Survivor Tocantins: Week 4 "The Boobs or the Rube?"

This week, Taj and Brendan's secret 4 alliance was severely threatened when Brendan neglected to tell the fourth prospective member of the alliance, Sierra. What could have been a very bad situation for Taj and Brendan was mitigated by the fact that Sierra picked Taj to go to Exile Island with her, so Taj was able to fill her in. I know it can be hard to pull someone aside unobtrusively at a crowded tribal camp, but what's up with Brendan? He had 3 days to tell Sierra that they were in a secret alliance, and he didn't do it. It was like, the only appointment he had, and he didn't get it done.

After two weeks of setup, the secret alliance storyline threatens to break wide open next week, when Tyson smells something suspicious about Brendan's inter-tribal relations.

Back at Timbira, Coach is full of seething anger at the prospect that Brendan is a better tribal leader than he is. Coach eventually managed to grit out that he would follow Brendan, but you coudl tell that it absolutely kills him to say that. However, as strong as Coach is, he was nowhere to be found during the reward challenge, when he passed up the chance to do some heavy lifting (literally). Rather than hold water-filled buckets, Coach passed on that job to skinny little Tyson, which I don't think anyone understands.

Jalapao won reward, but fobbled immunity when they couldn't solve the word/letter scrambling puzzle at the end. So, Timbira won immunity, evening up the tribes at 6 apiece. Does that mean it's almost merge time already? It seems like we just started.

On Jalapao, Taj halfheartedly went to bat for Sandy, whose horrifically annoying personality made her the obvious boot choice. Sandy tried to make some hay out of the fact that Sydney is a big flirt, but the argument "I may be annoying, but she's charming" failed to gain much traction among the men of the tribe.

So, Sandy was sent to the loser lodge to lick her wounds and repeatedly announce which of the entrees were likely to make her fart.


The Pool:

By and large, we accurately picked Sandy as an early ouster. What was more important this week was the immunity pik (IP), which Dawn, Kim, Paul, and Brian got right. They picked up 9 bonus points apiece, and that provided most of the motion on our rankings:

1st: Carl: 106 (-3 +0)
2nd: Paul 101 (-1 +9)
3rd: Kim 88 (-2 +9)
4th: Stats 88 (-3 +0)
5th: Dawn 87 (-5 +9)
6th: Matt 86 (-3 +0)
6th: Mike 84 (-12 +0)
8th: Mom 76 (-8 +0)
9th: Brian 72 (-5 +9)

Carl is hanging onto his lead, albeit by a thread, wih Paul knocking on his back door (!). Kim jumped from 8th place up to a rather distant third, and Brian went from hopelessly behind to behind with hope. He's only a few points off of Mom's 8th place, which means he might be able to get out from the bottom next week. The biggest loser of the week was Mike, who plummeted from second place to sixth.

Your second set of predictions are due before next week's episode. Please send them to me before the episode airs, or just tell me to "let 'em ride."

Also, please send me your IP for next week's episode: Jalapao or Timbira!

Good luck, everyone!