It can haul three tons of stuff.
Buy one! (Pretty please?)
Apparently next week’s grand finale will be Survivor’s 200th episode. Before you decide to stay up for that milestone event I should warn you that it starts at 11.15pm and runs for three hours, including the reunion. That’s OK, I’ll stay up (*sigh*).
This week gave us one of the most paranoid reactions we’ve seen in 199 episodes. Boo is worried that the others are scheming against him behind his back. Ever the man of action he decided to build a short-cut trail through the jungle to the water well so that he can sneak up and listen in on conversations that take place there. In his foolproof theory he’ll know what everyone is up to and they won’t be able to do a thing about it. Gee Boo that’s, like, really evil. You da man. It’s just a pity that the whole time you were off alone working on this eighth wonder of the modern world everyone else was back at camp talking about you. There’s nothing left for them to say, either at the well or anywhere else.
The crappy tree mail poem was so blatant even Dreamz worked out it was the car challenge. He’s the only one of the remaining six who doesn’t own a car. He’s also the only one without a driver’s licence, but that didn’t stop him from embarking on a campaign of shameless begging to either just be allowed to win the challenge or be handed the prize by the actual winner. Even I thought he had more dignity than that.
Dreamz was wrong: it wasn’t the car challenge, it was a truck challenge. A Ford Super Duty to be precise. It can haul three tons in the tray and tow twelve off the back,. To prove this, after the challenge they hauled a huge crate of school supplies and towed a mobile staff office to a nearby school. I’m not sure if the producers or the Ford marketing team came up with this idea, but they used a hoist to suspend the crate of school supplies over the tray of the truck (sorry, Ford Super Duty) then dramatically drop it to show off the suspension. Not once but twice, from a couple of different camera angles. Wow, that’s a truck!
Despite his team having to go back to the start three times because he kept falling off the balance beam, Yau-Man won. There’s a number of horrible racial stereotypes about men in hats, the elderly and Asians being bad drivers. Yau-Man avoided them all - and simultaneously proved the stereotype about nerds being smarter than jocks - by offering to give Dreamz the car (sorry, truck. Sorry, Ford Super Duty) on the following condition: if they both make it to the final four, and Dreamz wins immunity to make it to the final three, he has to give it to Yau-Man. Of course Dreamz said yes. Of course Jeff looked stunned. Of course Earl just smiled wryly.
As reward winner, Yau-Man also got to pick whom to send to Exile Island. His choices should have been Dreamz, Earl and Cassandra as members of the losing team, but Dreamz had to drive his new Ford Super Duty to the school with its three ton crate of soccer balls and pencil cases. (Actually Boo had to drive because Dreamz doesn’t have a licence, but you get the point.)
In the end, Yau-Man sent himself to Exile Island. He said it’s because Cassandra isn't strong enough to cope out there, and Earl has already had to go too many times. In truth it meant he got the next clue for where Alex’s immunity idol has been rehidden (which he dutifully shared with Earl, who found it easily). He was also spared the pain of visiting the school and witnessing Dreamz trying to teach impressionable children how to speak English.
The immunity challenge was only notable for three things:
- Jeff’s first opportunity this season to pronounce the word buoy as "boo-ee" (I love that so much!);
- The editing team’s first ever opportunity to pixelate someone’s potty mouth (in this instance, Stacey); and
- Boo winning immunity again and stuffing up everyone’s plans to vote him out next.
Many of you know that in my spare time I’m a Contracts Manager, and my inner bush lawyer cringed at the loopholes in the pact between Yau-Man and Dreamz. The main one, which even Dreamz spotted, is that the whole deal is conditional on them both making it to the final four. All Dreamz has to do is get Yau-Man voted out prior to the final four and he gets to keep the car and his spot in the final three. Likewise one might argue that Dreamz does not have the necessary mental capabilities to understand the contractual terms and give informed and binding acceptance of Yau-Man’s offer. Either way, Dreamz tried hard to get rid of Yau-Man this week so that he can honestly welch on the deal and not have the rest of the world think he’s untrustworthy. I mean, if this season has proven nothing else it's that Dreamz can be trusted with a secret, right?
The other pressing loophole is the car curse. Nobody has ever won the car and gone on to win the series. Perhaps it really is a car curse and not a truck (sorry, Ford Super Duty) curse. Is it the winner or the possessor of the car who is cursed? I guess we'll find out next week.
In the lead up to Tribal Council it genuinely looked like Dreamz had convinced Cassandra, Boo and Stacey to help him vote Yau-Man out. It was an easy choice for Stacey, because Boo had immunity and she was the only other unaligned person left for them to vote out. (Oddly, in his recap on last week, Jeff described Alex as the last member of the Four Horsemen alliance. I thought Dreamz was a member, too?) Cassandra had a tougher call to make, because if the plan backfired she’d have burned bridges with both Yau-Man and Earl. Boo just does what he’s told.
Maybe Yau-Man is psychic, or maybe he’s an excellent judge of character. Maybe he’s actually paranoid and says things like this all the time and they just end up on the cutting room floor, but it was oddly prescient when he said to Earl as they left for Tribal Council, "I have bad vibes." Either way he was alert for the hidden meaning when Stacey made a seemingly random comment to Jeff that she believed it would be a split vote that night. It was enough to spook Yau-Man into playing his immunity idol, and he smiled a little bit wider every time Jeff put a vote with his name on it on the scrap heap, leaving two votes for Stacey and none for anyone else.
That puts Stacey on the jury and me out of our office sweep. Next week we get to see if it’s a final three again this season, who those final three are, and who eventually wins. We’ll also see if Jeff wears the same duck-egg blue V-neck sweater to his third reunion in a row, and whether Lisi’s grooming standards are a result of poor suitcase packing or genuine lack of effort.
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