Thu, November 4, 2004

When Survivor gets boring – and with this clan, how can it not? – one fun way to pass the time is to watch the "lower third" advertisements for other programs on CBS. My favorite is Madam's Family, about some sort of true-life brothel bust. Every time I see that, I can think of nothing other than Madame, that hideous ancient dowager puppet from Madame & Wayland Flowers, and the thought of her running a whorehouse – something like the Maison Derrière from The Simpsons – makes me giggle. Also, CBS claims that its Thursday lineup is "America's best night of television," and the sad thing is, they're right. Right now it's the only full block of prime time, 8:00-11:00, that I watch. Granted, I only watch the first hour because you people demand it (!), and I'm not exactly an obsessed devotee of CSI, but I still can't deny that TiVo records all of CBS's Thursday lineup, and that's the only part of the week where that happens. Chilling, really.

This week, the action opens on firewood gathering, because we're making the obligatory point that one of the contestants isn't pulling his/her weight around the camp (has it been 17 minutes already?). John K of Lopevi is the target this time, and I have to agree with him. On TV, it seems like there's barely time to collect firewood, cook, and eat between challenges, but in reality there is a lot of sitting around time. Tons. So, he's absolutely right to spend some of that time relaxing and napping. There's only so much firewood you can gather. Some people (like, say, Twila) have very little to contribute to the team – not particularly smart, not particularly quick or strong in the challenges, not particularly likable – so "work" becomes their contribution. It's not that Twila's not a good person, or that she doesn't deserve a million dollars. She just doesn't stand out in any way, so the only thing she can do is play the martyr like Mia said and be a workhorse. It's working out fine for her, but it doesn't mean that anyone who does less work is necessarily a slacker. He might be conserving energy for the challenges (just an idea). Watching Lopevi gather firewood, however, I start to wonder if perhaps that task is illimitable after all. Because they sure do burn a lot of wood. I would love for someone to do some sort of biomass study over a season of Survivor and see how much of their host island they manage to burn. It's got to make a pretty significant impact.

Over at Yasur, Royry takes a brief respite from signing autographs and accepting Tony awards for his performance last week, and confronts Leann and Ami. Oh, he is smooth! He's got it all planned out, hasn't he? He's pressuring them to let him know "where you guys stand" vis a vis his elimination. (As if it isn't obvious.) I've never understood this approach. It's basically the same as the "give me a heads-up before Tribal Council if I'm the one" move, just three days earlier. What exactly will he do with this information? He has no power and no alliance. Will it give him super extra incentive to win immunity? As far as I can tell, his approach consists of hassling these women about not doing enough to assure him that he won't be voted off. This is insane. If you ask anyone on Survivor who they want to win, they'd have to be pretty stupid to come back with any response other than "Me." Which means that at some point they're going to be willing to vote for you (or campaign against you), which means that any assurance that you won't be voted off is just a lame attempt to appeal to people like Royry who mistakenly put stock in that sort of thing. Add to that the fact that he's the only guy in an all-girl team and already has a target on his back, and it's positively bonkers for him to be bitching about this. They owe him no such assurance, and he's in no position to extract it from them. He has nothing to offer and no base of power. Sure, he's handy with a slingshot, but what are the chances of two slingshot challenges in a row? Besides, winning immunity isn't that big a deal for them when they've already picked out who they're going to send home next. If he'd singlehandedly won them the reward challenge, maybe... but he sat that one out. Leann flatly reminds Royry that he's entered a team which had a pre-existing alliance, and there's no compelling reason for them to dismantle that to include him. Plus, they don't exactly trust him to keep Yasur in mind after the merge, when all the other guys are around again. He's outraged over that, although it seems to me to be a pretty reasonable conclusion for them to reach, and he's insulted that they expect him to help out around Yasur and just wait to be eliminated. To which Ami brilliantly replies, "Nope. You can sit on your ass." See? Playing the "worker" card doesn't always work, especially when you're talking to two other people who actually do their share of work. He goes crazy, cursing and flailing, and it's gorgeous. They've done just what they needed to do: get under his skin and make him nuts.

Royry grabs a cameraman and heads off to vent about how he's going to make Yasur pay if they vote him off. "If they vote me off this island, Yasur will burn!" he says, while invoking some sort of salt-the-earth threat as well. The problem is, this is a pretty horrible strategy. Punishing them after they've eliminated you fails to bring you any closer to the million dollars. (You're already eliminated.) Sour grapes is great and all, but as a Survivor strategy? Futile. The only way this works is if they know that this is your plan, so fear of the burning and the salting prevents them from voting for you. (Arksie brilliantly offered the perfect illustrative example: the Doomsday Device in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. It can't be effective if you keep it secret!) So, this strategy would only work if Royry were to publicize it, and he can't publicize it because someone would ask the obvious question: how can you burn this camp to the ground after you've already been eliminated? He can't hurry back to the beach and destroy everything. And it would make little sense to burn the camp before TribCon, just based on a hunch. What if they vote for Scout instead? That'll be damn tough to explain after! Plus, won't they wonder what you're doing? They're packing their things and carrying their torches, and then, "Royry, honey? What are those fuses? What are you lighting, there?" What a moron.

Reward comes along, and it has to do with transporting water through an obstacle course in a coconut shell. The reward is, of course, food. They're not even bothering with other rewards any more; it's just a constant smorgasbord. Lopevi's excited: "We're starving! We haven't eaten since those juicy steaks we won last time!" This time, it's the "Home Cafe," which is a tiki-themed (trite!) coffee bar including coffee, pastries, and photos and letters from home. It also includes a coffee maker which the team will take back to camp with them, and it turns out that the name of this coffee maker model is the "Home Cafe." Yep, in a blinding turn of product placement, they've named the entire reward building after a sponsor. Next week, they'll win a chance to visit that factory where they churn out the cheesecakes. Or the city with all the ...uh... circuits. Or – just maybe – hang out in a tent where they're always so thankful that it's Friday. My favorite part of this reward is the moment when the women are having the time of their lives, enjoying the pictures and sharing stories, and there's Royry, in the middle of all of it. Sitting there like that part of the sandbox where your sister just threw up – everyone's having fun, but the good time is diminished by keeping one eye out for where he is so they don't get too close. It reminds me of the title of one of Charles Grodin's books, It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here. Where "You" is Royry and "Here" is the Home Cafe.

As usual, the tearful reading of the letters from home reminds everyone what awful people they've been. Royry's letter from his wife reminds him to keep his temper in check, which is effective for about 15 seconds before he starts snapping about how he "hasn't forgotten" about the treatment he's still so outraged about. "Anybody who knows me," Royry grumbles, "knows I always always carry an Ace up my sleeve." Always? Like on the way to the bathroom after lunch, he's got a secret plan? Tipping at a fancy restaurant? Showing his son how to ride a bike? Royry's always got an angle? Seems unlikely to me, but then again, I don't know Royry the way anybody who knows him would.

Meanwhile, at Lopevi (Starving! Burping up steak!), Julie and Twila are conspiring. They seem to feel like they have something in common which dictates that they should team up against the men. I'm not buying this "we're both women" business. Female they both may technically be, but I'm reminded of that statistic about how we have more in common, genetically, with chimps than we do with opposite-sexed humans. Somehow, I think Julie has more in common with John K (or, to a lesser extent, Chad) than she does with Twila. However, Julie's damn good at seizing an opportunity. She senses that Twila, in the process of being a workhorse, may have garnered herself an invitation to some sort of final four deal with some of the menfolk. (This is odd to me that the guys, who have seemed like such a tight group, would already be dividing amongst themselves.) So she manages to get Twila to admit it, and at the same time implies that she's received a similar invitation, even though she hasn't, in order to erode Twila's confidence in Lopevi. And, so far, it seems to work like a charm. (I'm also proud of Julie for interviewing that she's "got a plan... for now." She doesn't take for granted that an advantage or an alliance today is necessarily going to be in force tomorrow, which is something that could've really helped Chapera at about nine different turning points.)

The immunity challenge involves breaking tiles with a slingshot and a marble, and it's utterly forgettable except for the fact that it apparently employs at least 40 cameras, based on the fact that we see quite a few close-ups of individual tiles being shattered. It's not like Jeopardy where they can focus the camera on the next clue in the column and if the player changes categories, they can fall back on the animated zoom of the clue on the wide shot of the full board. There's no animated zoom of the tile break. You need a camera on every goddamn one! (Also notable: the Battleship-like make-work element of team members turning over wooden planks as a way of marking which tiles have been shattered; don't the shattered tiles keep track?) Royry works his ass off in the challenge, because he's not finished setting up all of his explosive charges back at Yasur, so he can't let them vote him off tonight. He manages to win immunity for the team, which is somewhat startling considering how Sarge compared Lopevi to an SEC team before they got started. (Ah, yes... Who could forget the Cinderella story that was Auburn's 1997 trip to the Final Four of slingshotting?) As he draws a bead on the last tile of the Yasur board (thank God the planks with the big Xs are there to clue us in!), Royry says, "This one's for my baby boy." Then, the producers politely edit it out a series of misses and fumbles so that he appears to make contact with his very next shot. Aw, those producers. They've got a big basket of cuddly fluff where their hearts should be, they do.

Immediately upon his return to Yasur, Royry is ticking off Ami's violations on his fingers. She's "number one on [his] hit list" now. Scary! Royry and his alliance of one will surely amass the necessary vote to trounce her! And when they do, she'll burn!

At Lopevi, John K is making the same mistake Ethan did: aiming for the wrong teammate to deflect votes off of himself. He tries to focus on Chad, whom nobody seems to dislike, rather than targeting Julie or Twila, whom people might actually be considering voting for. Sure, as you say, he doesn't know that. But he knows he's a possible target, which means people will be willing to pretend to go along with whatever vote he proposes, to keep him in the dark. So, what he should do, instead of telling Chris he'd like to vote for Chad, or telling Julie and Twila that he'd like to vote for Chad, is ask them who they're voting for. Yes, the decision has probably already been made to cut him. But there's a slim chance he'll catch a few people before they've had a chance to put their heads together, and he can divide them from the group by saying he'll vote with them. Say, for example, that he talks to Chris and Chris doesn't really cough up a name. Then, he could go talk to Julie and Twila and ask who they're planning to vote for. They probably have at least a hazy idea in their head of what order they'd vote people off if it were up to them, and so they'd name the first person on that list (or the second, if John is first). Then, if John says, "Great. I've been wanting to vote for him, too," and the ladies haven't had a chance to talk to Sarge or Chris yet, he may be able to convince them that that's the vote for Tribal Council, and that will hush them up for the rest of the day because they don't want to discuss their vote with the potential victim. Sure, it's a long shot, but it beats picking a popular guy (Chad) and randomly asking people if they'll vote for him with you. Of course they're going to say yes and then all gang up to vote for you in that scenario. (And they do. So I guess I was right about that!)

POLL:

CBS Mail Bag

Whose letter from home would you most like to read?

	Royry's - Remember, if you take your yellow pills with coffee, it'll aggravate your pyromania and make your eyes bug out of your head.
	Scout's - I still love your dad very much, but I'm going to be humping Ashton Kutcher for a while.
	Ami’s - It’s Téa Leoni. Can I have my face back?
	Eliza's - Congratulations! You have been accepted to the waitlist for Harvard Law./Congratulations! You have been accepted as a waitress at Hooters.
	Leann's - Please let us know when your episodes will start airing. We've been looking for you!

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