‘Survivor’ Recap: Don’t Go Chasing Water Slides

Our old friends TLC told us to not go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to (yeah, try to get that out of your head now). The conniving castaways on Survivor could stand to listen to TBoz, Chili, and Left Eye (RIP) because last night things were getting shifty with our tribal alliances and everyone was chasing a water fall, or a water slide, rather. The show started out, I think, with bats. Everyone was standing around clubbing the crap out of Colton Combie with baseball bats and telling him what an awful spoiled brat he is. No, that didn’t happen. They were real bats. Like the animals. The B-roll makers at Survivor love the bats this season and we see their stretched electrical tape wings at least seven times an episode as they try to hide their heads from the light. Enough with the damn bats already. It’s like watching a rat try to burrow its way out of a spandex factory. Let’s get right to the first challenge, shall we, since it was the THIS RECAP HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BUY THE GOOD PEOPLE AT 7-UP THE UNCOLA — ENJOY A COOL REFRESHING GLASS OF THE UNCOLA TODAY! REFRESHING! Oh, sorry guys, it looks like I got hijacked by some product placement. Remember when that happened on Survivor all the time when they would be crapping in the Charmin toilet and drinking out of Aquafina canteens on their way to the Doritos reward challenge to win a Ford truck filled with Exxon gas? Now all they can get is one old timey cooler full of glass 7-Up bottles. Why did they make it seem like the Survivors dug up this cooler of soda in the beach somewhere like it had been buried for decades? You can’t buy those glass bottles in the store even if you tried. Anyway, they walk up to the challenge and Alycia says, “Wow, that looks like a big wedgie.” The two giant wooden water slides, while impressive, did not look at all like someone yanking your underwear up into your buttcrack. I don’t know if wedgie means something else at the school where Alycia teaches, but, for the rest of us, it only means one thing. For the challenge everyone is divided into two teams and they have to go flying down the water slide (trying to avoid wedgies, is that what Alycia meant?) and get these crates and bring them on shore and then solve a puzzle with them. “The first ones to solve the puzzle win reward. Want to know what you’re playing for? You’ll spend the afternoon at a 7-Up oasis that looks remarkably like a pool in Fire Island with a little tiki hut and you will drink 7-Up. There will also be 7-Up to 7-Up and you can 7-Up with 7-Up all afternoon. 7-UP!”Challenge, challenge, challenge — Leif, the last one from his team to go flying down the giant Slip-N-Slide (WARNING: This challenge was not sponsored by Slip-N-Slide and any assumption that it was is unintentional, at least until they pay their bill) goes absolutely soaring off the end of it and tumbles through the sand on the beach like one of the tortoise shells from Super Mario Brothers, just careening into everything and knocking it off the screen as he sails along. It was funny. And now I feel bad for laughing at a little person going sailing through the air. But it pays off and Lief, Matt’s abs, Sabrina, Christina, and Candice Bergen (whose name I later learned was Kim, but I’d rather just keep calling her Candice Bergen) win the reward and go off to Fire Island to jump in the hot tub and eat, as Lief said, repeatedly to the disgust of his fellow castaways BARBECUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. While they’re in Fire Island, Lief is eating a stack of hamburgers taller than he is and Sabrina the Survivor Witch cozies up to Candice Bergen and is like, “How far ahead are you thinking?” “Far,” Candice replies. “Yeah, me too,” Sabrina says, wishing Salem was curled up in her lap right now. That is why these two are the most dangerous players in the whole game, because they’re thinking far. From the beginning, Candice has been looking towards winning. As we’ve seen from Survivors past, those are the people who usually end up with a million smackeroonies, the ones that think three votes ahead and have it all mapped out. Those that scramble and don’t have a plan and wait until the last minute are those that always get screwed over. They decide to target Matt, even though he’s on their alliance of former Salani members. They’re thinking they can either get the guys on their alliance to go along with them or they can just get back together with all the girls, who now outnumber the guys six to five. Oh, these two are crafty crafty crafty. Jay and Troy (who I will not call Troyzan because I am not an idiot) know they need to vote off a girl this week to even out the numbers of men and women so that the girls don’t get together in a “women’s alliance” and kick all the studs out of the hen house. But Candice Bergen is smarter than that. She goes to Troy, knowing he already doesn’t like Mike and says, “Mike is trying to vote you off.” Troy gets all out of sorts and decides it’s time for Mike to go. Oh, men. They have been letting women play against their vanity for centuries and it still hasn’t changed. So, everyone heads off to the challenge where they have to get a bunch of puzzle pieces through a ladder maze and then they have to use those pieces to solve a puzzle. Challenge, challenge, challenge, and Jay, shockingly comes from behind to win. Maybe it was the accent or maybe it was something he did, but I always thought Jay was stupid. Not so much anymore.Back at camp, their third strong alliance member Blonde (I can not for the life of me remember her name, so that’s what we’ll be calling her) is stupid enough to bring up voting out Matt to yokel Jay in front of Christina and Alycia, who supposedly aren’t in their alliance. He knows something is up and tells them all that he doesn’t trust the girls, because he’s afraid they’re going to get together and boot him out. The girls have a little conference and then realize that Jay has taken Mike off for a little talk in the woods. “WHAT?!” Candice Bergen says. She runs after them and catches up just as Jay is about to tell Mike that they girls are thinking of voting them off. “We’re going to vote out Christina,” Candice blurts out, like she just got caught doing something illegal. Oh, she is an operator. She sees her plan going amiss and she changes it on the spot to appease Jay and to keep Mike from having any idea that he’s getting voted off. But then she goes back to the girls and talks it out. Do they make a move now and start voting off the guys and change the game, or do they get rid of dead weight Christina, who has about as much chance of winning this game as the beaten body of Colton Combie, and deal with the boys later. I always say if you’re going to make big moves in Survivor it’s better to do it early when you have enough bodies to configure them in your favor and before alliances get too deep. If you try to make a move too late, the alliances are calcified and you have much fewer options. Vote out the boy, Candice Bergen! Change the game. They go to tribal council, which usually I find totally ridiculous. Rarely does anything interesting happen at tribal and never once in all the seasons of Survivor I have watched (and I have watched them all) did someone say something at tribal that influenced the vote. By the time the get there, the vote is already decided and they’re just waxing on and on to fill up time. What was mildly interesting is that no one thought they were in danger last night. What? If I was on Survivor I would be thinking I was going home every second of every day. Being a paranoid player is being a good player, because you always have to pay attention to the small clues and cues that people are giving off that could indicate your fate one way or the other. Jeff goes to tally the votes and there are two votes for Tarzan, which were probably cast by people who hate him because they got bad boob jobs and he’s a plastic surgeon, two votes for Christina, and the rest voted for Mike’s abs to be sent home (spoiler alert!) and to be sadly covered by a shirt for the rest of eternity. Now the only abs we have left to look at are Jay’s and Troy’s, and while they are nice abs, they aren’t as nice as Mike’s who has some of the best abs we’ve seen in a long time. Shame about the eyebrow though. But the vote revealed something crazy going on in the tribe. The two votes for Christina came from Tarzan and Lief. The two votes for Tarzan came from Alycia and Christina, and Jay and and Troy joined the rest of the girls to vote out Mike. That means there is a lot we didn’t see. We didn’t see that Tarzan and Lief are totally on the outs with the rest of the guys and Christina and Alycia are on the outs with the girls. Even worse, Candice Bergen’s plan to use Troy’s vanity against Mike totally worked and Jay, who may be as stupid as I always thought, let the girls get the upper hand by voting off Mike, seemingly against his best interests. If I was Jay, I would get Troy, Tarzan, Christian, and Alycia together and vote off the girls in power. Doesn’t he see how this game is shaking out? It’s because he’s listening to TLC. He’s not chasing the waterfall, he’s sticking to the river and the lake that he’s used to. Too bad Candice Bergen is the one running that lake and she is going to drown all of their asses on her way to the win. More:‘Real Housewives of OC’ Recap: The Mud Slide Brought It Down Hey, Jeremy Renner, Stop Whining About the Press AttentionChanning Tatum Gives Elton John a Lap Dance