Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Breakfast In Soaking Wet Bed
By Miss Alli | Season 12 | Episode 8 | Aired on 04.05.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.We open with a reward challenge in which Aras tells the women of Casaya what to do, and they obey for no particular reason, and it results in Aras's winning the challenge (with Bruce and Sally); Terry, Austin and Shane grabbing second-place bitterness; and the Casaya women getting third-place dick. As a result, Aras decides to send Austin and Chiclets to Exile Island together, which is incredibly stupid, but isn't going to backfire on him, because it's just not that kind of season. Terry wins immunity again, so he carefully avoids another free opportunity to eliminate Aras, but at least this time, he has a semblance of a plan. A plan-ette, you might say. He wants to flip Bruce by telling him that he's on the bottom of the Casaya six -- a fact Shane was idiotic enough to give Terry ammunition about -- and flip Chiclets by telling her that she's fifth in the Casaya six and (here's where it threatens to become strategic) that he will give her the hidden immunity idol if she flips. But nobody flips, and nothing interesting happens, so Austin goes, and the Pagonging continues. It does become clear, however, that the hidden idol is the first genuinely interesting change to the way the game is played since Hatch. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on When It Can't Possibly Matter, That's When I'll Make My Move!: The merge brought out Aras's fondness for rice that rightfully should be shared, and was Terry's opportunity to tell the members of Casaya that he might be able to arrange for them to, in return for taking a significant risk of making some jurors hate them, wind up no worse off than they are right now. As tempting as this offer was, nobody took him up on it. After he failed to figure out that his one chance to make a grab at numbers involved not using immunity, Terry stood at tribal council with immunity twice over and watched Nick go home. Also, Shane was making some sort of Dr. Phil reputation for himself as a uniter, not a divider, which upset the balance of the universe to a remarkable degree. Now, there are nine left. Who will be thrown out next? It won't be Shane, will it? No, it won't. I know it won't. I'm just being unreasonably optimistic.
Credits. I think what I have been calling the short version of the credits must now be considered just "the credits."
Beautiful scenery brings us to Day 19 at Gitanos, where Terry and Austin are happy just to be around for another day. The opening issue for this episode is the kerfuffle over Austin's announcement at last night's tribal council that he acted weaker than he actually was in order to perhaps keep the Casayans from choosing to vote him off. Courtney talks about this as if it is a very, very scandalous discovery on par with, say, finding out that your spouse is keeping another family somewhere. "I was like, 'Oh my Gosh, what have we done?'" She says that, now, she wonders whether they did the wrong thing by getting rid of Nick instead of Austin. Austin tells Sally and Aras that, indeed, he was very surprised to see Nick voted off instead of himself. "I'd already given up," he says. In an interview, Austin talks about how he thought that he had a good idea in acting weak, but then when he got the impression he was going, he decided to tell everyone what he did, just so they'd know. He talks about how people now question whether they trust him, which is pretty silly to worry over at this point.
Casaya is out snail-hunting. "These snails are like members of La Mina," Aras says. "Slimy and hard to get out." The fact that he is currently positioned to get rid of all the members of La Mina seems not to give Aras any sort of pause. Nor does it, in fairness, upset the snails. "Austin is a slimeball," Aras announces, as if having a strategy to save your own ass is some kind of moral failing. It's always the ones who are sitting pretty, isn't it? "I can't trust him, that's for sure," Courtney agrees. So I guess the long heart-to-hearts between Courtney and Austin in which she entrusts him with her fate in the game are over, huh? "The one thing we have to make sure," Aras says, "is that we don't reveal anything, period." Shane watches, and as usual, it's hard to tell whether his eyes are focused or whether he's just kind of throwing his head in random directions.