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?