Survivor Panama - Exile Island: week 4

The morning after is always an uncomfortable time for a man who has done a woman wrong, and both Nick and Austin were having a lot of trouble looking Sally in the eye following the Tribal Council at which they voted out Misty despite an alleged alliance with both girls.

In one of the strangest leaps of logic ever witnessed on Survivor, Dan the astronaut decided their alliance of four boys needed a fifth member to ensure their dominance after the merge. Here's just a few of the problems with that idea:

1. The merge usually happens with ten people left, so five isn't enough for security.
   
2. With six people left they can only afford to lose one more immunity challenge before the plan collapses.
   
3. Since they need to win the challenges they need the strongest players in their alliance.
   
4. Sally is by far stronger than Ruth Marie.
   
5. Dan didn't check with the rest of the alliance before making an offer to Ruth Marie.

At Casaya the inter-alliance arguments between Shane, Courtney, Aras and Danielle have reached such a critical – and utterly entertaining – stage they've had to implement a rule of "no arguments during dinner". Cirie is working her butt off, and Courtney and Danielle are at least in an alliance. Snoop-Bob (as he likes to be known) has no excuse for sleeping all day other than being too damn cool to really care.

The reward challenge involved two great Survivor traditions: marine-grade plywood and blatant contra. Each contestant had to retrieve a large triangular puzzle piece floating in the water, wrangle it into a frame and then work with the others to match the symbols on each side. It was basically a giant game of Triominos, which brought back my childhood almost as much as the "no arguments during dinner" rule.

The prize was a bathroom stocked with Charmin toilet paper, a nameless loofa, some nameless towels, five litres of nameless water and some Olay soap. The marketing folk at Olay obviously didn't pay as much as their Charmin cousins, because we only saw the Olay soap logo once whereas the timber portaloo was festooned with plenty of twee "Casa de Charmin" signage.

Casaya won the reward, and despite a team agreement that the portaloo be used to keep things like towels and firewood dry, Snoop-Bob declared – in quite specific detail –that he intended to christen it first. I think he just wanted to show off his impressive range of euphemisms for the number two. Hopefully he remembered to use both the Charmin and the Olay when he finished.

Of course the other part of Casaya's reward was getting to send Terry to Exile Island for a couple of days. Since the weather was perfect the whole time it was less of a problem for Terry than it was for the rest of his tribe, who couldn't cope without their SuperMom. Without him, nothing works in an orderly fashion and there's nobody who is completely in charge. Nobody knows how to use the flint to make fire. Dan even made all the kids promise that the place would be spotless when Mom got home.

Terry, meanwhile, was enjoying plenty of extra clues to the Individual Immunity Idol's secret hiding place. He very quickly picked up that two clues included the word "why", translated that into the letter "Y", deduced that it was referring to a specific tree of that shape, lifted a particular rock, dug a few feet and found the talisman. He's now pretty much safe until the final three so they might as well give him the million bucks now, but not until somebody asks some hard questions about how many hints the camera crew dropped. Maybe it was just skilful editing, but gee it looked rigged.

Since it wasn't dinner time, Casaya broke out into full-fledged war about Danielle's work ethic, or lack thereof. Shane took the not very subtle route of asking why she has, quote, "such an aversion to work." She was affronted because she has been a sports captain so he shouldn't speak to her like that. I'm not sure that I understand the logic, nor that I particularly want to.

The immunity challenge involved pairs roped together running along a balance beam course to collect water in little buckets. The water went into a drum as a counter balance to another tribe member sitting on a swing and waiting to be raised high enough to release a flag. The rain was enough to make things slippery but not help much with the bucket filling. In an exciting finish, Shane and Courtney's haphazard pouring was faster than Sally and Austin's more water-wise efforts, and helped Casaya to a narrow win and clean sweep of this week's challenges.

La Mina's pain at losing was eased by Mom being home and immediately taking charge. Sally made a no-nonsense pitch for survival, which obviously worked because Terry and Austin started looking for loopholes to vote out Ruth Marie instead. Technically only Dan had promised Ruth Marie membership, but Nick and Dan wanted to stick to the spirit of the deal more than the letter of the law. Austin declared himself the new messiah for pulling off the miracle of changing Terry's mind. Somehow I don't think Terry will share that opinion when he watches the episode.

At Tribal Council, Ruth Marie described being "small in statue" (sic) as the reason she feels on the outside. Sally admitted to having no idea which way it would go, but looked pretty relieve to be on the winning side when Ruth Marie was voted out 4-2.

Tonight's episode was brought to you by Charmin, Olay and the number 2.