Survivor Panama - Exile Island: week 3

This is the twelfth season of Survivor, and yet the contestants still manage to miss fundamental aspects of the game. For example, it's unwise to rush into an alliance with people you barely know, but it's idiotic to then tell the rest of the tribe of both the existence and precise composition of that alliance. Why? Because when your coalition turns out to be more dysfunctional than the cast of a Woody Allen movie you look like a loser to everyone else regardless of whether you leave the alliance or put up with it. And Cirie is laughing like a hyena all the way to the merge.

Melinda's spot in Casaya was barely cold before Mr Miyagi was in it, imparting wisdom and making character judgements. Bruce says he can see at least six different personality types within Casaya, but didn't indicate how many of them Shane accounts for.

His first pearl was that filtering water through three layers of t-shirt gets rid of 90% of the bacteria. He's taught backpacking to high school students for 30 years so he knows these things. Personally I'm guessing that 10% of the germs in a third world country is still more than enough to kill a healthy adult, let alone someone who hasn't eaten properly in a week. I also wonder how many germs are put back into the water by a t-shirt that hasn’t been washed properly in a week. Or by sharing the one water bottle between seven.

La Mina isn't faring any better on the food front because choking back tears of frustration that Sally lost their spear doesn't count as nutrition. Luckily Terry caught one small fish, which was enough to give them all a protein boost going into the reward challenge. There were blankets, pillows and a tarpaulin for the winning team, but there must also have been something on offer to the camera men for whomever got the best shot of Danielle's lovely decolletage. Seriously, watch in future how often she gets a lingering upper-body close-up whenever she’s in a bikini. There's surely a drinking game in it.

The reward challenge involved four tribe members on a balance beam out at sea trying to catch cannon balls fired from a slingshot on the beach by one of the other three. La Mina won and got to pick which member of Casaya would be deported to Exile Island to stay until the next immunity challenge. Since Casaya had spent most of the opening chit-chat with Jeff raving about how much better Bruce was making their lives it was a no-brainer. He’s now spent more time on Exile Island than with either of his tribes, and for most of that time it’s rained. He’s also only got one t-shirt through which to filter his water, which must be frustrating.

The only thing in Panama that turns faster than the weather is Shane's mood. In the ads we saw him sitting on a stump throwing a tanty to make a three-year-old proud. Surprisingly it was far more dramatic within the context of the episode, since the moments leading up to it were quite warm and playful before he suddenly snapped. Everyone in his tribe – and most specifically those in his alliance – thinks he’s a few analogies short of a metaphor. He thinks they’re nuts, too. The funny bit is that they’re all too busy complaining about the lousy deal they’ve struck to do anything about it and try making a new alliance with some sane people. Cirie, Bobby and Bruce only need to lure one member away to tip the balance in their own favour. Danielle is probably the prime candidate, because Aras is on his own after telling Cirie she’s dispensable and Courtney is just as narky and unpredictable as Shane. She also thinks that La Mina's choice to send Bruce back to Exile Island was the most evil thing she's seen people do, so she needs to read more.

Things couldn’t be more different at La Mina, where everyone is being very careful to be nice to each other’s faces. Misty, who wants us all to know she’s a natural born flirt, has been giving all the boys back rubs, because that way they’ll like her and won’t vote her off. For such a book smart girl it was an incredibly adolescent strategy, and it got an equally adolescent response from Nick and Austin: they lapped it up but still thought less of her for it. We even got a nicely spliced in shot of Nick out in the ocean trying to scrub the ‘girl germs’ off his shoulders.

The immunity challenge was one of the most novel ones the producers have ever come up with. Five wrestling rings were laid out on the sand, one for each round. Buried within each ring was a pillow-sized bag. Each team had a mat to mark its own home plate. In each round, a few members of each tribe had to race to dig up the bag and get it back to their home plate, while simultaneously preventing the other team from doing the same. It was essentially a cross between a pillow fight, mud wrestling and rugby. Well, when the girls were competing against each other it was more like pillow fight / mud wrestling and for the boys it was more like rugby. At least that seemed to be the editing suite policy, along with enthusiastic deployment of the pixelating machine.

Like the reward challenge it was a very close contest, but unlike the reward challenge Casaya won. Misty explained that it was because "they’ve got so much more weight than we have", while looking smug and rubbing her neck at the spot where Cirie sat on her. Most members of La Mina got their first taste of Tribal Council, and we got the third rendition of Jeff’s incantation that fire equals life on Survivor. Austin nicely deflected a question about what happened to the spear without mentioning Sally’s name. Ruth Marie agreed that she’s vulnerable as the only member of La Mina without another member of her original tribe for company. Misty looked smug again while talking about how close everyone is. The boys and Ruth Marie all agreed with her, and then voted her out regardless.

In the final humiliation she was forced to reveal that she had not found the Individual Immunity Idol after all. As the third person voted off she’ll be in the back row at the reunion special, so at least she’ll get another chance to show off those neck rub skills.