Trick Question

I know, right?! Obviously the budgets were boosted for the sake of the show since otherwise, man, you could add up everything my parents spent on every one of my birthdays from ages 1-12 and still not hit four grand. And we had fun! Just invite some friends over to play board games or watch movies, not David's brand of strictly enforced frivolity. I had David pegged as a potential winner since he was one of the few who seemed generally competent from week to week, though the wheels really came off here. Richard might have a shot but ever since Brett's David Brent comparison, I can't stop seeing it.

Ok Probst, you win, I'll refer to them as 'voting blocs' from now on. Why fight it? Bloc #1: Kelley and Abi Bloc #2: Jeremy, Kimmi, Tasha The floating bloc: Spencer, Joe, Keith Not a great night for Jeremy. Voting out Wigglesworth alienated Tasha, Keith and (sorta) Kimmi, then going out of his way to save Fishbach alienated Tasha/Keith even more, and then Fishbach got eliminated. I still have to believe Joe is the biggest target if he loses immunity again, but he wins another challenge, then the target is firmly on Jeremy's back and he'll have to use his HII. Tasha may well jump ship and vote against Jeremy in that scenario as well. I'd love to know the reasoning for targeting Ciera over Wentworth. I know Ciera 'stirs things up,' but isn't Wentworth considered the bigger overall threat, hence the 9-3 vote against her a few weeks ago? Maybe I'm underestimating Ciera since she did swing the vote Stephen's way and the plan would've worked had Jeremy not used his idol. This season is a lot of fun. Probst is overdoing the 'voting bloc' thing but there actually is a lot of very fluid strategy being played from round to round. The last two all-returning player seasons featured pretty much standard Pagongings but things haven't been nearly as predictable this time around. I really want to see a sitcom of Spencer and Abi having to share an apartment for a month.

Just when you thought poor Janel Moloney would actually get something to do in an episode....nope! She and Liv Tyler must get together at the wrap party and perform a karaoke duet of "Money For Nothing."

I'm willing to put up with Ward surviving another season, just as long as this one ends with HIM stuck on the blue filter desert planet of doom with no hope of return. This show is getting borderline incredible in how it manages to juggle so many characters and storylines. We're just eight episodes into the season yet it feels like there's an absolute ton of stuff that's already happened, and it's leading to even more stuff being set up.

I don't mind Andy and Haley as a couple since it seemed inevitable, and the two actors actually have good chemistry together as a duo, if not as a romantic pair. It's just that yeah, this slow burn has verrrry slow to burn, especially when it's just been an extended telling of how Haley (who's essentially a young Claire, as evidenced by the many tales of Claire's wild teenage days) will end up with a guy just like her dad. Not coincidentally, Haley/Andy seem to crib a lot of acting moves from Claire/Phil except that Bowen and Burrell are also believable as a couple who are legitimately in love, whereas Hyland and DeVine have never really sold me on that aspect. Maybe things will change now that they're actually going to be an item.

I can't help but think that these complaints over who's doing what job (specifically, who's doing the most high-profile and important jobs) within a task happens literally every week, and it's just a question of how much the editors choose to show us. Surely all these type-A personalities are always jockeying for the biggest positions, apart from the under-the-radar types or candidates like the first guy fired this season that "didn't like sales." Brett doesn't seem like the strongest of candidates but his bluntness is pretty funny. He reminds me of Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy --- just completely literal at all times. The pricing and organization, yes. The actual "getting your hands dirty" thing, probably not so much. Obviously Lord Sugar can't expect these people to be construction professionals with no training whatsoever, so David's error with the pipe measurements was hardly a big deal. That type of thing doesn't mean a damn when Sugar is choosing whose business to invest in --- "David, your plan is completely sound and may be the next Google, but eh, that shortened pipe in Week still nags at me. You're fired." The more important thing for this task is to at least give it an effort and to have common sense about your limitations. Case in point, Vana stepping in to stop Scott from promising the customer the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

For pete's sake, they couldn't put a roof on Tribal Council? We all know those TCs are actually a couple of hours long and are edited down, so making those poor sods sit in the pouring rain seemed inhumane. (Not to mention dangerous, given the lightning.)

This is where Kelly's invisible edit really hurts. I figured she wasn't going home tonight since she only had one confessional and eliminated players are usually more 'featured' than that in their boot episodes. Then again, for Kelly, one confessional counts as a lot given how anonymously she'd been edited all season. My assumption is that Joe is a dead man as soon as he loses a challenge and everyone knows it, with even Kimmi/Tasha/Keith feeling this way. So in getting rid of Kelly Wigglesworth, it's a way of weakening Joe's power base as much as possible without actually eliminating him. My issue, however, is that if Joe is eventually dead meat anyway, why even bother with this alliance-fracturing move? Stephen/Jeremy/Spencer now have some serious explaining to do to Tasha/Kimmi/Keith/Joe. Those four might just decide to form a voting bloc of their own from now on and freeze out the three guys --- while that would make them down 4-6 overall, the alliances have been so fluid in this game that it wouldn't necessarily be an issue. No kidding. Maybe last week's results spooked Joe enough that he wanted to get Kelley out and make it just two 'witches' to worry about. Otherwise, I don't see why he didn't get with the witches and Wigglesworth (if she indeed was some big ally of his) to turn the vote split around and get Stephen out. UNLESS he was worried that Stephen's advantage was a super-HII, but even then, Joe had immunity so he had nothing to worry about. It may also be helping Jeremy beyond just hiding purposes. It wouldn't surprise me if Jeremy isn't getting any major vote consideration because everyone sees him as one of the top threats to actually beat Joe in a challenge. Though the scary part is, we haven't even had any super-physical challenges yet --- they've all been balancing acts that theoretically anyone can do, as evidenced by the wide range of finishers we're getting in 2nd-3rd-4th-5th. Joe is winning these too, and he's the clear favourite in any physical challenge as well.

Such "we need to vote this person out, the jury will love them" discussions are always interesting since these players ARE the jury. It's not like the jury is some abstract group of strangers. In an alliance of, say, five people, what is essentially being said here is "this person is so cool and likable that if I happen to be on the jury, I'd definitely vote for them over any two of you." The biggest threat in this game is, indeed, that cool likable person with so much innate charisma that "how they played the game" is almost really kind of secondary. It's human nature --- you're going to, on some level, always vote for the person you like the most. (Stephen found this out the hard way in Tocantins.) Along this same line, if this Cool Likable Person is the one doing the backstabbing, then suddenly it's perceived as just 'playing the game' and not backstabbing at all. The problem is that within a 42-minute show every week, it's hard to get this idea across. It's hard to show a person just being generally nice and cool every week, whereas stuff like winning challenges and finding idols and making flashy tribal council moves is more overt and built up by Probst and the producers as what being a true Survivor badass is all about. By this metric, someone like Matt von Ertfelda should've easily won the Amazon season, but instead it was Jenna winning in a walk since at the end of the day, the jury just liked her and thought Matt was a weirdo. While I love the Amazon season, I fully admit that it wasn't particularly well-edited since they sacrificed the actual narrative of Jenna's victory to edit her as a generic mean girl instead, which is why her win shocked so many people. The only way to win this game if you're kind of a dick is to get to the final two/three with people who are hated even more (i.e. Brian and Clay in S5) or to get there with people perceived as non-entities (Tony and Woo in S28, though apparently the editing of that season hid how Woo was disliked by a lot of his tribe). This, in my opinion, was Russell's biggest failing as a Survivor player --- you CAN win by playing with zero social game, as long as you get to the end with the right people. Why he thought Natalie and Sandra were the right people is beyond me.

So if the non-magic answer of what happened in the pond was that the earthquake's fissure swallowed up the water, then SURELY it's been examined to make sure the three girls' bodies aren't inside, right? That's too obvious an answer at this point. (Plus it wouldn't explain that random scene from the premiere of the three girls running naked in the woods.) The acting on this show is so excellent that a bad performance really stands out, and Margaret Qualley is just totally the weak link here. Zylka's not much better but at least they've solved that problem by simply keeping him off the show. He'll drop Kevin's corpse in a toilet?

The Four Horsemen vote is still best thanks to the utterly perfect reaction shots of Edgardo/Alex instantly going from gleeful to solemn after Edgardo's name is revealed, followed by Earl grinning from ear to ear. That said, the Four Horsemen's douchiness was 85% Alex, 10% Mookie and 5% Dreamz for being so flaky, whereas Edgardo himself seemed like an okay guy. In this case, it was the chief douche himself Savage that got the boot, making it all the more satisfying.

Abi-Maria is one of my least-favourite players ever, but man...."at least you made the jury" was so priceless. I wonder how many times Savage had delivered that same overbearing speech about what a lifelong goal it was to make the jury while they were all sitting around camp; I can't be happier seeing that blowhard get eliminated. Or, they find Ciera as unbearable as the rest of us do and are sticking with the core alliance out of spite. It occurs to me that Ciera's "why be on the bottom?" speech doesn't work in a NINE-PERSON ALLIANCE. If you presume the top four are Savage/Tasha/Jeremy/Stephen or Joe, that still leaves Keith/Kimmi/Kelly (yikes, unfortunate acronym) and the other of Joe/Stephen in the "middle." What's to stop the "middle five" from flipping things on the top of the alliance next week or two weeks from now, teaming up with the one of Ciera/Abi/Kelley that would've been left had things gone to plan? I don't buy either of these reasons. For the first, all last week proved was that Ciera or Kass didn't have the idol. Nobody knew anything about Kelley or Abi, so a vote-split was still necessary. As for Stephen's tweet, Joe/Andrew flipping wouldn't have made any sense at that point since it would've put gigantic targets on their backs. Would've been easiest thing in the world for Jeremy/Tasha/Kimmi/Spencer/Keith/Kelly to just regroup without them and they'd still have a 6-5 numbers advantage on the rest. It tells me a lot about Kelley's game that apparently nobody considered she'd have an idol, when to us viewers, it seems patently obvious that if any of the three women would've had the HII, it would be her. Abi seems completely useless out there, so surely she must've been considered the least likely of the bunch, so she was the safest option to pile your votes on --- it's the old Edgardo move of voting out the alliance member they least expect, since if you get out an alliance member AND cause them to burn an idol, all the better. Even if you're Stephen and worried about Joe or Savage flipping, get together with the rest of your alliance and say "hey, I'm not sure I totally trust Joe or Savage, so tell them we're voting Ciera and then the rest of us will vote Abi just to be safe since Abi is useless."

Can't agree more. These two are great at playing off the more outgoing characters, but they're a riot when paired together. The show suddenly turns into a Dragnet parody, it's wonderful.

Is that the first time they've ever turned the 'introduce the musical guest' bit into a sketch? I'd like to think that somewhere, Adrien Brody is fuming that they let Kenan Thompson play a broad Jamaican stereotype to introduce a musical guest and not him.

Another week, another boardroom where Sugar easily could've or should've fired two people but didn't. With still a whopping 13 people left and relatively few episodes left in the season, there must be an absolute blood-letting coming. The editing fooled me, I thought for sure Charleine's team was going to lose that task and we'd get a clear Char vs. Richard showdown over who was to be fired. Richard is clearly full of himself but Charleine's methods were ridiculous....openly asking to speak to David every time, even if to just parrot Richard's information? Good lord.

God forbid this nice little scene actually makes it into the episode as opposed to, say, two more Savage confessionals.

The previous two all-returning-player seasons also featured post-merge alliances that more or less Pagong'ed the opposing tribe (minus Russell's still-idiotic vote against Danielle), so I wouldn't be shocked to see it happen again. Since "old Bayon" indeed seems to be a thing, that leaves seven (Jeremy, Kimmi, Savage, Stephen, Keith, Tasha, Joe) who were part of that original group with Wiglesworth as an apparent eighth, so Spencer/Ciera/Kelley/Abi may be screwed already. The only wrinkle could come if Spencer or Kelley win a key immunity, or if Kelley plays her idol at the proper time, or if everyone realizes "hey, we need to eliminate Joe as soon as he loses a challenge since otherwise he could go on a run." Or, if Abi becomes a wild card in the mix that everyone in Bayon fights to keep in their F3 since she's such an obvious goat. Abi sticking with Kass' plan was interesting, as it shows she's indeed turned on Savage and company. Abi isn't one to suck it up and play with people she dislikes for too long, so if there's an anti-Andrew faction within Bayon, they can turn to her at any time.

It occurs to me that how Andrew responds to Abi in the wake of the Woo vote may determine how far he gets in the rest of the game. He has two options... 1. "Hey Abi, so what happened with that Woo vote?....Well, you were pretty against him, fair play to that. I wish you had told me first but no worries, at least we got rid of a physical threat before the merge. Who do you think we should target next?" If Andrew says this and shows respect to her decision, she'll still probably be on his side and they can work together with Tasha after the merge. 2. "Hey Abi, wtf? Why'd you vote out Woo? That was pretty stupid. I haven't been this upset since that time I spent two hours apart from my wife, who's a model in case I forgot to mention it earlier. Whine whine whine." He does this, and Abi will instantly write him off and probably go out of her way to target him. She will make these feelings well known, and then the anti-Andrew faction (Kass, Ciera, probably Spencer, probably Kelley and Stephen) can recruit her and then they only need one more vote to knock Savage out of the game. Given how Andrew's entire Survivor career is based on him reacting poorly when things don't go his way, I'm not putting much stock in Option #1

This is the first season when Survivor has tangible, mostly-legit evidence of how popular each of the players is, so the editing could be focused more towards "giving the fans what they want" than providing a direct narrative of the game as in past seasons. Maybe we're getting so much of Joe, Savage, Stephen, etc. because they generated the highest vote totals, not because their "stories" play any huge role in how the season really unfolds. (Then again, I suspect any season with Savage returning would give him a big spotlight due to the Probst factor.)

And ironically, Abi was absent this week when the very story she was driving for the first month (her feud with Woo) reached its culmination. She was even the one who turned the vote against Woo in the first place yet that was inexplicably left offscreen. It just went from Ciera targeting Savage to "ok, let's get rid of Woo." This show is so weird about how it sometimes portrays women that it's hard to read a winner edit/loser edit into the proceedings thus far. Recall S23, when Ozzy/Brandon/Coach/Cochran took up literally 90% of the confessionals and airtime, then Sophie won anytime. Or when the first half of S29 was all Jeremy, Josh and John Rocker's side feud yet all three were gone before the final nine.

This is a solid point, since there have been enough tribe shakeups that previous tribal bonds may not matter all that much. (Not to mention pre-show alliances that we might not know about.) Still, going by the last two all-returning player seasons, veterans like the strategy of getting into an alliance and more or less sticking to it, unless you're Russell Hantz and you just randomly decide to torch Danielle one week because of REASONS~~! Time has shown us that getting into a fairly stable alliance is a tried-and-true path to Survivor victory, so it's no surprise that the vets are all keen about it, though they're also experienced enough to know when to try and shuffle the alliance boot order if it benefits them. It's fair to assume that Jeremy/Kimmi/Stephen are probably pretty solid by this point since they've been playing together the entire time. Bringing Savage/Tasha in with them makes sense, though Savage was pretty open in his dislike of Stephen earlier in the game and Savage/Tasha would have to know they'd probably be on the bottom in that quintet. I could see this group trying to recruit Kelley or Keith since they're perceived as "free agents," and nobody at large seems to know about this second-wave Ta Keo alliance.

So going by alliances, we have... Second-wave Ta Keo: Kass, Joe, Kelley Wentworth, Ciera, Keith The "old Bayon" group that has stayed together throughout all the swaps: Jeremy, Kimmi, Stephen Old Angkor: Abi-Maria, Savage and Tasha. The latter two were in old Bayon, but it's hard to say if they'll see that as an option. Abi could and probably should be a free agent since she could turn on Savage or Tasha at a moment's notice for a minor reason. Free agents: Kelly Wiglesworth, Spencer. I have no idea where Kelly's allegiance lies since while she's an old-school player that would theoretically stick with her original alliance, we have no idea what she's thinking due to the lack of confessionals and the fact that she's seemingly on the outside of every vote. Spencer will go with any option that keeps him in the game, though he had some previous ties with Jeremy and Kelley. I would guess that with the merge, everyone will be gunning for Joe the moment he loses an immunity challenge, UNLESS his Ta Keo Five group holds or if Jeremy or Savage try to keep him around for the 'alpha male shield' strategy. Jeremy pushes too hard on this, however, and he may lose Stephen, who obviously wants Joe out as soon as possible. I don't really have any idea how this is going to play out next week, so yeah, I'm very much digging all the tribe swaps and seeming lack of any hardcore allegiances.

Fans get 'grumpy' since depending on some of the outfits, it's patently unfair to some players. If you're a lawyer, how would you feel if you showed up to play and were told "oh, you can stay in a three-piece suit on this tropical island....others, yeah, they get t-shirts and shorts."

This one was pretty obviously forecast from the beginning. It seems like almost every time one of these "pick a product" tasks requires a vendor to pick which of the two teams he/she prefers to sell their product, the team that loses the vendor's choice also loses the task. Ruth didn't seem like anything more than the token goofy candidate so best that she get fired now rather than be dead weight for weeks on end. Yet again we have a strong case for a double-firing, as Selina clearly should've been gone and is living on borrowed time in the process....Karren and Claude were ready to personally pack her bags. For an insane moment, I thought the one team was actually going to choose the f'ing rabbit hutch as their high-end item. A rabbit hutch that cost 1000 pounds, did I hear that right?! What's the ratio of dog owners to rabbit owners at one of those pet expos, about 10-to-1?

First and foremost, it's wonderful to hear that Danny is doing well after his transplant. I can't even fathom how terrifying that late-night visit had to have been for Terry. It's great that things are going smoothly for the Dietz family and that everyone is healthy. Kass and Spencer need to form a secret alliance ASAP, and in a way they already have. They've played up the "bitter rivals" thing so much that none of the other tribe members would believe they were covertly working together. Clearly they're not THAT angry at each other since they worked together here, and it wouldn't be the first time that Survivor players have put aside personal differences to team up. So let me get this straight. Survivor spends multiple episodes hammering home Abi's feud with Woo, but when it finally comes time for Woo's elimination episode, that ENTIRE SUBPLOT is completely ignored when it may have been the reason Woo was sent home?? Watching the ep, I was wondering why Ciera was targeting Woo instead of Savage and figured that it was because it would be an easier sell to get rid of Woo (the ex-Ta Keo) than Andrew (the ex-Bayon). But no, it looked like Abi's feelings were again the focus and yet the show ignored it to push the 'Ciera is a player' narrative. This being said, dumb move by Savage in just naming Ciera as the would-be vote without any discussion or consultation. Doubly dumb move to just waltz back into the merged tribe and assume he was the 'leader' of the former Bayon crew. Let me add a giant LOL that teaming with Abi inevitably came back to bite Savage in the ass....gee, who saw that coming? (besides everyone) I have to laugh that Stephen's tearful obsession with losing S19 of course gets aired, whereas Kelly is reportedly getting spitefully frozen out of camera-time since the producers and Probst are all mad that she's not obsessing over her loss to Hatch. Kudos to Kelly for being a mature person. That being said, I can't totally fault Stephen for his emotions. Unless you've been out there, you can't really know what the whole Survivor experience does to one's mindset. Stephen as a student of the game must have gone into that FTC thinking he was going to win, so to lose a shutout had to really rock him, not to mention going back and watching the season and realizing that JT had it in the bag all along. (And then watching JT's bed-crapping performance in HvV and thinking "I lost to THIS GUY?!?!") Beyond Stephen's "golden boy" issues, it must also be incredibly frustrating when you're in Survivor and trying to swing a logical vote but the others simply aren't having it. Damn. I didn't get the whole "Abi is eye candy" vibe since I've never found her attractive but....damn.