fishcakes

Targeting Sol to avenge Rome -- ROME! -- is the dumbest fucking thing ever. Good going, Genevieve, you just helped Gabe, Sue, and Caroline further cement their dominance in the game.

Sol, you magnificent bastard. I knew you were a good liar, but you are also a great actor. I don't mean the performance at TC; I mean the way he left the rest of the reward feasters so he could read his advantage clue by walking as though he were about to have a momentous bathroom event. Sol for the win. But my second choice is Andy for the win because that would be hilarious. I dislike everyone on Blue except maybe Kyle, but he's probably just a walking target now. Gabe is obnoxious, Sue is ridiculous, and Caroline is a follower. I didn't love Tiyana or anything, but I'd have rather seen Gabe go. Genevieve is growing on me. When she approached Andy, my first thought was that she certainly has interesting taste in alliance mates, but her TH showed me that she's doing what players should but rarely do: scoop up the people on the bottom to take out the bigger players. I would like to see Sol, Andy, and Kyle team up and take out each of their former tribemates, and I'd like Genevieve to be in on that, but I don't know how willing she is to work with Sol long-term.

Almost everyone is a TERRIBLE player and yet somehow this is the most fun season we've had in a while. Everyone's glee at getting rid of Rome is what unites us as a nation.

I have no idea why anyone would want Joel Klug's input on this. He was voted out before the merge and was never on a tribe with Kelly and Rich. He doesn't have first-hand knowledge of anything. Hatch has been making this same claim for years, and aside from the Power Bar itself (which I agree is not okay) the problem with his version of the tax situation is that even if Burnett agreed to pay the taxes on his winnings, Hatch would still have had to declare the winnings on his tax return that year, which he did not. Nor did he declare his income from a radio hosting gig he got as a result of winning Survivor, and he also failed to declare income from a rental property he owned. Hatch committed tax fraud, end of story. His attempts to justify it over the years and portray himself as a victim -- as he did with his assault of Sue on All-Stars -- just reinforces how completely and eternally full of shit he is. The other, smaller hole in his story is that, if the game was as rigged as he claims it was, and Burnett agreed to pay his taxes if he won, then Burnett would have rigged it so that Hatch would not win in order to save himself the approximately $440K he would have had to shell out.

I'm out. I love Kathy Bates, but I can't get past how wrong they get every single aspect of the legal stuff, which is 90% of the show. I had to watch that absurd trial while peeking through my fingers like it was a horror movie.

I think the show would be greatly improved by having only one season per year rather than two. Casting has always been the most important aspect of the show and with half as many seasons, they could afford to be more selective about who gets chosen rather than having to cast so many clods and/or nonentities. When I think of seasons that I thought were particularly bad, it's always because they had unlikable or forgettable casts. Location matters less, I think. Season one's Colleen Haskell and Jenna Lewis in bikinis pretty much set in stone that the show would always be in a warm weather location, and one beach is not that different from another. And as others have noted, staying in Fiji keeps production costs down and the local government is on board. It does detract a little that there aren't challenges or rewards that draw from the local culture of whatever country they're in, but they were a small part of the game and it's also probably not a good idea to count on Mark Burnett for accuracy or sensitivity in this regard. I would like to see them bring back some of the earlier, simpler challenges. There used to be less complexity (which I doubt people care about that much), but a lot more variety. Things like filling a bucket with a hole in it with water to raise a flag, Jeff tells a story and then gives a quiz, the coconut chop, even people just standing for hours on a pole and trying to make deals and trash talk each other. The current multi-part obstacle/crawl/dig/climb/puzzle challenges in every episode are stale.

For the first time in 25 years, I fell asleep in the middle of a Survivor episode. Only for a few minutes, but still. When they voted out Jon at the first TC, I said I hoped that it would come back to bite them and that Andy would outlast all of them, so I'm pretty happy the vote went the way it did. Also glad it was Anika, who's been queening around since the beginning and thinking she was running things. All her outrage and crying? Inject that into my veins. Genevieve was trending last week on social media as "the new Parvati" which is one of the more ridiculous Survivor takes I've seen over the years, so I hope her belated well duh realization this week that Rome is not a reliable guy will put that trend to rest. Sol saying "FFFFFART" after learning about Teeny's amulet was really cute. Love him.

Sort of. In Island of the Idols, there were three women complaining about Dan Spilo touching them, in some cases overtly sexually, but only Kellee directly told Dan to stop (he didn't) and was willing to go on the record with the producers about it. He got one warning from the producers and then actually grabbed a fourth woman at the following TC to demonstrate how "innocent" it was, but still nothing happened to him. After that, he groped the thigh of a woman crew member -- which he claims was inadvertent -- and only then was he removed from the game. Just badly handled from beginning to end.

After seeing this episode, I feel like evicting Rome is a moral issue.

This is what's key, whether or not she's really on the bottom. I think it could just as easily be Sol on the bottom, but I really don't know. And I put the blame on Rome for her name coming up because of his mean-spirited desire to not just vote Sol out, but to bully him into giving up his SITD in exchange for not getting voting out, and then vote him out anyway, just for the fun of humiliating him. In asking Kishan for a decoy, Rome knew the only possible answers were Gen and Teeny and Kishan wasn't going to say Teeny. I agree that Kishan didn't care that Gen's name was being floated, but Rome didn't care either. He only cared when he heard his own name had come up. So the way I saw that is that Sol was NOT willing to work with Genevieve on voting on Kishan. He told her he wouldn't do it and was voting for Rome. To me, he seemed surprised when Rome stole Kishan's vote and even said, "I don't know what to do," and only ended up voting for Kishan because he quickly did the math and knew that Kishan was going regardless, so no need to vote for Rome and make him even more irrational. It's entirely possible that Sol was only acting shocked at TC to maintain plausible deniability with Teeny, but he seemed genuine to me. Oh, and on another topic entirely, Sam being concerned about Sierra giving Andy information that she didn't give Sam didn't bother me that much, but I am in favor of voting Sam out to prevent us having to hear him rap again.

The episode title should have been, "Not it, Rome." I'm on the Genevieve Is Stupid team. She's doing what Maria did with Q last season, keeping the unpredictable guy around because she thinks he's loyal to her, not understanding that it only makes her look sketchy by association. I'm also not seeing what the big deal is that Kishan was the first one to mention her name. He wouldn't have if Rome didn't want to threaten Sol into giving up his SITD (Rome understands what "ultimatum" means about as well as Jelinsky understood what "several" means). ROME wanted to give Sol a decoy target, and who else is Kishan going to name? He's not going to say himself or Teeny because it's clear they're each other's number ones. That only leaves Genevieve. And it was Rome who floated Genevieve's name to Sol without telling her first; Kishan's conversation with Sol was about voting out Rome. She's stupid to throw in with Rome because he is loyal to himself, and it's obvious his loyalty to anyone else only goes as far as their willingness to coddle his massive ego. I read Kyle and Gabe's reaction to Sue saying she's 45, not as them believing her, but as them humoring her. Their faces, to me, were saying, "okay, sure, 45. Good for you. That's great. So so very great and believable." To be honest, I find it hard to believe that she's only 59. I don't want to crack on her too hard because it saddens me that anyone feels like they have to do that to themselves, but I think most women look better and usually younger if they just let themselves age gracefully. There's nothing wrong with fighting the aging process a little, but at some point, you just need to realize that you're not going to be 25 -- or 45 -- ever again and you shouldn't try to be. But she is, in general, a bad liar. "I tripped. I was attacked by a tree. I ... bit my tongue!" LOL at she bit her tongue. yes, that explains why there's blood in her hair and under her nails and all over the machete handle. Tiyana was so creeped out,I'm surprised she didn't immediately go looking for Kyle to make sure he hadn't been hacked to death.

The fish situation was one of those things were everyone involved was wrong. Rome was possessive of the fishing gear, especially the Hawaiian sling. He was like Rupert all over again. Genevieve wanted to try fishing and he told her no. I would guess he kept saying no until she gave up because we saw him do a similar thing at the challenge when both Sol and Rome wanted to do the solo swim, and Rome wouldn't let it go so Sol let him have his way. Then while Rome was fishing, everyone else was very conspicuously doing nothing. They were sunbathing and shit-talking Rome and saying he was probably saying they were lazy, which yes they were. They could have at least made sure there was fire and cleaned the fish. But Rome was also wrong to think half the fish were his just because he caught them. It's a communal living situation. It's like saying no one can sit by the fire unless they got it started, or anyone who sits out a challenge doesn't get to share in the reward. At the same time, I find it kind of funny that Rome was ready to die on the hill of two little fish that couldn't have weighed more than six ounces combined. I guess my point is that they're all bad at this.

One of my favorites is The Trial of Henry Blake, where he faces a hearing after Frank and Margaret accuse of him of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. This episode had Hope Summers as the original Nurse Cratty, who brought a pregnant Korean woman to the hearing and announced to the officers conducting the hearing, "this is an example of Henry Blake's work!" She also called the officers a bunch of "high-priced bellhops." Also featuring Klinger as "a big red bird with fuzzy pink feet."

Yeah, I don't think he was stupid for playing it. I just think he was annoying for giving that long explanation about why he was playing it.

How many different people are playing the part of Genevieve? She looked different every time she was on screen. Maybe next week, she'll get a speaking part. I don't really care that Aysha is gone except that it bothers me that Lavo is so weak that they're letting an idiot like Rome be their leader instead of doing the logical thing and moving their camp to an unknown location while he was off on the journey. He never shuts up. Even when he was unnecessarily playing his idol, he talked all the way through it, like it was some revolutionary move that needed explaining. Fuck that guy. He's not a great player; he's been lucky and the luckiest thing of all was landing on a team with Teeny and Kishan who didn't have the wit to count to four and join Aysha and Sol in voting out Genevieve because they were afraid Rome would play his idol for her? Yeah, Rome who ate two of the four fish because he was the one who caught them is always thinking of others and would definitely, definitely risk his own safety to save someone else. I was thinking J.J. Evans from Good Times, but it's been so long since I've seen that show, I'm not sure if that's accurate. Maybe it's just because of the hat and the very studied casualness of the way he sits during his THs. But also I could see Rome answering the phone with a "Chello!"