the way. Leann taps Sarge. Cyborg Chad lights Julie. Ami picks Sarge — that’s three for him, meaning he’s out of the game. Chris picks Ami, Julie picks Chad and Twila finishes him off. Both Sarge and Cyborg Chad are eliminated, and neither one of them look happy about it. Sarge, on his way to the losers’ lounge, sets Julie’s skull on fire; she protests: “I didn’t even hit you,” she says. Sarge rumbles, “Oh, it’s beyond that.” Everybody laughs. Sarge doesn’t laugh, though. Sarge holds on to that torch for a second, looking like he really wants to crack Julie’s gorgeous melon open with it just to see what she looks like on the inside. Eventually he puts it down and heads off to take a seat next to Cyborg Chad. Last one to take a turn, Scout picks Chris, leaving him just one away from elimination.
Third question: “According to Vanuatu culture, large, curved pig tusks are a sign of a person’s (A) wisdom, (B) courage, (C) fertility or (D) wealth.” Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Big, curved, pointy things? Obvious fertility symbol. But remembering the schtick from a couple of weeks ago about how pigs are valuable, I guess “wealth.” I’m right, as are Perfect Eliza, Twila and Scout. Perfect Eliza eliminates Chris — she apologizes again — and as Chris takes his seat he says, “Naw, it’s not a woman-man thing.” Ami snarks that there’s a little bitterness over on the loser’s bench. Now even I want to set her on fire. She’s a real charmer, huh?
With all the men gone, Probst makes the observation of a lifetime: “Now the women,” he says, “are forced to eat each other.”
Yeah, they sure …
I bet they …
It’s just like this movie …
Wow. Sometimes the setup is just too easy. I got nothin’.
Twila takes up the torch and lights one of Perfect Eliza’s skulls on fire, and Scout ignites one of Leann’s.
The fourth question is a true-or-false. “Local sorcerers often participate in magmay, a soul-cleaning ritual in which a small cup of lava is consumed to exorcise spirits and evil demons.” Bafflingly, Perfect Eliza, Leann and Julie seem to forget that lava is two-thousand-degree molten rock; they think it’s true. Ami, Twila and Scout see right through it; they say it’s false. They’re right, of course, and Probst makes fun of the other three girls. Everyone laughs but Sarge. Sarge just stares.
Ami picks on Twila, and Twila picks on Perfect Eliza. Scout makes some kind of remark about “deference” to Perfect Eliza’s knowledge, and eliminates her. Perfect Eliza is pissed at this, and doesn’t even try to hide it. “It shows you just where you are, doesn’t it boys?” she asks on her way to take a seat. “Great to see you guys.” Chris and Cyborg Chad both get the same look on their faces: They know that sometimes opportunity knocks and sometimes it just clinks softly at the glasses. Cyborg Chad grins. Chris can barely contain himself. Sarge just stares.
“This friendly game just turned,” Probst says. I don’t know if he’s talking about the reward challenge or the game as a whole; either way, he’s a little behind the curve.
The fifth question is also true-or-false. “Vanuatu has the highest concentration of different languages per capita of any country in the world.” It’s true, Probst informs us. There are over 100 different tribal languages spoken on the islands. I take a minute to look it up: According to the July 2004 estimate, there are about 202,000 Vanuatuis … Vanuatuites … people on the islands that make up Vanuatu. That makes it about one language for every 2,000 people, which I guess is pretty impressive. Julie, Twila and Scout get it right — only Ami blows it. Julie taps Scout, Twila eliminates Julie and Scout picks Ami.
The scores, with four left in the game: Leann has two, Ami has one, Twila has two and Scout has one. Last one standing wins, which means Ami and Scout are in worse shape than Leann and Twila.
Sixth question: “The tam-tam is a unique musical instrument which is an indigenous version of an (A) horn, (B) rattle, (C) drum.” The correct answer is C; Scout and Leann get it right. Leann eliminates Scout, and on her way out Scout eliminates Ami. We’re down to two players, and the score is tied.
Seventh question: “The national currency of Vanuatu is the vatu, a word meaning (A) stone, (B) pig, (C) coconut.” I guessed pig, but it’s actually stone. Leann gets it right, giving her a one-point advantage over Twila. If Leann gets this next question right, she wins the game.
Eighth question: “The national dish of Vanuatu is (A) yam-yam, (B) lap-lap, (C) pop-pop.” Goo-goo, ga-ga, the right answer is B and Leann gets it. She wins the game.
As is customary, Probst tells Leann to pick one other member of the tribe to take with her on her picnic. “It’s not any fun goin’ alone,” he says, which strikes me as odd; after three weeks of living with these people, I’d think that going off alone would be a hell of a lot of fun. But Leann plays along. She doesn’t even have to think it over; she names Jules immediately. Julie hops up. They hug and laugh and kiss and it’s so cute I think I’m gonna puke. Probst is customarily Probsty: “For you guys,” he says, glaring at the losers, “it’s over. Get your stuff and go home.”
First commercial break. The creative director who thought of running an Old Navy ad with carolers in it in the second week of November is going to hell.
As Leann and Jules board the helicopter we hear Leann explain why she picked Julie as her picnic partner. “Julie was the one person that I was a little unclear about as far as where she stood and where her head was at.” So it’s a come-to-Jesus meeting, evidently. One with champagne and chicken wings.
What follows is a three-minute montage of the girls really, really enjoying their helicopter ride. Vanuatu is pretty, I guess is the point here. The girls’ destination is a dormant volcano the name of which I didn’t catch and probably couldn’t spell anyway. When you say “dormant volcano” I think blasted earth and solidified lava, but this volcano is really dormant. There are trees growing in the crater and stuff. It’s been quiet for decades, maybe centuries. It’s surreal and beautiful. A great spot for a picnic.
The girls spread out their blanket and pop the cork on their champagne — they’ve got a bottle each; I think what the producers are going for here is in vino veritas — and munch away on the chicken wings. They laugh and giggle and snort and chuckle, and then they begin to dish. The first topic is Perfect Eliza. Leann remarks that Eliza’s comments at the challenge worried the fuck out of her. (The expletive is deleted for broadcast, of course, but that doesn’t stop me. Muah-ha-ha. Drunk with power, I labor on.) Jules observes that the boys were doing their part to feed Eliza’s bitterness — all except for Sarge, who just stared — and Leann notes that Eliza might just be gullible enough to fall for it. Then comes the inevitable math. “If you think about it,” Jules says, “we could lose Eliza over Chris first.” Which is an interesting comment, because it makes it sound like Chris is the dead man walking this week. I wonder if Chris knows that. Then I remember that he said anything could happen. I applaud his optimism, but come on.
The girls then summarize the key dilemma facing Survivor players: whether to get to a final four with players that deserve it, or to get there with players that they know they can beat. Seems like kind of a “duh” situation to me; there’s no prize for third place, only for first and second. Screw the people who deserve it. The people who deserve it are out there planning your imminent departure right this very minute. Take them out as fast as you can, and bring along the lamest set of rejects you can find to defeat at the last tribal council. But then again, I’m sitting here on my couch with a dog next to me — snoring — and a laptop on my lap. I guess I have a slightly different perspective.
Back at the Alinta beach, Scout decides that now is the moment to make fun of Perfect Eliza. “Look at you,” she says, pinching Eliza’s cheeks and making the noogie-noogie face. She looks around the circle. “She’s all pissed off,” Scout says, gesturing at Eliza as the younger girl walks away, back ramrod straight and cheeks hot. Twila says something to Perfect Eliza that we don’t catch, and Perfect Eliza replies, “It is personal. It’s definitely personal.”
“Yeah, this whole thing is just a came,” Perfect Eliza says privately. “Scout’s right. But if she weren’t here one more day, I’d be a happy camper.”
If three boys aren’t making desperate plans to ensure their future right now, they’re just idiots who deserve to lose this game. Perfect Eliza is just begging them to bring her into a counter-alliance, to land one more vote so they can take out Ami and break the back of the six-way girls’ cabal. She’s begging. Plus, of course, she’s perfect. Always a plus.
Chris, for his part, seems at least to have noticed the situation. “The challenge definitely showed vulnerability in the women’s alliance,” he says. “We see a weakness right there. It definitely opened up some doors.”
The boys decide to take a pow-wow, and the way they choose to do it is actually pretty clever. The three of them pile into an outrigger canoe and paddle out into the bay. Long lines of sight and no chance of being snuck up on. Must have been Sarge’s idea … assuming he’s still functioning at this point. He’s got the Colonel Kurtz thing going on. He’s been dangerously close to either all-out catatonia or a sociopathic break for a while now.
Chris opens the meeting with the wagging-finger thing. “Eliza is definitely in doubt of her position with the group,” he says, poking the air to emphasize his point. “She is vulnerable,” he says.
Wait, what? Oh, Lord. The boys have the perfect opportunity to flip Perfect Eliza here, to recruit her into their alliance of three, and what do they do? That’s right. They start making plans to take her out at the next opportunity. Their only possible friend right now — with the possible exception of Twila, whom we’ll get to later — and they’re plotting her assassination. Brilliant, guys. Just great.
“She’s a token player,” says Cyborg Chad. “We have got to take Eliza out,” says Chris, missing it completely, the putz.
Chris and Cyborg Chad cackle malevolently, the open water swallowing up the echoes. Sarge just stares. “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor,” he wheezes. No one seems to hear.
In the distance, a helicopter appears. Jules and Leann are crazy-go-nuts excited to be heading back home. I have no idea why, unless they’re just plain crazy-go-nuts by this point. Or maybe it’s the champagne. “I do love these people,” Jules says to Leann over the intercom. “Me too,” Leann replies. “Maybe I’m just drunk,” Jules says. “Me too,” Leann replies.
A C-130 flies past and drops a daisy cutter into the jungle of the island’s interior. The shock wave from the massive explosion blasts out, flattening everything and creating a hundred-foot-wide landing zone in the shape of a perfect circle. The copter pilot brings it in full-throttle; the girls leap out and run all-out for the treeline as tracer fire screams by inches over their heads. Caked with blood and dirt and fear sweat, the girls dive into the undergrowth as the helo dusts off behind them, rotors tearing spiral gashes in the wet jungle air.
Sometimes you have to make your own fun.
Jules and Leann come into camp whooping at the top of their lungs, stopping only long enough to ask where the boys are. Reassured that the boys are still out on the canoe a hundred yards from shore, they start yelling and going crazy again. Jules — who has apparently see The Great Escape almost as many times as I have — hitches up her pant leg to reveal a bag strapped to the inside of her calf. She smuggled back a handful of chicken wings and a bigger handful of bones. Leann and Jules breathlessly tell the girls that the wings are for them, and the bones are for the boys.
Harsh. So harsh.
The girls, chicken wings in hand, sprint into the safety of the treeline to eat out of sight of the returning boys. They pick the bones clean, tossing them deeper into the jungle — I have a vision of Cyborg Chad stepping on one of the well-gnawed bones, snapping it cleaning in half with a wet crunch. Perfect Eliza hears the gritty sound of the canoe making landfall on the beach. She cranes her neck to see where the boys are and in the process sticks out her chest. Yeah. Parasympathetic response. Or sympathetic. Whichever. Either way, I like it. It gives me a happy.
The girls reassemble on the beach, wiping the last of the grease from their mouths and picking bits of cartilage from their back teeth. After a few pleasantries, Leann makes a huge show of asking Julie, “Did you give them the bones?” Jules reveals her stash of bones and passes them around the group. The boys are happy to have ’em; they tear into them like the starving men that by this time they probably technically are. The girls, just to put salt on the wound, don’t hesitate to worry the last little scraps of meat off either.
Oh so harsh.
Second commercial break. Absolutely nothing worth talking about happens.
Back on the island, it’s evidently the next morning; the Chyron tells us that it’s Day 23. Perfect Eliza wanders off to get the tribe’s “tree-mail,” and when she gets there she finds not just the requisite message but also something else. Whether it’s food, a pet or a new member of the tribe remains to be seen; all we know at this point is that it’s a pig.
Perfect Eliza grabs the rope to which the pig is tied and tries to drag him — and it is a him; we’re treated to a nice close-up of the pig’s testicles — back to camp. Pigs, it is evidently not widely known, are very stubborn and very noisy little critters, and they don’t take kindly to being led on a leash. Piggy plants his hooves in the sand and squeals like … well, see?
Perfect Eliza eventually manages to get him within shouting — and squealing — range of camp, and Chris comes out to see what the fuss is all about. He takes matters in hand by hoisting the pig under his arm and carrying him, squirming and squealing, into camp. Twila and Sarge show up to the party armed. “We must kill them,” says Kurtz — I mean Sarge. “We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army.” Nobody seems to hear him. Or maybe nobody’s willing to make eye contact with him while he’s got a weapon in his hand.
“You both have machetes,” Perfect Eliza observes. “Good start.” She goes on to read the accompanying note, which as usual is in the form of a bad poem. Long story short, they can’t kill and eat the pig. They’re supposed to keep the pig fed and happy for reasons that are sure to be revealed later. I guess that rules out food; the question of pet or tribe-mate remains unanswered for the time being.
It’s time for the immunity challenge. Y’all all know by now how I feel about obstacle courses, right? I might not have made it clear up to this point, but second only to the obstacle course in my pantheon of hate is the puzzle. Today’s immunity challenge is, inevitably, a puzzle. Thanks, producers. Thanks a lot. This one takes the form of a simple jigsaw made up of colored pieces, each one color on one side and a different color on the other side. Probst will show the contestants a picture of what their puzzle is supposed to look like, then they get a fixed amount of time to arrange the pieces to reproduce the picture. It’s a worthy challenge, sure, but it’s something better suited for those tests they give third graders to see if they’re gifted or not. It has very little to do with life in the jungle primeval.
Sarge, as is his privilege, shows up to the challenge with the immunity necklace around his neck. He’s also got that same icy cold stare that he’s been wearing for three days now. “Wow, Sarge,” Probst says. “You look angry.” Sarge stares him down. “Are you an assassin?” he asks. “I’m a game-show host,” Probst replies. “You’re neither,” Sarge says. “You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.”
“Oooooo-kay,” says Probst. He decides not to talk to Sarge any more. He takes the immunity necklace — really, really quickly — and gets right into the game. He holds up a card showing the players what their puzzles need to look like. It’s got some red parts and some yellow parts and some green parts. He holds it up for a bit, giving them all a good look, then takes it down. Ready-set-go.
This part is why I hate puzzles. They are sometimes fun to do. They are never fun to watch on television. And when it comes to writing about them, they are actually anti-fun. They have negative fun value. They suck the fun out of things around them, making things that would normally be fun to write about less fun by their mere existence. They are not fun.
But I’m a team player. I’m going to write about the puzzle anyway. Here we go: Perfect Eliza works her puzzle. Meanwhile, Cyborg Chad works his puzzle. While that’s going on, Ami works her puzzle. Simultaneously, Julie works her puzzle. It looks for a second like Leann is not working her puzzle, but it turns out she’s just taking a moment to think. Scout works her puzzle, Twila works her puzzle, Chris works his puzzle. And, just to keep things interesting, Sarge works his puzzle.
And then the time expires, and everyone stops.
Just fucking shoot me now.
Probst comes over to inspect the kids’ work. Perfect Eliza gets hers right. Cyborg Chad gets his wrong. Ami gets hers right. Julie gets hers right. Leann gets hers right. Scout gets hers right. Twila gets hers right. Chris and Sarge both get theirs wrong.
All the men got their puzzles wrong. All the girls got their puzzles right. Somewhere there’s a grad student who’s working furiously on a paper extrapolating these results into the conclusion that all men are mouth-breathing psychopaths with bad spatial relations skills and that all women are brilliant games theorists. Also that 16% of all women have erect nipples all the time.
The men take a seat; Probst runs through the whole damn thing again with the women. This time, Perfect Eliza, Ami, Julie and Leann get it right; Scout and Twila get it wrong. Those two girls hit the bench and Probst takes us into a third round.
At this point I’m wondering what would happen if nobody got it right. Or if everybody got it right. Or if an enraged wild boar were to charge the set. Or if something interesting would happen. That’d be cool.
Perfect Eliza gets her puzzle wrong. Everybody else gets it right. Perfect Eliza takes a seat, and goddamn if we don’t have to go through this whole thing again.
While we wait, I’ll entertain you with a little anecdote. We’re experiencing the first real cold snap of the season here in Texas; it’s getting down into the 50s at night. My roommate just asked me, on her way upstairs to bed, “Is your window open?” I told her that I was sure it was. “I’m closing your door, then,” she said, “because I’m frigid.”
“I think you mean ’freezing,’” I told her. “Unless there’s something I don’t know.” She laughed, but in the awkward, vaguely uncomfortable way that says she doesn’t quite get the joke.
The remaining girls — Ami, Julie and Leann — work their puzzles. Probst checks their work and decrees that Ami got it right, but that Jules and Leann both blew it. Ami wins immunity.
Sarge just stares.
Third and final commercial break. Toys ’R’ Us is still around, Plavix makes your heart healthier and that blonde on the “Cold Case” show is pretty darned cute.
Back at camp, Ami confesses privately that winning the challenge might not have been the best idea in the world. She’s already seen as a strong competitor, she says, and winning might just make that worse. “But I can’t let myself play bad,” she says. She has no problem letting herself talk “bad,” evidently.
She goes on to say that she’s planning to vote for Sarge tonight, that he needs to go because he’s a strong competitor and that now’s the time since he doesn’t have immunity. Cut to a shot of Sarge perched, contrapposto, on a volcanic outcropping, looking out to sea … scanning the horizon, waiting for a rescue that will never come.
Sarge will go home when the game is over. Sarge will go home to his wife and his children. He will never tell them. He will keep it secret, keep it locked away. But it will be true: He left his soul on that island, that little bump of land in the middle of the blue Pacific. A part of him — the best part, the most human part — will always remain there. He thinks this as he stares into the misty depths of the infinite horizon, and he knows that it’s true. “As for the charges against me,” he thinks, “I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid lying morality, and so I am beyond caring.”
Chris and Cyborg Chad concoct a pretense to take Scout into the jungle for a little chat. She hides nothing. “It’s just me personally,” she says on the subject of Perfect Eliza, “but she drives me nutty.”
Perfect Eliza, meanwhile, takes Ami aside to talk about Scout. “She’s out plotting with them right now,” she says. Ami is so unapologetically arrogant that I just want to punch her right in the mouth. “I think it’s funny,” she says, strutting through the jungle like she’s deciding where the mass grave should be. I absolutely cannot stand that woman.
Let’s talk strategy for a second. There are nine votes out there. Right now, purely on gender lines, the girls have six and the boys have three. It’s pretty safe to assume, since Ami makes it so completely clear that she’s calling the shots all the way, that the six girl votes are going to Sarge tonight. But Scout despises Perfect Eliza. If the boys can convince her to vote for Eliza instead of Sarge, that leaves the girls with only five votes. If they can then get Eliza to vote for Ami — probably not a difficult proposition, given how clearly Eliza’s position in the pecking order was established during the reward challenge — then the boys will have four votes for Ami versus four girl votes for Sarge and Scout’s lone vote for Perfect Eliza. A tie would go to a tie-breaker, which I think is decided based on how many votes each of the tied players has received in previous tribal councils. I’m not going back to review the minutes here, but I think Sarge has received none and Ami has received at least one, so Sarge wins the tie-breaker and the girls’ alliance is effectively and decisively decapitated. All but for that stupid immunity necklace.
But can the boys think of this? And will Scout and Perfect Eliza go along with it without running home to Ami? And, more importantly, is there a way to do it without completely burning Scout as an asset? There are a lot of ifs in this equation. But it’s better than just lying there and taking it.
“Jules and Leann have gotten to be kind of tight,” Scout says in voiceover while we watch Leann and Julie dance the tango. That’s not a metaphor, and I’m not kidding. Julie and Leann are dancing the tango, out in the middle of the jungle, with no music and nobody around. It’s easily the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen. Leann leads, but I think at one point I see Julie’s hand slip inside the other girl’s shirt to the bare small of her back. This makes me happy. “There might be some changes,” Scout is saying. “Hell, I might be sent home tonight.”
Cut to a close-up of the pig. He yawns. Who he’s voting for, no one can say.
Meanwhile, Sarge and Twila are having a confrontation in another part of the jungle. Twila says that she voted for Rory because she thought the boys were getting ready to fuck her over. (Her choice of words.) “Would you not have gotten the same feeling?” she asks. “No,” says Sarge from behind that patented thousand-yard stare. “You gave me your word, Twila,” he shouts. Suddenly he’s visibly angry. “I would have walked off this game today before I crossed your word.”
Twila, speaking privately, drops a bombshell. “I screwed up when I didn’t vote with the guys,” she says. “I’ve had more respect out of these three guys than I ever got over at the girls’ camp.” So now it seems like Perfect Eliza, Scout and Twila are all three in play. All the boys have to do is flip Perfect Eliza and Twila — which should not be hard — and they’ll have the majority of the votes to do with as they will. They can’t attack Ami, but they can attack her base of power: Scout, maybe, or Julie. As much as I hate to see Julie go, that girl is devious. She’s a real threat. And she’s vulnerable tonight, if the boys can just get their act together.
Sarge emerges from the jungle and heads for the beach, probably to find a little creature and kill it slowly. Cyborg Chad catches him. “Remember that plan we were talking about in the boat?” he asks. “I just thought of it. If you us three, Twila, and we got Eliza because she’s next on the chopping block, can it be five-four?”
If Cyborg Chad is just now thinking of this, then he deserves to lose in the most humiliating way possible. Come on, man. We’re down to nine people. You can count the votes without even using any toes. Use your brain.
Chris understands the situation — I don’t know if he counted for himself or if he got the news flash from Cyborg Chad. He says, “We don’t have the numbers. Unless we can pull something off with Twila and Eliza, it’s over.”
The tribe files into tribal council and takes their seats. Probst turns on his talk-show-host act. He says to Eliza, “You were the first woman knocked out” of the reward challenge. “You weren’t hiding anything.” Eliza walks a fine line between coming clean and lying through her teeth. “I was pissed,” she says truthfully. “I would have been pissed if I was the second-to-last person knocked out too,” she adds, which everybody knows is a lie. She might have been pissed, sure, but she would have been pissed for entirely different reasons.
Probst follows up: “The reason I bring it up is, dating back as far as, I think, the first tribal council” — it was the second, and please don’t tell anybody that I knew that without having to look it up — “it seems like you’ve been struggling with this group of women. Are you still fighting a little bit?”
Perfect Eliza: “I’m the only woman who came tonight with a bag packed.” Pretty much says it all, I think.
Probst addresses Sarge: “Are you starting to sense some division within the women?” Sarge: “I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead, and I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters.”
Probst remembers that he’d decided not to talk to Sarge any more. He blows through the rest of the question-and-answer section — there really wasn’t anything there worth writing down — and gets to the last little bit of exposition. He explains that the last nine players in the game don’t go home when their tenure is over. As they’re voted out, they join the jury, the panel of ex-players who will ultimately decide who takes first place and the million-dollar prize and who finishes second. The person voted out tonight — the ninth-place finisher — will be the first member of the jury.
That explained, Probst sends the kids off to vote. One by one they write down a name and put a ballot in the urn, until finally it’s Chris’ turn. We hear him in voiceover: “I’m gonna burn every one of ’em. Just let ’em open a door. This is for you, not against you.” Only then do we see his ballot: Sarge.
I’m not gonna pretend to understand any part of that. I’m not gonna pretend to understand why he would bail out on his alliance, why he would seemingly commit in-game suicide or how he could possibly think that his vote could in any way be for Sarge. Maybe he just misspoke. Like Neil Armstrong, he had one chance to get his line right in front of a billion people, and he blew it. He really meant to say, “This is for me, not against you.” That would have made a lot more sense.
The final vote cast, Probst retrieves the urn and pulls out the ballots one by one. Vote for Sarge. Vote for Perfect Eliza. Vote for Julie. (The three-way split is confusing to me. Did Scout vote for Eliza?) Vote for Sarge. Vote for Sarge. Vote for Sarge, vote for Sarge.
For a moment it looks like Sarge isn’t going to budge. He just stares into the fire as if he weren’t even listening. Then he speaks, low, under his breath. I had to rewind it and turn on the closed captioning to make it out. He says, “I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be. I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything you saw, because there’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, you will do this for me.” A beat, then: “The horror. The horror.”
Cut. Print. That’s a wrap.
Next week on “Survivor”: It rains and rains and rains some more, and Scout tries to lead a coup d’etat.
Back issues
- Pants of fire: Survivor Week 1
- Swing vote, my ass: Survivor Week 2
- French-braid this: Survivor Week 3
- Victory through tapioca: Survivor Week 4
- Stupid is as stupid does: Survivor Week 5
- The secret word is ‘ass’: Survivor Week 6
- It’s nap time: Survivor Week 7
- Baby did a bad, bad thing: Survivor Week 8
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