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!