Alicia: Muscled out
Well, more of a see-you-later. Alicia, along with whoever gets booted after her, will be hovering over the game from here on out like a ripped Jacob Marley as part of the jury that will pick the million-dollar winner, but no one made an enemy of her this Wednesday. Ogakor had the majority, and Alicia had the muscles. Just business.
It's Jerri who has to stalk the campground like the walking dead, now fully aware that pretty much everybody hates her except Amber, who after Jerri let her share her shrimp dinner was perfectly willing to pour chocolate all over herself and take her queen out to the sublimation shack in the woods. (I think that's actually one of the outtakes on next Wednesday's inaugural cutting-room-floor special.)
Clearly, the four Kucha members who came after Jerri didn't need much debate to settle on her, and as the show threatens to plod on for two more weeks of party-line votes it'll be the aspiring actress and her aspiring assassins that bear watching.
First the boomerang-toss reward challenge, for which Jerri won (there's a sexual metaphor in there somewhere) a free meal and a great opportunity to attempt gracious victory by clapping both hands to her face and yelling "Oh my God!" several times. (Alicia didn't buy it — is it me, or did she actually get kind of likable this week?) And as Jerri and Amber dined on seafood and iced tea and snarked about Tina and her own clumsy emotional fakery, the remaining seven seemed perfectly happy to hunker around the fire with another starch buffet.
After all, they got to complain about Jerri to their heart's content, and hardly made a secret about it upon the two ladies' return. Ah, how lonely Ms. Popular and her lovely assistant seem now.
What's going on behind Colby's shades?
Even Colby has apparently turned, although the placid Texan may be in danger of confusing himself with his own machinations. Maybe with a little help from the editors, though, the plan took shape clearly enough: He's telling Jerri — who cornered him right after getting the post-meal cold shoulder from the chummy Barramundian Seven — that he's letting Keith and Tina think he's with them till the end, but really he's with Jerri and Amber. But really, he's with Keith and Tina, against Jerri and Amber — although can you trust a man wearing sunglasses to tell the truth about lying?
And the man's scruples are a little confused too. "I didn't like the fact that I had to lie, but because I was lying to Jerri I didn't lose sleep over it," Colby confided to a cameraman after his midnight chat with the queen. And the beauty is, he doesn't even have to decide for another three weeks, at which point he'll have Ogakor's two factions begging for his nod. The man's future is so bright... well, you know the rest.
And Keith is pulling an image rehab that would make Nixon proud. With public opinion turning against Jerri, the whiny, sad-sack chef to the stars (two presidents, he said) is looking socially acceptable and a cool hand at the immunity challenges to boot. Tina gave him the last one, but this week's — a seriously convoluted pole-and-rope puzzle in which the most squares won — was all Chef. Following Jerri, he slapped down 17 placards like he was afraid of running out of them, and sweetest of sweet ironies, it was Jerri who set him up for the W.
A cruel network trick?
As Jeff Probst said, "The game has changed." Ogakor is as before the soap opera of choice, but now it's not just the bickering, the cliques and the Colby-tugging. Now it's the bickering, the cliques, the Colby-tugging and the Jerri watch. The former favorite has been marked for death by the dwindling Kucharians, and now it'll be a free-for-all among Elisabeth, Rodger and Nick to try and break up the enemy and save themselves.
Too bad none of them seem particularly up to the job, mentally or morally. The viewers will live — Rodger is starting to make me a little uncomfortable with his very friendly hugging of the nearest comely lass. Nick's a dud. And Elisabeth — well, she's a peach, but the I-just-want-to-stay-here-with-my-friends-a-while-longer stuff is simply not helping a show that could use a little more scheming these days.
Well, there's always the "Too Wild for Thursday" Wednesday-night shows, which, come to think of it, are sort of an affront to the viewers' concentration. Are the Outback outtakes — the entertainment value of which Jackie Chan created and destroyed a long time ago — supposed to be better than what we've seen already? Do we have anything of Mike actually falling into the fire, instead of just yelling about it? And is this why CBS made us change our "Survivor" night this week — just to get us hooked on the slag heap? Perhaps it was merely a cruel network trick to make America admit that there are actually plenty of other nights besides Thursday when they've got absolutely nothing non-vicarious to do on a weeknight. (OK, Leslie Moonves, you win.)
Bad move, CBS. They say the editors use 100 hours of tape to fill one episode. The key to enjoying "Survivor" as passive television is to forget those 99 lost hours, to imagine that all the suspense, the sight gags, the plotlines and the sour faces all happen on cue. Because the Outback is just that dramatic.
But if the clever construction of an episode is what makes reality good watching, that doesn't mean we want to see the stitching. The Wednesday outtakes will surely draw the slavish fan (and the indiscriminate couch potato), but once folks start thinking about the other 98 hours they're still missing, it can't help but dilute — and demystify — the rest of the action.
Now, maybe if it were on HBO...