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 a cheap date. To protect you from scary spoilers, the article is hidden out of sight on the other side of the jump.
Editor’s note: I wrote this while in the terminal stage of some kind of God-forsaken tropical disease unknown to modern medical science. If any of it is funny or entertaining, or anything other than the fevered ravings of a dying man, it’s purely coincidental.
In my first column I described kava as “muddy water with twigs and dead bugs floating in it, plus vodka.” Perfect Eliza describes it this way: “It kind of tastes like mud mixed with water and vodka.” No, kids, I’m not making that up. She really uses the same description, almost word for word, I used ten long weeks ago. On the one hand, that’s really neat. On the other, I spend an hour searching my house for hidden cameras and microphones.
It’s night 24 on Alinta beach, and it’s time for our regular weekly tribal council postmortem. Chris opens up the group session: “That was the toughest tribal council I’ve been to.” The other players make noises of assent. Chris goes on: “Ten minutes before we left camp, Sarge asked me who I was voting for.” There’s dramatic music: dum-dum-dum. “Right before we started walking, he grabbed me by the shoulder and told me to vote for him.” There’s a catch in Chris’ voice. He’s on the verge of tears, recounting the tale of Sarge’s heroic act of self-sacrifice.
It is, of course, all a huge lie. In private, Chris reveals that Sarge did no such thing, that he voted for Sarge purely out of desire to save his own skin. “I voted for Sarge to stay close to the women,” he says. Which seems kinda funny to me. He wasn’t a swing vote, after all. Sarge won by a landslide. Chris just threw his ballot on the giant pile of votes that had already been cast. But whatever.
Flash forward to the wee small hours of the morning. Scout scoots out of the shelter and laces up her boots. Ami opens one crusty eye and asks Scout if she’s getting up. “Yeah,” Scout says. “Oh,” Ami says, and she continues to stare. “You can use my pillow,” Scout says. “Okay,” sighs Ami. She rolls over and goes back to sleep.
Scout sneaks off to where Chris and Cyborg Chad are sleeping. She nudges them both and whispers, “I have a plan.” She doesn’t elaborate, but she tells the boys that she knows how to keep them in the game “for a few more days.” Chris rolls over, mumbles, “That’s the best news I’ve heard,” immediately starts snoring.
I don’t know about these guys but I’m not at my best when I’ve just woken up. Whether anybody but Scout will remember these exchanges in the morning remains to be seen.
Time passes. The sun comes up. A volcano, unsurprisingly, explodes. Twila and Scout go on a “tree-mail” run and find a little wooden ropey thing and, as usual, a bad poem announcing their reward challenge. The gist of it is that somebody’s going to be digging, and the tribe’s pig — the mysterious gift they got with their “tree-mail” last week — is involved. Cut to a shot of Ami down on her knees kneading the pig’s shoulders like he’s Muhammed Ali getting ready to fight Joe Frazier.
The tribe hauls their pig, squealing all the way, to the beach, where they find … oh, Jesus-Mary-Joesph-and-the-camel. It’s another fucking obstacle course.
“He needs a buff,” Chris calls to Probst, referring to the pig. Probst, who remembers his Boy Scout training, says, “You know, I thought you might want a buff.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out an orange Alinta tribal buff. Probst is so cool.
Chris adorns the pig — who, Ami tells us, answers to the name “Piggy” — with the new buff and shoves him into a nearby cage. Probst asks, “Has it been nice having a little company?” Everybody kinda stares at their shoes for a minute — reactions to the pig ranged from callous indifference to outright disgust to slavering hunger. Twila says, diplomatically, “When you’re hungry, you want meat.” Everybody laughs.
Probst explains the rules of the fucking obstacle course. As much as it pains me to admit this — and believe me, it does cause me actual physical pain — it actually sounds kinda neat. There are two identical courses arranged in parallel. In each, there’s a rope that’s wound over, under, around and through various obstacles. The tribe of eight is going to get split into two teams of four, each team assigned to one of the two obstacle courses. One member of each team is going to be affixed to the rope with his or her hands bound. The other three members of the team will be responsible for maneuvering the fourth member through the course.
Okay, bottom line: It’s a fucking obstacle course. But it’s a creative and potentially painful one. So it’s not all bad, I guess.
The reward this week is another field trip, this one kind of on the lame side. The winning foursome will be taken deep into the jungle to stay overnight with a tribe of native Waponis. They’ll take their pig to present to the tribe’s chief as a sort of squealy, stinky housewarming gift or something. The details are frankly lost on me.
Probst declares that the teams will be chosen randomly, presumably by lots or something. That part happens off-screen; when we next see our contestants, they’re already divided up, in gear, and ready to go. On one team we have Perfect Eliza, Cyborg Chad, Chris and Ami; Perfect Eliza has her hands tied and is affixed to the rope with a sort of cast-iron carabiner. It’s very bondage-and-discipline. The other team is composed of Scout, Twila, Leann and Jules, with Jules as the submissive. If you think it’s a coincidence that the two players whom everybody wants to feel up are standing there helpless waiting to be carried through the course, you’re fooling yourselves.
Ready, set, go. The two teams rush forward. Jules dives headfirst through the first obstacle, then wiggles back under it. Chris and Cyborg Chad do it a little more directly: They pick up Perfect Eliza and manhandle her through the obstacle. The sound is really bad, but we can read Perfect Eliza’s lips as she winces and says, “Don’t pull so hard.” Cyborg Chad leans in and whispers, “The safety word is banana” and kisses her hard on the mouth. She lets out a little moan as Chris picks her up and pushes her through the obstacle again.
Okay, back to reality now.
The two teams run the obstacle course. It looks really painful, and there are plenty of shots of pretty girls in awkward poses. But it’s still an obstacle course. These factors perfectly cancel each other out, resulting in a net zero entertainment value. Five minutes of dead air would have been just as good.
The team of Perfect Eliza, Chris, Cyborg Chad and Ami win the race. They hug and holler and celebrate. The other foursome — Scout, Twila, Leann and Jules — are visibly disappointed. Julie’s eyes fill with tears. Probst asks her, “Are you upset because you lost or because you’re hurting?” She looks down at an otherwise perfect 23-year-old body marred with bleeding scrapes and fresh bruises. She really thinks the question over. “We lost,” she says finally. She gestures at the course, at how far they’ve come. “It was a lot of work.”
First commercial break. The Spongebob Squarepants movie opens tomorrow. My roommate says she doesn’t get Spongebob Squarepants. This doesn’t surprise me. If you knew her, it wouldn’t surprise you, either.
When we come back, the four reward winners plus Piggy are flying in what looks like a vintage 1938 turboprop over a stretch of black water separating two of what are presumably the dozens and dozens of islands that make up the nation of Vanuatu. “Extremely rickety” is the first thing that pops into my head when I see this aircraft. “May I please get out?” is the second.
Piggy feels the same way, evidently, because we’re informed that while the two boys and two girls are having a wonderful time, the pig decides to take a big leak right in the middle of the plane. It stinks, Perfect Eliza tells us. Never having smelled pig urine myself, I can only take her word for it. I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t smell like frying bacon, but I’ll get over it.
The plane lands, and the foursome plus one board a bus. The bus takes them deep in to the jungle along a dirt road that looks like it was hacked out of the forest by machete, like, yesterday. They get where they’re going — an undistinguished clearing in the jungle utterly identical to every other clearing in the jungle — and disembark. From out of sight come a group of about twenty little people in grass skirts. From the lighting and the camera angles it’s kinda hard to tell whether they’re children or pygmies. Upon closer inspection, it seems like they’re both. There are a lot of children in the group, but the grown-ups don’t come up above Chris’s shoulders. Four of the smallest ones come forward and sing, “We represent the Lollypop Guild, the Lollypop Guild, the Lollypop Guild.” They go on to say that they welcome the players to Munchkin Land, and that from now on they’ll be hist-, they’ll be hist-, they’ll be hist-o-ry. It’s all eerily familiar.
The welcoming party leads the foursome into the center of the village, where an exchange of pigs takes place. Chris hands the tribe’s pig to the village elder or the chief or the Secretary of State or whatever the heck these people have; that worthy, much to the players’ surprise, responds in kind, handing Chris another pig in return. I have no idea what that was all about. I don’t know if the players traded their pig in on a newer model or what. In any case, it’s got the makings of a sort of neo-primitivist O. Henry story. “I sold my pig to buy you a frying pan.” “I sold my pig to buy you a roasting pan!” “Oh, the irony!” Et cetera.
There’s a montage of other little ceremonies, all presented without audio so we have no idea what’s going on. Imagine that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring only with little brown people instead of elves and game-show contestants instead of hobbits and you’ll pretty much have the picture.
Then comes dancing. The entire village, apparently, gathers in the middle of the clearing and begins to chant and clap their hands in a steadily increasing rhythm. Before long, they’re all dancing like crazy people, waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care. Ami discretely hands out four unmarked white tablets, Perfect Eliza snaps a glow-stick, Cyborg Chad sucks on a pacifier.
After the dancing comes the kava. Some of you may remember kava from the very first episode. In my column I described it as “muddy water with twigs and dead bugs floating in it, plus vodka.” The chief hands each of the four players a bowl of kava to drink. Perfect Eliza describes it this way: “It kind of tastes like mud mixed with water and vodka.” No, kids, I’m not making that up. She really uses the same description, almost word for word, I used ten long weeks ago. On the one hand, that’s really neat. On the other, I spend an hour searching my house for hidden cameras and microphones.
“The kava,” Chris intones solemnly, “is powerful.” Cut to a shot of him drinking his kava, then standing wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Dissolve to a shot of the setting sun. A sitar plays. Jim Morrison sings: “This is the end.” Homer goes on a spiritual journey, talks to a coyote with the voice of Johnny Cash and finds his soulmate. Or something.
Dissolve back to the players. It’s after sunset; the camera is in grainy-night-vision mode. Cyborg Chad is walking behind Chris with his hands on Chris’ shoulders. Not in that “How ya doin’, pal?” kind of way; more like that “I’m holding on to you so that I don’t fall down” kind of way. “I feel,” Cyborg Chad mumbles, “sorta buzzed.”
Lest we suspect him of hamming it up for the cameras, let us consult Google. The kava root, Piper methysticum, has known psychoactive properties, we learn. The root is dried and then pounded into a powder which is mixed with water to produce the drink our fearless contestants just chug-a-lugged.
Kava also apparently affects different people to different degrees, because it’s not long before we see Cyborg Chad stumbling on his feet. The tribal chief leads poor Cyborg Chad off to bed, tucking him in. The half-man, half-machine rumbles “Kavaaaaaa” before lapsing into a drug-induced coma.
Now it’s time for the feast, “feast” being a case of flagrant false advertising. The feast consists of some kind of quadruped roasted in banana leaves. Perfect Eliza identifies it as a cow, but the critter’s head was roasted along with the rest of it, and for the life of me it looks an awful lot like a mule or a donkey. The footage is all in black-and-white, so we can’t see color or make out any detail, but it doesn’t look very good. Ami gamely tears off a hunk and chomps down on it with her molars. She worries it for a second before extracting it from her mouth completely unharmed. “What’s it like?” Perfect Eliza asks. “Rubber,” Ami deadpans.
Finally, after dinner comes the sign-along. The children of the tribe gather around the contestants and sing them a song. Ami, still tripping on kava, is moved to tears. “Their smiles touched me in a way I’ll never forget,” she says. “It was the most unbelievable reward we could have possibly ever gotten.” Which just goes to show you that Ami is long on guile but short on imagination.
Second commercial break. On the subject of movies, is it bad that I’m kinda looking forward to Ocean’s Twelve? I know it’s cool not to like Clooney or Pitt or any of those guys, but I really enjoyed the first one. More, even, than the original. I know, I know. I’m a Philistine. I’m going to hell. I’ve made peace with this.
Meanwhile, back at the Alinta camp, Scout, Jules, Leann and Twila aren’t having any fun at all. A storm has moved in and the rain is pouring down. The girls are struggling to keep the fire going as they shiver under wet blankets. Leann is handling it even worse than the other three. “This is by far the worst night,” she says. “It won’t stop fucking raining.” The expletive is bleeped, of course, making it all the funnier when she says, “I don’t care if I can’t swear!” She goes on for a bit, complaining about the rain, when Jules yells, “Piss and moan! That’s all we can do!”
The girls are starting to lose it, I think.
When the sun comes up the rains have stopped — temporarily at least; the sky is still heavy with cloud — and Scout’s tending to one of her many mildly festering wounds. “I had one hell of a night,” she says, which I guess is for the people who got up to go to the bathroom and missed the whole thing with Leann and Jules screaming at the rain. But Scout has a point: She says that the experience of trying to keep the fire going all night during the storm led her to the conclusion that it might make sense to send Eliza home at the next tribal council and keep the two boys. Manual labor and all that. Second-class citizens. Somebody call the ACLU immediately.
Over coffee and tapioca, Scout broaches the subject with the other three non-reward-winning girls. Leann gets that creepy stare but says nothing. Julie chimes in to say that Perfect Eliza’s departure is long overdue … but we all know how truthful Jules is, don’t we kids? Twila, of course, hates Eliza with a fiery passion, and doesn’t bother trying to hide it.
Once again, Perfect Eliza has a lot to be afraid of.
The four reward winners return to camp bearing … um … coconuts. No idea why they’re carrying coconuts. Has the Alinta camp experienced a drastic coconut shortage at some point in the recent past? Are the souvenirs? “Sure, they’re coconuts, but these are from the other island. They’re way better.” I dunno. It’s a mystery.
“Did it rain on you guys?” Scout asks when the foursome make their way back into camp. “Yeah,” Chris replies, “it rained off and on.” Scout: “But you were inside?” Chris: “We ended up in a hut that didn’t leak.” Perfect Eliza: “The food and the sleeping arrangements were horrible.” Leann: “But you didn’t have to sleep with wet blankets? And you didn’t get poured on?”
Bitterness? You’re soaking in it. The Alinta camp is not a love camp this morning. It’s a bitch-ass, gripey, mean, spiteful camp.
It’s also a paranoid camp. “I could definitely tell something had gone on,” Ami says. “Jules wouldn’t look me in the face.”
Scout takes the boys aside and tells them her master plan: She, Jules, Twila and Leann all want to get rid of Perfect Eliza, she says. I’m skeptical, because I saw the looks on Julie’s and Leann’s faces when Scout floated the idea of booting Eliza that morning over coffee. Either Scout knows something I don’t, or she’s just not paying attention.
Therein lies the major flaw in Scout’s plan — her shameful failure to build a coalition of strong allies.
She goes on to explain that she wants to eliminate Perfect Eliza at the next tribal council with a vote of six to two — herself, Jules, Twila, Leann and the two boys — then get rid of Ami at the next council by a margin of six to one.
Chris bemoans the girls’ cockiness, but he’s really only talking about Ami. Cut to a shot of Ami patting Cyborg Chad on the ass. Now I know we’ve got a lawsuit on our hands.
Chris: “You question a woman’s ability, she’ll snap your neck. You open up your heart, show a woman you’re vulnerable, then they start thinkin’ with their heart. That’s when they open up that back door.”
Uh. What are we talking about again?
Cut to the immunity challenge. At least it’s not another fucking obstacle course. The arena is equipped with eight telephone poles lined up in a row, each one with a ladder next to it. Probst explains the rules, and they’re simple: Climb the ladder to the top of the pole. Grab the pole, hold on and kick away the ladder. Last one holding on wins.
The poles are decorated in a couple of places with lengths of rope tied around them. It’s not much, but it’s enough for the players to get their feet on and dig their fingernails into.
Ready, set, go. Everybody hangs on. Time passes. Everybody continues to hang on. Then Julie falls off. Everybody else holds on, then Chris loses his grip and falls. Almost immediately, Scout loses her grip and falls. An indefinite amount of time passes before Ami loses her concentration and falls. Perfect Eliza slips, letting go of the pole ten feet in the air. She lands on her feet, and I strain to hear the pop of a broken ankle, but it doesn’t come. She’s fine. She takes a seat on the losers’ bench.
Close-up on Twila: She’s holding on with her teeth. I’m not kidding. She’s got her arms and legs wrapped around the pole, but she’s also get her teeth in one of the pieces of rope that ring the pole. She’s holding on with her teeth. This girl wants to win.
Cyborg Chad, Leann and Twila manage to hold on for another minute. Suddenly Leann loses her foothold and slides to the ground. We’re down to our last two players.
Chad starts to slip, but manages to hang on. Twila whispers to herself and the mics pick it up: “Go down, Chad. Go down. Please, God, go down, Chad.”
He does. He loses his grip and falls. Twila wins the immunity necklace.
Third commercial break. AT&T, the Gap, Target, whatever the hell. I pop a couple of Tylenol to see if I they can take a bite out of my fever.
We’re back at camp, and it’s raining again. Ami, who’s fiddling with the campfire, asks, “So are we voting for Chad tonight?” Scout says that she thinks they should keep the boys as long as they can to help with the manual labor. “You just have to spend one night sitting in the downpouring rain trying to keep the fire going,” she says. “Oh, I’ve done it,” Ami chimes in, ever-so-pleased with herself. “I was out here by myself one night. I kept the fire going all night.” Well, la-dee-dah, Miss Perfect. I find myself longing for a tidal wave or another earthquake.
“It just scares me to think that one of the girls would be going home before the guys,” Ami says. Man, she’s got a serious bug up her ass about men. I don’t know where it came from, but she’s taking it personally.
After some hushed negotiations around the fire with Scout and the other girls, Ami takes the talks all the way back to square one by saying, “So, are we for sure voting for Chad tonight?” Every girl on the island and approximately thirty million Americans simultaneously roll their eyes.
After the women’s council has broken up, Cyborg Chad approaches Scout and asks her if the Eliza plan is still on. Scout: “I don’t know what the girls are going to do tonight.” Cyborg Chad: “Are you voting for Eliza?” Scout, after the briefest moment of hesitation: “I’m voting for Eliza tonight.”
Reassured, Cyborg Chad approaches Twila. “I have no idea what’s going on,” she says. “Are you kidding me?” Chad asks. “No, sir,” she replies. Twila remains firmly noncommittal on the question of her own vote.
Next it’s Twila and Ami in a one-on-one pow-wow. “What’s the deal?” Twila asks her. “Don’t ask me,” Ami says. “I’m not the person to ask.” Woman or no woman, I just want to punch her right in the mouth.
Twila leaves Ami and finds Scout. They discuss the possibility of a tie. Ami, Perfect Eliza, Leann and Julie are going to vote for one of the boys — it’s not clear yet which one. The boys and Scout want to vote for Perfect Eliza, and they want Twila to join them. But even if she does, the best they can do is accomplish a four-four tie.
Why, you ask, aren’t the two boys, Scout and Twila teaming up to try to flip Perfect Eliza and vote out Ami? That question goes unanswered. Hell, it doesn’t even get asked.
And then it starts raining. Again. The tribe huddles under the shelter. No one talks.
By the time the players arrive at tribal council, the rain has stopped, but the weather is the topic of conversation. Probst talks about the change in the weather, then asks Leann whether it changes anything. “I’m not good with the rain,” she replies. “I’m worried that I’m just going to freak out.”
Probst then asks Chris, “Have you noticed in the last couple of days that maybe your stock and Chad’s stock might have gone up a little bit?” Before he can answer we get a nice close-up of Ami, shaking her head, a smug little grin on her face. God, that chick is getting on my last nerve. I’ve never seen anybody so obviously and openly contemptuous of the opposite sex, ever. Pisses me off. But that may be the virus talking. Chad’s utterly irrelevant answer boils down to “Yes.” Probst moves on.
He asks Chad if the boys are still fighting. Cyborg Chad says yes, that they’ve come up with “25 or 30 plans” to stay in the game. Then Probst asks Scout whether anybody’s approached her about strategy. She says yes, but doesn’t name names. Then she says, “I think the guys have talked to everybody.” Ami, Leann and Perfect Eliza all say, “Not me.” Perfect Eliza looks a little hurt when she says it. I told you they should have flipped her.
Twila says that no matter how close you get, you can never completely trust anybody in this game. Ami flashes that I-want-to-break-things rictus, and Probst calls her on it. “I think that is such bullshit,” she says. “I definitely know that there are people I can trust, and I know I can be trusted.”
At this point, I’m completely certain that Perfect Eliza would have flipped just to shut Ami up. I’m sure of it, as sure as the day is long. There’s no doubt in my mind.
And you know what? Even Probst seems to get a little irritated with her. “We’ll find out, if you’re sitting in the final two, whether you’re right or wrong,” he says impatiently. I love Probst. He takes no shit.
The question-and-answer period is over. Probst gives Twila a chance to transfer her immunity to somebody else; she declines. (Dumb, dumb, dumb. The two boys, Twila and Scout convince Perfect Eliza to flip and vote for Ami. At the last second, Twila gives her immunity to Chad, which means the girls have to scramble. If we’re lucky, the now-diminished girls’ alliance splits their vote, but even if they don’t, Ami wins five-to-three. The girls’ alliance is crushed, leaving a new order to pick up the pieces. But do they do it? No. Dumbasses.)
The tribe votes. Probst reads the ballots, and there are no surprises. Cyborg Chad and Chris vote for Eliza. Everybody else votes for Cyborg Chad. Amazingly, the part-organic, part-machine construct does not go on a killing rampage. I mean, doesn’t elementary chaos theory teach us that eventually all blasphemies (cyborgs, artificial intelligence, cloned dinosaurs, et cetera) will go berserk and kill their human masters? It’s a law of nature or something. But alas, no, Cyborg Chad just watches quietly as Probst snuffs his torch and sends him packing.
Scout is left despondent, with her head in her hands.
Next week on “Survivor”: Chris betrayed Sarge, so it should come as no surprise that he throws Scout and Twila under the bus in a desperate attempt to stay in the game.
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
- Sarge of darkness: Survivor Week 9
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