Survivor Cook Islands: week 4

It is with a heavy heart, drooping eyelids and a caffeine I.V. drip that I write to you tonight. The signs are not good. Eddie Maguire has moved Survivor to 10.30pm on a Wednesday night, and with dropping ratings and American product placement sponsors not renewing their contracts for future seasons the end might be nigh. I think we should all prepare ourselves for the worst. I think I might need to start going to bed earlier on Tuesday nights.

This season is supposed to be the big moral lesson that we're all the same on the inside no matter what colour we are on the outside. It's a small world, after all. But no matter your race or religion, what this week proved is it's gender that really counts. At Raro the girls worked together to improve the shelter and complain about the boys sitting around the campfire talking and drinking coconut milk, while the boys sat around the campfire drinking coconut milk and talking about whether the girls were complaining about them. I think we can answer that one in the affirmative.

We actually had a proper Reward Challenge for the first time this week, with pillows, blankets and a hammock up for grabs. In yet another challenge based on previous efforts, two members of each team were tied by the waist to a long rope wound around various obstacles, with their remaining team members trying to help them through, under, over and around said obstacles as fast as possible. Obviously the best candidates were the smallest, lightest and most limber members of each tribe, which meant the girls. Jeff announced that "Teamwork is critical in this", by which he meant the girls being good sports and not complaining about the bruises being inflicted by their hyper-competitive male team mates throwing them about like crash test dummies. You think I'm joking? How else should one interpret comments such as "Don't worry about her, we'll give her a pillow tonight"?

There was some swimming and puzzle solving after the maze bit finished, but Aitu managed to keep the substantial lead they already had when Becky and Candice were tossed across the Stage 1 finish line first. Jeff made an effort to very clearly explain that a member of the losing tribe would be sent to Exile Island for two days but would be back for the Immunity Challenge and therefore not in any way protected from Tribal Council. He was so clear that I simply could not figure out why Adam grinned like he'd won something when he was picked. Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that he was still grinning like an idiot when he came back again, and possibly spent the whole two days just sitting there grinning like an idiot, which is why they didn't show a single second of his time on the island.

Ozzy had been in a sulky mood ever since his friend Cecilia got voted off. At one point he seemed on the point of packing up his Hawaiian sling and going home, but Aitu's reward win lifted his spirits and instead he helped catch a small fish market's worth of food for the rest of the tribe. Now he likes everyone again because they all need him because he's strong and if they lose him they lose a lot of strength. Well, that's what he thinks at least: it didn't seem to occur to him that catching nine out of the eleven fish that day does not make him the "sole" provider.

Even more childish was Cao Boi's reaction to spotting a booby bird (and no, he didn't mean Parvarti) up a tree. He climbed the tree, tipped the bird out of its nest and almost killed its newly hatched baby. Then he felt bad and blamed his inner child for doing it. The man is 43 years old! Jonathan, who is allegedly a writer, was so horrified that the most articulate words he could use to describe the chick were "This thing is newborn, like today…just covered with its…stuff." Actually it looked a bit to me like Balut, but let's not go there. They managed to stick the baby and nest back up in the tree, but I don't think the rest of the tribe is going to either forget or forgive Cao Boi any time soon.

Parvarti's flirting with Nate seems to be working nicely. She's got him so besotted that he can see quite clearly what she's doing but is powerless to stop it. She was also smart enough to realise that JP has started behaving like a little deity, getting people to do everything for him by simply expecting it. Ooh, I can feel a big fall from a very high place coming up.

The immunity challenge involved assembling a stretcher, some more swimming, and the rescue of a fair maiden tied to a ship's mast that was for some reason sitting out in the ocean by itself and not actually attached to a ship. From there it was a straightforward fire lighting challenge to burn a rope and drop a flag (ho hum). Cao Boi employed a technique which for a long time was all smoke and no fire, leading Jeff to observe that he was either going to be a hero or look very silly. In the end it was probably both, because he managed to help Aitu win and to look very silly indeed.

Part of the blame for Raro's loss went to Stephannie, whose flint technique suggests she's never heard the quote that Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Another definition of insanity might be Telling your tribe mates that it's entirely your fault you lost the challenge. Drawing a big target on her forehead would have been less subtle. The boys were all quite happy to agree with her, but some of the girls realised that with a 5-4 numbers lead it was their one chance maintain a degree of power over the boys, so the race was on to get the necessary numbers before JP woke up from his nap.

Parvarti was resistant to voting JP off, perhaps because she hasn't had a chance to add him to her collection of victims yet. She might think her hold on Nate is well hidden, but the rest of the girls have already spotted it and they struggled to decide whether she could be trusted not to tell Nate, who might blab it to the rest of the boys. Even more interestingly the same need to keep the new plan secret from the boys didn't apply to Brad, who they were quite willing to drag into their new alliance.

Needless to say JP's God-complex meant he never saw the vote coming, so he made lots of fabulous statements during Tribal Council which proved how little he realised how much he'd annoyed the others. The final vote was 5-2 against him and I just assumed it was JP and Adam as the core members of the boys' alliance who had voted for Stephannie. But the closing credits showed that somehow, somewhere, with no hint to us at home, Adam had swapped allegiances and voted against JP. Hopefully next week we'll get some more explanation about exactly how that happened. Hopefully next week I'll still be awake for Tribal Council!

Survivor Cook Islands: week 3

The final three minutes of last week's episode were some of the best TV Survivor has ever given us, so it shouldn't be such a surprise for this week to be a bit, well, dull in comparison.

Since I can't bear to let last week go just yet, mention must be made of Jeff's voice over summary of what happened Previously…on…Survivor: "Billy thought he and Candice made a connection." To quote JP, "If it's true it's true, but…it's NOT true!" If Billy had done a little more actual thinking and a little less wishful thinking he could have avoided the humiliation he's probably still feeling three weeks after the episode went to air in his home town.

Cao Boi has worked his way into his tribemates' hearts the way a deep vein thrombosis eventually works its way into its victim's heart. He's not dead yet, but one gets the distinct impression he'll mysteriously die in his sleep if he doesn't stop swinging wildly between unfunny jokes and unoriginal comparisons of the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. Using mid-sentence pauses to the same dramatic effect as JP, Brad explained in his piece to camera that "I don't think Cao Boi is all there…or ever will be all there…unless he's medicated."

The Reward Challenge was a blend of shock and the completely expected. The shock was Jeff's order to "Drop your buffs" and the subsequent affirmative action which split the races and genders equally among the two tribes. Cecilia was a team captain whose first pick was the other girl in Jana Pittman socks. Jonathans' first pick was the other guy who has also been to Exile Island. The process ended up with two teams each of boys and girls, and four team captains each holding an egg in their outstretched palm. Squeezing them as hard as possible on Jeff's order – issued from a dry-cleaning safe distance away - showed the stunt Easter eggs to have the dye on the inside. The two tribes now spattered in blue paint formed the new Raro tribe, and the two tribes looking like extras from a bad horror movie got the red buffs and the Aitu flag.

The no-shock-whatsoever was the lack of anything even vaguely resembling a reaction on Candice's face when Jeff pointed out that Billy was missing. Impressively she managed to continue not to react back at camp with her new tribemates when Cecilia explained why she should be very afraid of attending the reunion special without at least one bodyguard. It actually took a lot of explaining for Candice to comprehend how anything she'd said could have been so entirely transformed, but she looked suitably scared by the end.

Elsewhere on the beach the campaigning for alliances had already begun. Jonathan either grew up in the same neighbourhood as Alan Alda or watched way too much M*A*S*H in his formative years, because he talks exactly like Hawkeye and was very keen on joining the Korean alliance with Becky and Yul, and taking Candice and Jessica with him whether they liked it or not. Fortunately for him Candice was receptive to the idea. Fortunately for us, Jessica – who seems to be nicknamed 'Flicker' - was not. It wasn't so much a generation gap as a yawning generational chasm watching him try and use the logic of planning for the future to convince a Gen Y deadbeat to do something sensible for her own good. He instructed her on how to be non-committal if anyone else tried to get her into an alternate alliance, and I'd like to think she's a very fast learner because she used every trick he taught her to avoid agreeing with him. The funniest thing was the difference between Jonathan's assurance to Becky that "I can get Flicker to do whatever we want her to do" and his later piece to camera, by which time the story had changed to a more doubtful "I believe that I have Flicker."

Parvati's surname is Shallow. She's a cocktail waitress, and to quote her bio on the website "is most proud of being a female boxer for Perfect 10 Model Boxing". I don’t even know what that is, but it doesn't sound like part of the Mensa admission process. She is quite possibly the most overt flirt ever seen on Survivor. Nate caught an octopus, which then wrapped itself around his waist and effectively caught him right back. Parvati's response: 'That's a lot of meat [flutter eyelashes while looking at his groin]. It's good [glance coyly away to the side]. You could probably eat that whole thing yourself, huh? [blatant, smutty grin]. Later she pointed out that his pants were falling off. She has no shame. She'll probably make the final three.

To describe this week's Immunity Challenge as recycled would be to give it undue credit. 'Recycled' suggests that something old has been turned into something new and different. This was just a straight-out repeat of a challenge from a few years back, which in turn was a copy of a pursuit cycling race. Teams were tied together carrying heavy sandbags, running around a roped-off velodrome and trying to make up the gap to tag the tail of the other team. Raro won and got to send a member of Aitu to Exile Island for two days, effectively granting that person individual immunity. Who knows whether it was strategy or pity, but they chose Billy's true love Candice and promptly upset Jonathan's alliance. Cao Boi and Flicker seemed to form a new Tattooed Outsider faction who wanted to vote out Becky because of her 'vibe'. Jonathan's efforts to change Flicker's mind seemed to have the opposite effect from what he intended, but luckily for him Yul managed to convince Cao Boi to vote for someone else instead, and Cao Boi in turn convinced Flicker, so Cecilia ended up being the third person voted out.

The ad for next week looks really, really, good with Cao Boi up a tree doing battle with a bird. Considering how little defence he managed to put up during the challenge I've got my money on the bird.

Survivor Cook Islands: week 2

This week was a lesson in how to catch fish, clams, chickens and the unsuspecting heart of a lazy but lovable heavy metal fan.

Making fire using flint and a machete has been a staple part of the last half dozen series, but apparently nobody in the African American 'Hiki' tribe was paying much attention. Sorry let me correct that: Nathan, their remaining token male, hadn't been paying attention. Despite what was either several hours of non-stop effort or some deceptive editing, he utterly failed to get a fire going. In what was either a couple of minutes or some deceptive editing, the girls got it going as soon as he gave them the chance. To be fair he was either too happy to get upset about being upstaged, or smart enough to realise that the last guy who crossed those girls disappeared.

At Raro, the Caucasian beach, Jonathan came back from his two days on Exile Island and immediately started complaining that nobody had done any work on the shelter while he was gone. Since Adam couldn't understand that raising the floor up off the cold damp ground would make them feel less cold and damp at night, he's never going to understand that "ya'all's's" is not the correct form of second person plural possessive.

At Puka, the Korean kids took the first tentative steps toward an alliance, while Cao Boi inflicted another of his "Bad Wind" bruises on Jenny after she stupidly admitted to having a headache. He also inflicted more of his racist jokes on the rest of the tribe, despite them making it very clear they felt it was inappropriate, and that while they themselves got the joke others might not. Thanks to their lesson in political correctness I'm still waiting to find out what one calls a Vietnamese man with 3 dogs.

Aitu, the Latino tribe, took the main focus and most of the best quotes this week. Ozzy managed to catch a wild chicken using a net. Cristina and Ozzy caught lots of fish and some really big clams. JP came to inspect their haul and asked, "Have you guys got crabs?" I couldn't even make this stuff up!

Displaying a climate-appropriate fashion sense second only to Shane's beanie last season, Billy kitted himself out for 39 days on a tropical island in head-to-toe black, including socks. Billy doesn't want to peak too early in the game. He says there's no point wasting his energy doing something he's not as good at as someone else. Billy spends most of his time asleep in the shelter, emerging only at dinner time to eat, which he appears to be very good at. As least he's sticking to his strategy.

His 3-digit-decibel snoring was the last straw for his tribemates, who hatched a cunning plan to throw the challenge, send themselves to Tribal Council and vote him out. Actually it was Ozzy and JP who came up with that idea; Cristina didn't want anything to do with it. She and Ozzy had a couple of run-ins early, so it's hard to know whether she felt it was unfair on Billy or whether she just wanted to annoy Ozzy more than she's already doing by always calling him Oscar.

Again this week we only had the one combined reward/immunity challenge, which came with the flip-side benefit of only one crappy tree mail 'poem'. Each tribe's members were tied together to complete an obstacle course littered with answers to a series of questions from a story Jeff read out at the start. The story was about Captain James Cook, which included him finding New Zealand, New Caledonia and Hawaii but made absolutely no mention of Australia or, more significantly, the Cook Islands.

It was clear form the outset that Aitu were trying not to try. In fact the most effort they showed was fighting over who got to sit out the challenge to balance up the numbers, with Billy burning more calories in that endeavour than anything else he'd done in the previous six days.

The ending was so close between Raro and Puka that Jeff had to ask the third umpire to check the video. It was eventually called a draw so they each got two tarps and a piece of the immunity idol. Hiki got the last piece and went over the top in celebrating their third place in a manner not seen since the Australian Olympic team in the early Eighties, before all that taxpayer money started flowing to the Institute of Sport.

Billy fell off the rope-bridge, but by that point his team had already succeeded in losing and he knew why. Standing next to the Raro tribe members he told Candice, "I'm next!" and she replied, "We love you." The key pronoun there was "we", not "I". Billy, however, responded "I love you!", then blushed and fluttered his eyelashes at her from under his death-skull bandana. Up until that point in my life I'd never seen something so creepy and yet so tragic at the same time. But wait, there's still 12 minutes to go…

Yul got sent to Exile Island and used his Management Consultant problem solving skills to find the Individual Immunity Idol at the bottom of the first hole he dug. Mind you he was also smart enough to kill two chickens with the one box using bait, a stick and some rope. It'll be very interesting to see whether he plays the idol to better strategic advantage than Terry did last season.

Oh OK I'll explain the rest of the Billy story. Please understand that Billy is slightly less articulate than Judd from Guatemala, so I'm paraphrasing heavily here. He knew he'd been set up to get voted off, despite some apparent support from the girls in his tribe. He doesn't get along with Ozzy and JP, and they think he's lazy and untrustworthy. He came on Survivor to play the game, which he's done even if only for a few days. And the million dollars no longer matters to him because his prize is that he's found love of the at-first-sight variety. With Candice, she of the throw away "We love you" line. Jeff had trouble pointing out to Billy how utterly unlikely it is that a babe like Candice - a pre-med student who was class president, captain of both the soccer and cross country teams and achieved a perfect score on her Math SATs - would fall in love at first sight with a heavy metal guitarist and part-time professional wrestler. She watched him fall off the rope bridge, for pity's sake! Mere words cannot do justice to the stunned look on Jeff's face, however "tittering like an eight year old" is a good description for how the rest reacted.

If Billy had any hope that Cristina would try to save him, even if only because doing so would annoy Ozzy, it evaporated at that point. In a unanimous decision Billy was voted off the island and straight into Courtroom Three for the restraining order hearing. Billy doesn’t mind; he thinks it's cool that a heavy metal fan got voted out by someone named Ozzy. See what I mean about creepy and yet tragic?

Survivor Cook Islands: week 1

And they're racing in the Survivor Cook Islands (incorporating Exile Island) Office Sweep!

By now everyone knows that this season's big twist is that the Caucasians are the token minority, with entire tribes each of African-Americans, Asians and Latinos making up the rest of the extra-large 20 person starting line-up. In an echo of the young/old/male/female division last season we had much soul searching about what this all meant. One of the token white chicks wanted to know if it's "kosher" to segregate that way, proving she can't tell the difference between race and religion.

Billy, one of the Latinos, bragged that they'd have the advantage because "We all come from the Caribbean so we're used to the tropical heat." Yeah, it's real tropical in New York where you're from, Billy.

The African-Americans set out to represent their people and prove that black folks can swim, then promptly drowned in a sea of cliches; "cutting cotton" as a metaphor, indiscriminate use of words like "ghetto" and a really bad Martin Luther King impersonation.

At least the African Americans had several generations living in the same country as a starting point of commonality: the Asian tribe hail from as far north as Korea, as far east as the Philippines and as far south as Vietnam. Cao Boi – and yes it's pronounced Cowboy – is this year's comic relief, observing as they paddled ashore that it's his second time as a boat person. That joke went down a lot better on our couch than it did on his tribe's beach, and one gets the distinct impression that his team are merely tolerating him for now. While 'token minorities strike back' is this year's theme, at 42 he's still the token older person on his tribe. Ah, Hollywood's fickle youth culture.

In scenes reminiscent from Vanuatu (and Pearl Islands and Palau and a couple of other series) the Survivors had to clamber off an old sailing ship with just whatever rations and equipment they could grab in two minutes, then paddle to their respective camps on bamboo rafts. One of the Asian guys had a live chicken that was promptly colonised by Jonathan, a Caucasian guy who already had a chicken anyway. Unfortunately Jessica lifted up the box that both chickens were being kept under and they ran far, far away. Jessica is an amalgam of elements from last season: Sally's Jana Pittman socks, Shane's tattoos and Courtney's wacky hippy dreadlocks and, like, total cluelessness.

On the Asian tribe's beach (and yes they do have proper tribe names but I can't remember them all at this point so please forgive the labels I'm using) Yul had a sinusitis headache. Cao Boi's diagnosis was "Bad Wind" and his cure was a facial massage so vigorous that Yul was left with a prominent bruise between his eyes. Without a mirror the poor guy probably has no idea how bad it was, but comments from his tribemates like "Are you OK?", "It looks like a burn!", and "What the hell did he do to you?" probably gave him some guidance.

The combined reward/immunity challenge paid the first three finishers with flint and the last place getters with a trip to Tribal Council. It was the usual old combination of paddling and puzzle solving, although this time the boat to be paddled was itself one of the puzzles. The African-American team might have been the most united but they were also the most dysfunctional, with half the teams back on the beach before they'd even finished assembling their boat. The final puzzle slowed up the Caucasians enough that it was an exciting finish, but not enough for the African-Americans to get the one third of the immunity idol (which looks remarkably like a souvenir from my parents' 1974 holiday to Fiji) that they needed to avoid tribal council.

Exile Island is back this season, but it's not much more than a sandbar with part of a very fake shipwreck on it. For once it was the losers who got the fun job of sending somebody from one of the winning tribes for two nights of fruitless idol digging. Since none of them know much about the others they picked on Jonathan, who stood out because the Asian tribe had dobbed him in to Jeff for stealing the aforementioned chicken.

It seems that the creative effort which once went into new and original challenges has all been siphoned off into the design of the Tribal Council site. Only they've run out of ideas for that, too, and have just recycled one of the sets from Pirates of the Caribbean VII. As if the racial divisions weren't strong enough, the vote went strictly down gender lines. The three women ganged up on one of the two men, and crowned him with the indignity of being the first voted out. Jeff swapped them Sekou for a flint, which helped them get over his loss remarkably quickly. The explanation for their glee came in Sekou's video piece during the final credits: "My torch may be out, but my fire is still burning." Yep, a flint is definitely more valuable than listening to bargain basement philosophy like that 24/7.