Episode Report Card Sara M: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Fans vs. Favorites vs. Probst
By Sara M | Season 16 | Episode 15 | Aired on 05.11.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.And we're in New York for the Reunion show. The pre-jury cast takes the stage with the others and Parvati takes all the credit for Cirie's beautiful maneuvers while Amanda says it sucks to be the runner-up twice in a row. But she's still with Ozzy, who has graciously forgiven Parvati and even makes fun of Denises of Survivors past when he jokes that he's been demoted to cleaning toilets upon returning home from the show. Probst can't get out of that line of questioning quickly enough, especially since Ozzy also alludes to the fact that Probst has also dated Survivor ladies. Chet comes out swinging for Probst as well, accusing him of pointing out that he was the oldest and weakest person in the game at every tribal council and praising all the young male athletes. He's totally right, and to Probst's credit, he admits that Chet has a point. As for Chet's rival Joel, he's still an asshole but at least he cut his hair. Jason also cut his hair into a girly bob, which looks much better. He's kind of cute now, I am ashamed to admit. Erik has the same stupid hair that he did on the show, and takes the many jokes about how he did the stupidest thing in Survivor history in stride and has a good point when he says that while he initially thought he was the dumbest person alive, he now realizes that he wasn't cut out to be the kind of person you have to be to make it further in this game, and he's learned a lot about women in the process. I have a feeling the stuff he learned wasn't exactly positive for my gender. Johnny shows off his fiancée and baby and quickly gets the brush-off from Probst while Cirie gets the brush-off from the supposed fans of this show when she doesn't even place in the final three to win the Sprint player of the season $100,000 prize. That honor goes to Amanda, Ozzy, and James, with James taking home the prize for the second season in a row. Kathy admits to going "cuckoo" on the show and seems much more normal these days. Mary is engaged to Ryan from Pearl Islands. Jonathan's leg is healing. Yau-Man is given almost nothing to say. Tracy's good, strategic playing is acknowledged; Cirie's is not. And just to end things on a happy, positive note on this Mother's Day, Mikey B reveals that his mother got sick just as he left for the show and died last month. See you next season, in high-definition Gabon, Africa!
Click here to read the season finale recaplet.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!And now it's time for the reunion show, where some contestants are inevitably ignored and Probst insists on asking all the questions we don't care about and none of the ones we do. We open with a montage of Parvati's greatest moments, almost all of which can be attributed to Cirie, who didn't win. I'm still bitter! We go to the live show whereupon Probst congratulates Parvati on her win once more and we see the entire cast looking clean, healthy and gussied up. Probst asks Parvati if she was planning to play as hard as she did on day one. "Oh god no!" she says. Her plan was to "fly under the radar," flirt, and get the others to underestimate her, but then Jonathan outed her as a threat early on so she had to start playing right away. To his credit, Jonathan pretty much figured out who was going to win this game from the beginning. I never would have expected a Parvati win. Probst asks her when the idea for the women's alliance first came to Parvati, then amends his statement with a "you guys," so as not to give her all of the credit for something she had a lot of help with. Parvati has no desire to share the credit, so she says she and she alone saw how tight Natalie and Alexis were when she was on Airai, so she brought them in, knowing that there was no way she could beat Ozzy and James on her own. "The women that I brought together, we had this game on lock," Parvati says. She deigns to give some credit to the rest of her alliance, saying she couldn't have done it without them. I'll say -- without Cirie, she wouldn't have done squat. Yes, Parvati brought in Natalie and Alexis and recognized that they would be better opponents at the end than James and Ozzy, but from what I saw, Cirie was the one engineering most of the blindsides that kept the alliance on top. Probst points out that as the person who brought Natalie and Alexis into the alliance, she pitted them against Cirie and Amanda, putting her in a power position. Parvati acknowledges this and says that she was in a "safe spot," since both halves of the alliance were more loyal to her than each other. That's true. She had all those days to bond with Natalie and Alexis that Cirie and Amanda did not, and she took full advantage of them, unlike, say, Eliza.
Probst turns to Amanda, saying she holds some new Survivor records: She boasts the most number of days on the show (78) and she was able to win the final challenges on both shows while keeping the alliances that she made in the beginning of the game intact. And yet, she still couldn't manage to win. "I know! It's a problem I'm having!" Amanda giggles. Probst asks Amanda how difficult it was to go back to real life after being on the show for so long. Amanda says it was difficult, and she has "trust issues" with people. "And what does it feel like, right now, not winning again?" Probst asks. "It sucks!" Amanda says. Well, yeah. I guess it would. Duh, Probst. Amanda says she can't be too upset though, since the end of the game isn't up to her; it's up to the jury. And "different people vote for different things," she says. Now, this is why Amanda keeps losing. Because it's absolutely up to you at the end of the game. It doesn't stop right before the last tribal council. Eliza's vote was in the air going into that, and I think she was just looking for a reason to give it to Amanda because of how mean Parvati was to her. And yet, Parvati won her vote, and the game.