Survivor: Week 10

The Episode

I suppose this would have to be considered "the feelgood episode of the season," which isn't saying much in a game that rewards you for your cutthroatedness.

In the beginning, we see Bob completely undo any strategic benefit he got from helping Sugar & Co. to depants Randy at tribal council last week. He basically expressed his disgust at the way that they had reveled in Randy's humiliation, and while Bob may have the moral high ground here, that's certainly not the point in Survivor.

This led us learning that, per Ken and Sugar, Bob was going to be the next one to be voted out at tribal council.

I loved the challenges this episode, but I was also puzzled by them. There's almost always, at this stage in the game, a challenge or two that seek to identify the pecking order inside the ruling alliance. This is accomplished by either having a popularity contest element in the challenge, or at least allowing the winner of the reward challenge choose who to share the reward with, which allows for all sorts of interesting things to come up.

But this week, there was nothing of the sort, which is really too bad, because this is the perfect game for it. Bob and Corinne are on the outside, while Kenny and Crystal have told both Sugar and Susie that they will be in the final three, with Matty being the low man on the totem poll. A pecking order challenge would have probably made Ken and Crystal sweat a bit, at the very least.

Instead, the reward challenge separated the Survivors into groups of three, each of whom had to run through a muddy bog collecting puzzle pieces while tethered together. The threesomes then had to assemble the puzzle pieces, which were functioning gears that, when placed correctly, worked with a crank to raise a flag. Matty, Ken, and Susie were clearly more athletic than Bob, Crystal, and Sugar, and they did indeed collect their gears with what seemed like a sizable lead. But Bob assembled the gears in a flash, and so his team moved into a finalist competition for reward.

The final competition involved solving one of those puzzles in which you have to slide swuares around in a grid to form the complete picture, and Bob won reward handily.

Reward involved time with your loved one, which was undermined somewhat when all of the loved ones appeared back at camp. What if Bob had had an opportunity to spend an evening with two other people of his choosing, along with their loved ones? Might have had an impact there.

So, there was a lot of hugging and tears (from everyone except Susie, surprisingly), and a proposal from Matt to his fiancee.

Bob then created another fake immunity idol, and cooked up a story about it being the one that was thrown into the ocean by Marcus a few episodes back. He and Corinne were going on the slight hope that they could use the threat of the idol to peel away two of the five majority alliance members.

The immunity challenge involved answering Gabon trivia questions. Each correct answer got you a ball, which you then got to throw down a slope and onto a bulls-eye target. Whoever got closest to the center of the bulls-eye won immunity.

Sugar got the most questions right, but Bob threw three very good balls. His first ball wound up being the immunity winner, and his other two tied for second place. So, the bespectacled and bow-tied physics teacher with the gray hair and the grandmotherly wife is the huge immunity threat. The other tribe members, who are half his age and include an olympian athlete, should be ashamed of themselves.

Bob and Corinne decided that their best bet was to work with Ken and Crystal in an effort to vote out Matty. This was a tough decision to gauge. Usually, you'd want to go with the people on the outside of the alliance, but that would be Matty, who was also the most appealing target due to his immunity challenge capabilities. Also, Susie and Sugar would have been possible targets, but they both seem to hate Corinne so much that it may have been a foregone conclusion.

At any rate, Ken and Crystal ate up the fake immunity story, although they were wise enough to envision a possible future in which the idol was not real. They agreed to go along with Bob and Corinne against Matty, but they weren't willing to vote him out-- only to allow the idol to take him out. Since the idol was fake, this basically sank Bob and Corinne's plan, and Corinne was voted out.

The one possible good thing for Bob here is that Matty now knows that Ken cast a vote against him. It's unlikely that Bob can swing a revolution in a 5-1 situation (or 4-2), but he might get Matty ousted before himself, which would give him some possibilities in a final five situation.

The Pool

This pool remains amazingly tight. Only 23 points separate first place from 7th, which means that if any single person had correctly predicted Bob's immunity win, that person would be leading the pool today.

As it is, Mom slipped from first to 3rd in the rankings, allowing Mike to climb into first. Carl and Paul also had good enough weeks to climb in the standings, while cellar-dweller Dawn sank deeper into eighth. That's ok. She has a Lady of the Dance title to console herself. Jen also had a rough week, sliding down into sixth place (and one point off of seventh).

Here are the scores. They are presented as follows:
Current 1st picks score (- elimination) + Current 2nd picks score (- elimination) + Current 3rd picks score (- elimination) = Current Total Score

1st: Mike 76 (-3) + 156 (-2) + 288 (-3) = 520
2nd: Matt 50 (-5) + 153 (-12) + 310 (+5) = 513
3rd: Mom 79 (-5) + 137 (-12) + 294 (-3) = 510
4th: Carl 40 (-7) + 155 (-8) + 310 (+5) = 505
5th: Paul 67 (-4) + 124 (-8) + 310 (+5) = 501
6th: Jen 47 (-6) + 152 (-6) + 299 (-6) = 498
7th: Kim 54 (-9) + 149 (-2) + 294 (-3) = 497
8th: Dawn 21 (-11) + 141 (-2) + 290 (-15) = 452

Don't forget to send me your IP for next week's show.

Good luck, everyone!