Episode Report Card Sara M: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bob Is Full Of Craft
By Sara M | Season 17 | Episode 11 | Aired on 12.04.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Bob gets on his high horse and yells at Sugar for laughing at Randy when he gave Probst the fake immunity idol that Bob himself made and gave to Randy. Corinne gets in on the yelling action, because that's a good way to stay in the game. The reward challenge brings messages on the product placement phone from contestants' loved ones, with the winner receiving gross pizza, beer, and a chance to watch the full message. Bob wins easily. Of course, he doesn't have to settle for just a phone message -- wife Peggy comes alive and they have a happy reunion. Then all the loved ones go to the Nobag camp, and Ken talks strategy with his sister, Matty proposes to his girlfriend (she said yes), and Sugar's sister, Salt, smuggles in some of their father's ashes to toss into the Fang lake. I'm sure he's thrilled to be down there with the leeches and Randy's pee.
Once the loved ones leave, Bob reveals his latest plan to Corinne: he's going to make yet another fake idol and say it's the idol that Marcus pretended to throw away, but really stuck in his pocket and hid back at camp. He never got a chance to use it, but he told Bob were it was and Bob's held onto it ever since. To implement their plan, one of them has to win the immunity challenge, where contestants must answer questions about Gabon to earn balls, which are then thrown at a target. Whoever gets closet to the center wins. While Sugar wins the most balls, Bob takes first, second, and third place to win immunity.
He and Corinne hatch their plan, and Corinne convinces Ken that she has an idol and she, Bob, him, and Crystal can align together to vote Matty out. Bob then reveals the fake idol, and it's actually better than his first one. It's got little metal faces and beads and everything! How the hell did he do that? Is there a craft store at the bottom of the Fang lake along with Sugar's dad's ashes? It looks like the plan will work perfectly … until Ken and Crystal decide that only one of them will vote for Matty, just in case the idol is a fake. That doesn't make much sense -- if the idol is real, Corinne will play it and her and Bob's votes for Matty will take him out. If it's fake, Corinne will go home with the majority of the votes -- but Matty will know that someone in his alliance voted against him. That's exactly what happens. Corinne goes home with a very gracious exit speech in which she hopes everyone's lives are miserable except Ken and Bob's, and Matty stays in the game but gets suspicious.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The previously on segment focuses on the immunity idol Marcus and Randy threw away, so I guess we haven't seen the last of it after all. Amazingly enough, Probst credits the Fang alliance with "brilliant strategy" in how they took the Onion alliance out. We see Randy play his fake idol again, and Sugar laughing her ass off. "Sending him home and humiliating him at the same time," Probst says, as we see a hilarious shot of Randy being eliminated with dissolves of Sugar laughing in slow motion. There's a new scene with Bob, where he says that Sugar didn't just say "ha ha" at Randy's misfortune, she laughed for a long time, and this irritated him. I wonder if it irritates him now that he's read post-show interviews where Randy said he hopes Bob has a heart attack.
Nobag returns to camp following Tribal Council. Sugar declares that the best Tribal Council so far, and Ken asks Bob if it was his idea to give Randy the fake idol. Here's where Bob should have said he didn't know the idol was fake and Sugar must have planted it on Exile "Island" when she found the real one, but no. Instead, he readily admits to giving Randy an idol he knew was fake, saying he "didn't mind" giving Randy a fake idol, but he was very pissed off at how Sugar rubbed Randy's ouster in his face with all of her laughing. "Don't ever do that again," Bob says. Have we ever seen him angry before? Also, he's saying that Sugar should have been happy enough that Randy was leaving the game without laughing at him like that, but if that was how Bob felt, then why did he give Randy the fake idol at all? How can Bob get on his high horse when he's the only reason why Sugar was able to have such a great time booting Randy in the first place? Sugar acts appropriately contrite. But while she might be sorry that she pissed Bob off, she's not at all sorry for laughing at Randy. As she tells us, Randy "dug his own grave" and it was hilarious.
And now it's Corinne's turn to be pissed. She (kind of rightly, I must admit) points out that Sugar was all about teaching her how to be nice to people, and asks if this was one of her lessons. Sugar doesn't seem to think she's a hypocrite, though. She says Corinne talks about everyone behind his back and then acts nice to his face. It's much more honorable to laugh in people's faces when you've fucked them over and they can't do anything about it. Corinne says she has to talk behind people's backs because if she said something to their faces, it would be bad game play. And just look where Corinne's "good" game play has gotten her! Watching members of her alliance get voted out one by one. Corinne says she didn't come here to make friends -- she came here to play the game. Sugar says that's exactly right. They all came here to play the game, and that's what Sugar's doing. Corinne has no response to this, so she runs over to the nearest cameraman and talks about the members of her tribe behind their backs: "I am now in a camp of mutants, none of whom I like. So it's very difficult for me to pretend to be nice to them. That's not something I'm used to. And that's done." No, it isn't. As usual, Corinne is all talk and no game.