God, I am so sick of the rain. Just rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain on this season of Human Umbrellas Under a Tarp. It’s enough to make you think the Jeff Probst is a huge Garbage fan, because he’s only happy when it rains. Well, guess what, Jeff. I’m a Garbage fan too, and I’m only happy when it’s complicated, which this game has not been. Why? Because everyone is stuck in the damn shelter talking to each other all the time and can’t sneak behind each other’s backs to talk strategy and whatnot. Boring. Can’t we have it someplace warmer next time, so that people can walk around and form little cliques and whatnot?
The other thing that has made it boring is that Team Ponytail lost every darn challenge so far and there are only two people left, human cannonball Denise (I couldn’t think of anything else as small, compact, and deadly as that) and Malcolm. Oh, Malcolm, my one true love. My be all and end all. My ponytail wearing saint who has buffeted about by fate and awful players on this very mean game. Oh, what is the world going to do with you two? We all sort of figured out what they were going to be divided up between the two remaining squads and so did they. What did they have to do first? Share an embrace and reminisce on all the yahoos who they sent packing already? No. They had to find their hidden immunity idol.
Add this to the list of Russell’s mess ups that he is the only one to find the clue to where the idol is to not find it. Had he, he would still be crapping all over this game today and Denise would be at home telling people how to have better sex. But no, he could not. Denise and Malcolm however, they found it. In the rain. It was raining. It’s always raining.
So, Denise and Malcolm, with his hair pulled back and his pectoral muscles sprinkled with the dewey rains of the South Pacific go to a reward challenge and they take off their buffs. Malcolm goes to Team Blair, so the only two people who I care about in the game are now together. I have they have an offspring so that it will one day grow up and will be the only creature that can slay the evil Jeff Probst and knock him off his hosting throne. That means Denise goes to Team Lesbian which, lez be honest, is a little fitting. I’m not saying Denise prefers the company of women, she might not, but she reads kinda dykey. I’m not gonna lie.
Alright, so there’s some kind of showdown where each person is holding a ping-pong paddle with a wooden Buddha on it and the first person to knock off the other person’s Buddha earns a point. Who ever gets five points first wins the Continental Breakfast that Probst stole from the Palayan City Courtyard by Marriott, where the crew is staying during filming. Challenge, challenge, challenge (Penner makes the season’s first and only Dawson’s Creek joke); boring, boring, boring, and Team Blair wins. Yipee!
Back at camp Blair is very excited about Malcolm joining the tribe. While they all eat their muffins (oh, to be able to eat Malcolm’s muffin!), Blair says, “He has such good…energy. As soon as he walked up to us I thought, wow, all I can see right now is energy. Not in his mind or in his heart, but down below in his wet board shorts, there seemed to be this big ball of indescribable energy. And I was drawn to it. I just wanted to walk right up to him and touch this energy. It was like it was energy. The last time I saw, um, energy like that was when I had a costar on Facts of Life and he came on set and he approached me and I could feel his energy and it was so strong that I felt flush and faint, like the life was being sucked out of me and replaced with a tingling that went all over my limbs. Do you know who brought that energy? George Clooney.”
Yes, everyone at Team Blair is happy to have Malcolm and his big, thick, pulsating energy. They like him so much that Pete (who I want to call Chris) welcomes him into their alliance and tells him everything, including that he has an immunity idol. He never asked Malcolm about his. No, not his, um, energy. About his idol. If I was Malcolm I would have told him that someone played it early on so their tribe’s is out of play. That’s the smartest thing.
Over at Team Lesbian, the other lesbians aren’t as happy about Denise. They wanted Malcolm. Penner is all “Boo hoo, we needed a boy.” Oh please, give Cannonball Denise a chance, because she will totally destroy a pirate vessel while you sit there and cower in your little hut in the rain.
Speaking of rain, it is raining again, because that is all that happens this season. The Ponytails lose, it rains, lose, rain, lose, rain. But now there is something else happening in the rain. Dana is sick. She’s puking. She’s lying under a tarp. She wants to die. Now, this isn’t like a cold where you’re sick and just kind of annoyed. This is crazy sick. This is rocking yourself and moaning on the floor of your bathroom sick. This is putting your face next to the toilet bowl because it feels so nice and cold sick. This is the kind of sick that you think you’ll never recover and you start worrying about which of your neighbors will smell the stink first and maybe you should put on clean underwear because you don’t want the coroner to see your skid marks sick. The medics come in and say that Dana can stay in the game for 12 more hours and they’ll come and ask her again.
OK, now Jeff Probst asks her a question, “Do you want to stay?” She obviously says no because all you want to do when you are that sick is cry and cry and fall asleep watching The Price Is Right and hope you don’t wake up to puke again. Now he’s always going to say she “chose to left the game” like those other jerks who actually quit because they were cold or hungry or stupid or something else. That is not fair. I mean, she might not have been deathly ill, but, man, she was going through the names of all her grammer school teachers in her head trying to get herself to stay on this earthly plane. I mean, this girl was ill! Mean old Jeff Probst. All I could think about, as that boat pulled away, is Dana, still dying of pain and wanting to die and just moaning in the fetal position as she has to deal with the choppy sea that will bring her to a warm bed. There is still suffering ahead for poor Dana, even though we will never see her again.
But Probst got even worse at the challenge. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Jeff Probst has too much impact on the game. At the challenge, the teams had to climb a bunch of obstacles, then open a door that had a bunch of knots keeping it closed, then chop through piece of wood that released a bunch of puzzle pieces, and then solve the puzzle. When going over the first obstacle, some creature named Katie, which we have not seen for more than 7 seconds until this point in the show, had a hard time keeping up. Jeff pointed this out. Then, when Team Lesbian (which is her team, even though she does not appear to be a lesbian, but I have no evidence who she sleeps with either way) was behind Team Blair, Probst kept pointing out that Katie took so long to there that she was the reason they were behind. He said this four times in case no one heard him the other three times. Maybe they just don’t care! Maybe you should butt out of it. Everyone can see that she is in last place. Everyone can tell that she is the reason they are behind. You don’t have to keep telling them. It’s like telling Seth Green he’s short every time you see him. You know he’s short, he knows he’s short, saying it over and over again is just annoying. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he also had to point out twice that Abi has only competed in two challenges. So? Her team knows they always sit her out, they make that decision. Why do you need to tell them? It’s not their fault that Team Ponytail sucked so bad that they always had extra members. God!
So, yes, Team Blair wins just barely. Why do you think? Maybe it was because of Katie? Maybe? Where have I heard that before? Back at camp the guys want to keep Denise becuase now that they’ve seen her in action, they know that she will jump into the trees, rip off coconuts with her bare teeth, throw them at members of the other tribe, and kill them. Then she will tell them how to have better sex. This is what Denise does. It’s between Katie, a former beauty queen who still looks like her eyes are ringed with drooping eyeliner and Dawson, who has a creek. Everyone is thinking of kicking out Katie, but then Dawson is being all cutesy and talking about sports around Jeff, who doesn’t want anyone to know that he his a retired baseball player and millionaire. He starts throwing pressure at her for being lazy and just as bad.
They go to tribal council, Jeff starts talking about how awful Katie is, because we have never heard that before, and then they all go and vote off Dawson. See, Jeff, these people are capable of making their own decisions. Also, it was a more interesting decision because it showed how shrewd, cunning, and quiet Jeff can be as a player. You don’t need to intervene, just let it happen. But if you could do something to stop the rain, we’d really, really appreciate that.
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: CBS]
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