Survivor Fiji: week 9

"Not a good tree mail."
You just don’t watch this show much,
Do you Cassandra.

There simply is no such thing as a good tree mail. Well, it’s really more the crappy "poems" that come with tree mail that are the problem. (I do occasionally wonder what became of Pam Ayres; now we know.) This week we had four separate crappy "poems" inflicted on us, which surely breaches Fiji’s Charter of Human Rights.

The first one told everyone to pack up their personal belongings and paddle to Exile Island. They were not allowed to take any tools, flints or rewards. The scene had started with some loving camera shots of Moto’s bed, couch, crockery, coffee and toiletries just to remind us of what they were leaving behind. At the time it seemed like just an excuse to play some more wacky luau music, but it turned out to have a purpose. More on that later.

The note was very explicit about what they could take with them, but when they got to Exile Island there was nobody there to check their luggage, not even Jeff. Well, a few cameramen but we’re all supposed to pretend they’re not there. The person most conspicuously absent from Ravu’s boat was Lisi, and yet nobody on Moto bothered to ask where she was. They clearly didn’t care.

The look-out tower housed this week’s second note, along with new purple buffs for everyone. The note advised that the merge, which even Dreamz could see coming, has now happened and they are one tribe. It also told them to paddle back to Moto’s camp where they will all be living from now on. For Boo, Cassandra and Stacey this meant not having to experience life without a decent shelter and plentiful food. For Edguardo, Alex and Dreamz it meant a return to the good life. Mookie kept sooking about how he’s the only one who’s never lived there and slept in the bed. Either he doesn’t remember building the shelter along with everyone else on the first day, or he’s trying to garner more sympathy and therefore more pillows.

Which brings us nicely to the third note. It was sitting in the old Moto camp on top of the single set of fishing gear, the two pots, the one flint and the bare ground. While the contestants were paddling out to Exile Island the camp was totally cleaned out. There’s no shelter, no bedding, no food, no coffee and no toiletries. Nada. And we at home know exactly what’s missing because we got that little inventory at the start.

The one thing everyone – except Boo – understood was that it’s now or never for alliances. The Ravu boys each had people from their old alliances who they were supposed to target for membership of a new group. Dreamz was to win over Cassandra, Mookie was to work on Yau-Man and Michelle, while Alex was going to sweet talk Stacey. Apparently Edguardo doesn’t have any friends.

The crazy thing is that they keep referring to themselves as "The Four Horsemen". I wonder what they’ll call themselves when there’s eight members of their alliance if they all succeed in their missions? I wonder if they really thought that name through. I wonder which one sees himself as Pestilence, which as War, which as Famine and which as Death.

The names Alex and Edguardo probably use to best represent Mookie and Dreamz are Dumb and Dumber. Before leaving Ravu they grilled Mookie about whether they could trust him as the keeper of the idol, and reiterated their plan not to tell Dreamz about it yet because he couldn’t be trusted not to blab to Cassandra. It turns out Mookie can’t be trusted not to blab to Dreamz.

Alex witnessed the announcement with barely contained fury. Smooth as ever he managed to twist "You can’t be trusted" into "You just get really honest" when Dreamz quite naturally asked why they didn’t tell him at the time. As much as I love to pay out on him, the wounded look on Dreamz’ face was a bit heart-wrenching. And he got really honest in his next one-on-one to the camera pointing out how and why he doesn’t trust the other Horsemen any more.

The only person not frantically working on new alliances was Boo, who is planning to sit back, let things shake out and then take a leadership role with whichever group wins. Unfortunately for Boo, he was the top of the "first to go" list that came out of every clandestine deal-making huddle. Fortunately for Boo the Immunity Challenge shook things up again in yet another twist. And fortunately for us we didn’t have to see the tree mail notifying them of challenge.

Before it started, each person had to reach into a bag and pull out at random either an orange or green tile. This is where it gets a bit confusing. They are all still in the new purple Bula Bula tribe, but the new green and orange groups had to compete against each other for immunity and a reward. The winners would get a feast, and the losers would be punished with not just a trip to Tribal Council but another mystery note, which is a cruel punishment but not all that unusual this episode.

As twists go it was a good one but as challenges go it was unoriginal. Teams had to paddle their boat through a course, collect bags of stuff and solve a puzzle. True to the Milton-Bradley / Mousetrap / ‘For Ages 8 to 80’ spirit of the whole thing, the bags had to be retrieved from what others might have described as a coil but looked to me like the top off a big Totem Tennis(TM) pole.

Both teams reached the first one at the same time. Jeff called out that there’s a strategic technique needed to get the bags down. He need not have wasted his breath for our sake because that was obvious by the way Yau-Man was retrieving the second one for his team by the time Stacey and then Dreamz each struggled before Alex finally took over and worked it out.

Too little too late however, so the team of Alex, Michelle, Dreamz, Stacey and Mookie were forced to watch as Jeff handed over a big plate of raw steak and veggies to the winners (which is apparently their reward, even though it had been sitting out in the tropical sun for a few hours). The losers also had to brace themselves for the final note, which simply read:

You will not be going back to camp,
There will be no time to strategize.
We’re heading to Tribal Council right now.

The only question I really wanted Jeff to ask was "Lisi, you’ve been in a luxury resort for three days now; why have you still not brushed your hair?" Unfortunately his questioning consisted solely of "[Person A] give me a reason to get rid of [Person B]." Once again, Alex’s smooth tongue won the day. One by one he simply answered that he had no reason for getting rid of any of the people Jeff named until it got to Michelle, in which instance he said "I don’t know Michelle as well as I know any of the other people here." It sent a clear message to the others that leader Alex had tagged Michelle for elimination. Even Dreamz understood it, although apparently Alex also should have explained to him that ‘Michelle’ is not spelt ‘Mechelle’.

Either way, yet another girl is gone. We don’t know whether the orange and green teams will continue, but I’m sure the next tree mail will explain it in excruciating rhyme and metre.