Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Reports Of Granny Fairplay's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
By Miss Alli | Season 7 | Episode 11 | Aired on 11.26.2003
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When we return, Jeff explains the details of the plank-walking challenge. He'll ask a question about the castaways, and they'll answer for themselves, and their loved ones will answer for them. Whenever the answers match, you get to send somebody else's loved one another step down the plank toward the end. So it's like The Newlywed Game, only with more clichéd pirate trappings and less of Bob Eubanks pumping you for information about the weirdest place you ever did it. The fourth hit to anyone's loved one will send that person off the plank and out of the game. Last one standing wins reward, which is the right to go back and spend twenty-four hours at camp with your beloved castaway. Or, in the case of Big Dumb Dan and Idiot Jon, the castaway who got you your five minutes of fame.
The loved ones take to their planks. During the questioning, we learn several things. Sandra's nickname is "Changa." Darrah's boyfriend thinks her nickname is "DJ," but she thinks it's "Nub Nut." I'm not sure whether I want to believe that Darrah has a boyfriend who calls her "nub nut," or whether I want to believe that Darrah can't spell "numbnuts." They're both really, really sad possibilities to consider. Burton and his mom both write down that his nickname is "Burton," which is much funnier than it should be. When we get to the plank-walking itself, Sandra points fiercely and dramatically and takes her first shot at "Fairplay's buddy." She ain't fooled, people. That's no accident -- she thinks Dead Old Granny Fairplay is a pile of horseshit. I might not be so sure if she hadn't done it so eagerly right at the beginning, complete with pointing, but she did. And I am. Lill indignantly retaliates on Jon's behalf by sending Sandra's husband down the plank. Jon just cannot believe Sandra's insensitivity and says, "I have about a million questions I'd like to know about my grandmother, but obviously some people don't give a shit." Lill nods enthusiastically with Jon's anger, because when you're tending the garden of your own doofusness, you have to water it as often as you can. "It's not all about you all the time," Sandra snaps back to Jon. Lill lectures with patient exasperation, "His grandmother just died." See, as far as I'm concerned, Sandra should have just gone for broke. If she didn't believe him and she was going to take a whack at his buddy first, she should've just said, "You know what, Jon? I think you're lying." That wouldn't have made her look any worse than what she just did, which was to suggest that she maybe did believe Dead Old Granny Fairplay was really most sincerely dead, and just didn't think it was important. So rather than the "it's not all about you," which struck me as an unfortunate and weaselly hedge, I wish Sandra had just said, "Considering what I've seen from Jon so far, I don't believe anything he says, and I'm sorry if his grandmother just died, but he's made it impossible for anyone to assume she did just because he says she did." That, I would have respected. ["The Sandra we know couldn't have been that articulate, I don't think, and would have said something like Jon's lying about his grandmother's death left him 'ass out' or something." -- Wing Chun] Anyway, Jon sends Sandra's husband down the plank. Burton sends Billy walking. Christa, with a shrug, picks Burton's mom. Poor Didi. I hope she won't lose one of those earrings in a mess of seaweed.