BunkoSquad

Treemail! It's a catalog! The tribes get to pick out their own rewards for the Reward Challenge. Aitu sensibly picks peanut butter and potatoes. At Camp Raro, which is starting to look like a Hooverville, they're thinking about bread and peanut butter (too bad Christina's gone; I bet she could have come up with a doozy of a recipe with those ingredients). Brad's against that, since bread is perishable. Like it won't all be eaten in four minutes. Parvati looks a little bummed that mascara and conditioner aren't available in the catalog.

The challenge is as convoluted as ever. The Survivors will swim out to a platform, leap off the platform, smash a box, release a key, dive to find the key, swim the key back to shore, use the keys to unlock a chest, open the chest to reveal pieces of a puzzle, and put the puzzle together. I miss rasslin'.

Rebecca's the first swimmer for Raro; she gets to the platform, jumps, and....well, that's it. She flollops in the water for a minute, hauls herself back to shore, and collapses on the mat. Operation Shutdown in effect. Ozzie, who I used to only speculate might be Aquaman, swims like a man possessed, summoning a flounder to retreive Aitu's keys, and a million barnacles to form a bridge so Candice doesn't have to get her feet wet. It's really something.

With Rebecca down for the count, it's up to Adam and Parvati to do all the swimming. Brad would be a logical choice, you'd have thought, but he declared himself to be better at puzzles, so he's on the puzzle team. Which will never even get tested, because Aitu wins handily. Interestingly, Jeff spends the entire challenge barking out updates, but never updates whether Rebecca might actually be dead or not.

Sans Adam (sent to Exile Island), Raro trudges back to camp, looking like they kind of hope the producers have left a loaded gun or a half-dozen nooses they can use to escape the next challenge.

Aitu's having a little peanut-butter orgy. Candice and Jessica give each other a little Jiffy kiss, and Candice says "I love everybody right now!" Somewhere in America, Billy just kicked his amplifier.

But as tantalizing as the possibilty of girl-on-peanut-on-girl action might be, they swing us back to the grim Raro tribe. Nate (who was ineligible for the Challenge, still technically a pseudo-Aitu) is pissed at "nancyboy" Brad for touting his puzzle prowess at the expense of having a strong, fit tribe member out there swimming. The sentiment is echoed on Exile Island by Adam. Just before he battens down the nonexistent hatches for a vicious monsoon, he says, "It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys." Adam - dude - when you're surrounded by turkeys, the chances are actually pretty good that you, yourself, are a turkey. Just sayin'.

Speaking of fowl matters: the next morning, Ozzie wanders into camp with a bird in the hand. Not in any cliche way, he's actually holding a bird that he just picked up somewhere. If Ozzie keeps this up, they'll be eating Loch Ness Monster fillets before the merge. Candice marvels that Ozzie is like a half-man, half-animal, which has been done, but he has the climbing skills of a monkey, the tracking skills of a leopard, the swimming skills of an eel, the chinny-chin-chin hair of a little pig, and the bird-catching skills of a - well, whatever animal catches birds. So some of the lesser Aitus start thinking about ways they can vote him off before he gets to be too helpful and successful.

Immunity Challenge! Adam, still quivering and shivering from Exile Island, rejoins the tribe. Jeff sympathizes with the awful night he must have spent out there, as if he (Jeff) didn't spend the whole storm being fanned with palm fronds, trying on hats, and nibbling peanut butter off a sexy intern's stomach. The challenge involves setting up poles to build a ladder-type-thing, then sliding down one of those cool rope things that nobody I knew ever had in their backyard, then hauling more puzzle pieces back through the water.

Brad, wisely, elects to swim this time.

They set up their ladders, and at one point - well - if you ever suspect that I embellish or make up some of the facts on SurvivorBlog, if you believe nothing else you read in this space, know that this actual quote actually comes out of Jeff Probst's actual mouth.

"They're building it from the bottom up while the guys debate which is the longest log."

Let's just move on.

Aitu, led by the dolphinesque Ozzie, jumps out to a huge lead, but somehow the Raro puzzle crew (which, it should be noted, does not feature Brad) somehow gets their act together and wins. Raro wins Immunity!

Everyone at Aitu has a different tactic for strategy. Jessica's playing Cub Reporter, going around interviewing everyone to see the vote breakdown. Right now, in her mind, it's a 54-way tie. Her choice is Jonathan. Becky and Yul are ready to throw Jon overboard from their alliance; Yul realizes that Jonathan never actually helps them win anything, whereas Ozzie is to the Aitu Tribe as Michael Jordan was to the '92 Bulls.

Candice and Sundra are sitting on the beach when Jon comes up. They say they had to get out of the camp because everyone's scheming and plotting. Jon plops down and starts scheming and plotting. Jon interviews that he's playing the game so fast and so hard that he might overreach and get taken down from behind. Yul says he never saw Jon being really sleazy, but everyone else thinks so, so it must be true. Let me reiterate that: Yul doesn't see what everyone else sees, and he DOES NOT assume that he's right and everyone else is wrong; he considers the possibility that everyone else might be right. How the hell did he get on this show?!?

Before they break camp, Jessica gives a poignant farewell-to-the-troops speech. Then she interviews that nobody really knows what they're going to do. That's called projection.

When Tribal Council started, I assumed it was coming down to Ozzie (too strong) and Jonathan (too annoying). In the Q&A, Jeff is shocked that people on Aitu are friends even though they come from different ethnic groups. Jessica is asked who gets along with whom; her answer is all-encompassing and vague. From some people, I'd think this is strategy and politics. With Jessica, I think it's what honestly is going on under her dreadlocks. Ever seen those pins that say "I smile because I have no idea what's going on"? That's her.

They vote, and shockingly (to me), everyone but Jessica votes for Jessica. I really didn't see that coming. Happily, though, she's pretty cool with it. Jeff's Words of Wisdom indicate that he thinks Raro has all the momentum now.

Next week: Brad's freaking out! Ozzie hauls down a rhino! No more election commercials!