Survivor Palau: week 11

Survivor Palau, Episode 11: Stephanie Strikes Back

If someone were to ask what the biggest disappointment for me has been so far this season I’d have to answer, "Caryn". According to her bio on the web site she’s a human rights attorney and in her photo she looked really switched on, so I had high hopes of some masterful manipulation based on a superior understanding of the human psyche. I guess I was expecting Geoffrey Robertson in a skirt. Instead she’s run the emotional gamut from confused to perplexed, and possibly does the "rabbit in the headlights" look even better than George W Bush, which is really saying something. More on Caryn later.

This was one of those episodes where the challenges were boring because they were just the same old recycled ideas. Sure there were a few "twists", but they were about as predictable as the plot of a Steven Segal movie. Let’s get them out of the way and move on to the good bits:

Reward challenge: the auction one where Survivors get to spend $120 on an ice-cream sundae or $300 on plate of spag bol and garlic bread. The "twist" was that the lots were covered up so nobody knew what they were possibly wasting their cash on. Tom had already predicted that the last lot would be letters from home, so it was a bit of an anticlimax when that happened.

Immunity challenge: the tile smashing one, but set out horizontally like a disco dance floor and put far enough away that any precision lobbing of coconuts was next to impossible and most people smashed more of their competitors’ tiles than their own. Once again Ian and Tom dominated, only with Ian winning this time.

The one interesting bit at the reward challenge was an off-hand comment from Jeff to the effect that Ian was starting to smell like one of his dolphin buddies. Much to everyone’s relief and amusement Ian was embarrassed enough to finally take both the hint and a bath. The difference in the before and after shots once he’d washed his hair was so pronounced that you could pick the out-of-sequence editing, which made it a bit hard to trust how much of the rest of the episode happened in the order it was shown.

Deep down in his heart, poor delusional Coby might actually believe that people saw him as a threat, but it was clear this week that everyone is genuinely worried about keeping Stephanie around for too much longer and has only been temporarily thwarted by Janu’s dramatic surrender. As Gregg with two G’s put it, "Stephanie progressing in this game means Koror falls apart and starts to stab each other in the back." Derr, Gregg! That’s inevitable, and voting her out this week just delays it a bit longer. Don’t worry; we know what you meant, even with the awkward sentence construction.

Initially devastated at not winning immunity, it didn’t take Steph long to realise that Tom didn’t win either and they had their first – and possibly last – chance to vote him off. Having already managed to get Katie, and even more surprisingly Jenny, on side for a girls alliance against the boys it just remained to word Caryn up and the deal was done. You’ve been waiting for it, so here comes the explanation of why Caryn is going to be absorbing Janu’s full allocation of cheap shots from me from now on.

Katie tells Caryn about the girls’ alliance, in words of one syllable or less, but Caryn doesn’t give any indication that she understands what a strategy is or what to do with it. She immediately runs off and tells Tom about the girls’ alliance. Tom tells Ian, and Ian has a go at Katie. Katie lies to Ian and says it was just an idea she was floating, then in her piece to camera tells the whole world that "Caryn sucks" (although since the sentence had a subject and verb but no object we’re not sure what precisely it is that Caryn sucks. I could take a guess, but this a family newsletter.)

The funniest thing was that, like me, everyone held Caryn in far higher intellectual regard than she deserves. They interpreted her actions as some kind of complex reverse-psychology trap and refused to believe her. If any of us can believe the editing, at one point she was likely to be the one going home because nobody trusts her any more.

Unfortunately that wasn’t to be, and Stephanie’s valiant stand as the last member of Ulong was snuffed out along with her torch (and Warren’s chance in the sweep) in a unanimous vote. As Jeff pointed out, now it’s down to six Koror members who’ll be forced to turn on each other, so hopefully next week’s episode will be a bit more entertaining.

Let’s close with a quote from Caryn: "At any given time I might not know what’s going on." That’s out of context of course, but so was the editing this week, which makes it all the more appropriate.