“The Sooner We Get Rid Of These Jackasses The Better!”
Posted by Grimme on 2003-12-12
Sandra was CLEARLY (Hi Mr_Pessimistic) the Comeback Kid of Survivor tonight. After losing her last friend Christa, Sandra quite rightly felt she was next on the hit list but had decided not to go without a bang.
Sandra planned some big time sabotage---hiding water barrels, cutting fish nets, throwing away the fishing spear were on her list---until she realized that she might not be going home after all.
“Come on, old girl, focus,” Lillian said to herself as she fumbled in the Reward Challenge but the words also applied to her evolving game strategy. Already resentful of Burton’s skittishness about taking her to the Final Two, Lillian became downright suspicious when Burton and Jon wanted to vote strong Darrah off before weaker Sandra.
Lillian’s sense of righteousness often kicks in at the weirdest moments and this was one of those moments. Burton, Jon, Darrah and she had an alliance of 4 and, by golly, Lillian felt they should stick to it. Once it was obvious that the men were so easy to break an alliance, Lillian felt free to explore other options for herself.
Meanwhile Burton and Jon underestimated the three women’s abilities in very condescending terms, but not to their faces. The women, they felt, had no strategy, each one had ridden coattails to get this far in the game and Jon contemptuously said the men held the “intellectual advantage”.
My view is that Jon is the one who has ridden coattails since the beginning of the game. Each of the three women has demonstrated their ability in some way and certainly aren’t pushovers…..
At the time of these male insults, Darrah had won two immunity challenges in a row (and tonight would make it three in a row) and no one had given them to her. She was on the lower end of the totem pole on her original tribe and also in the merged tribe. She survived all of these handicaps, also winning a reward challenge.
Sandra has been a hard worker and she is the main reason that the Drake tribe was so well-off. Her village bargaining had won incomparable advantages for her tribe which paid off in the repeated reward and immunity challenge wins. She’s made and broken deals and she too has survived. Her overhearing of conversations is second to none.
And Lillian, like Burton, literally came back from the dead and convinced the Drakes that she would side with them against the Morgans. She was primarily responsible for the evictions of Andrew and Rupert, no little task. And she has won a Reward Challenge (on a team with Darrah and Jon)
All of these tensions and undercurrents were swirling around as the Reward Challenge came. Called “Second Chance” it was a mélange of several previous challenges---being tied up, digging to get inside a cage, building a pole and using it to get a key to unlock the cage, breaking plates with a slingshot and solving a puzzle.
Burton won and chose Jon to go with him. This was Jon’s third reward and he has never won one by himself (He won as a team with Darrah and Lillian but, truthfully, it was on the women’s coattails that Jon won……)
The prize was an overnight campout/feast in the ruins of old Panama City, burned by the Pirate Morgan in the 1600s. But the unmentioned prize was a GMC Envoy SUV. The boys shared a tender romantic dinner, Jon with food dribbling down his beard as he gushed to Burton: “Win, lose or draw, you’re the only person I like in this game.” Touching. I’m sure Grandma would be so proud were she “alive”.
Meanwhile the “girl talk” back at camp began in earnest as the women circled each other like wary tigers. Burton had said they “couldn’t come up with a decent strategy if they had to” and Jon said “I don’t think they have a brain between them” but the three women allied, came up with cover stories to withstand the two men’s scrutiny and questioning and decided that a man would be going home, preferably Burton. As Sandra put it: “The sooner we get rid of these jackasses the better!”
Burton and Jon returned, having decided to keep the news of Burton’s car a secret, and quickly suspected an acting job by the women as they probed to see if there was a female alliance formed while they were absent.
The men veered between getting rid of Darrah, the strongest or Lillian who was becoming, in their view, “a basket case, freaking out, getting only one hour of sleep a night” . Both Burton and Jon even negotiated with Sandra to get her as a backup in order to keep the three women divided.
It was hilarious to see Sandra (falsely) swearing on her two children to Jon that she would be loyal to a Final 3 that included the men and her while Jon swore the same on his “dead” grandmother. “Jonny Fairplay” has met his match in Sandra!
The Immunity Challenge was “walking the plank” after using a canteen to get water to float a buoyant key to the top of a tube to unlock and lower the plank. There were 5 planks so this had to be done 5 times. At the end of the 5th plank was a flag which had to be carried back to the starting pier, without falling into the water, to win.
Darrah won, hands down, actually by having little hands which could go way down the tube to get the key, water or no water and this was her third immunity win in a row. On to Tribal Council where the boys felt that Sandra would be with them in giving the heave-ho to who they thought was an ailing Lillian.
Probably most nauseous was Jon’s false smarmy praise of the women’s achievements which completely contradicted his real feelings of scorn for them. In a real surprise to Burton, he was voted out, for the second time, 3-2. Jon was shocked while, on the jury, Rupert and Christa high-fived each other at seeing their enemy get voted off.
Burton’s farewell comments were the height of hypocrisy as he said: “Lillian, I hope you can live with yourself. We had an alliance and you broke it, big as Texas.” His vote to evict Lillian was still warm when he said this and he wasn’t going to take her to the Final 2---he had cast his lot in with Jon. Physician, heal thyself!
So the Final Four are three women and the self-proclaimed “I’m the king of men and they’re women” Jon. “He’s an asshole,” said Sandra much more accurately. This time we only have to wait three days to see the Sunday finale of Survivor: Pearl Islands and who will win the million dollars.
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