Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Jenna Jumps
By Miss Alli | Season 8 | Episode 3 | Aired on 02.11.2004
And now, more about Sad, Sad Jenna, Queen Of The Lost Island Of Boo-Hoo-Hoo-a-Hooey. A long camera shot shows her strolling on the beach alone, which is the international symbol for melancholy, as you know. Kathy voices over that Jenna is "hurting" and "wants to go home," as Kathy and Richard watch all the highly symbolic strolling with concern -- or so the editing would have you believe. Kathy gives the quick and dirty -- literally -- rundown on Jenna's physical condition. She's not eating for whatever reason; she was wiped out by the first few days without food and water and can't seem to recover; and she doesn't even seem motivated to drink enough water without Kathy's prodding her to keep it up. "She's just not taking direction," Kathy says, which is a supremely odd choice of words for the situation, as if Kathy has placed Jenna in receivership. Kathy calls her a "wandering zombie," which shouldn't be funny, but kind of is, if you believe as I do that Jenna could sort of leave that impression even under the best of circumstances. Lex and Shii Ann talk about how the experience seems to be taking a much bigger toll on Jenna this time than it did during Amazon. I think you can almost tell that from the fact that she's being so much less bitchy; she just doesn't seem to have that old self-obsessed Jenna charm. "I don't think she's happy," Lex says softly. "She's really not," Shii Ann replies. Jenna, all sad and sitting on a big rock, takes us out of the segment. I'm surprised they didn't show her thoughtfully sketching with a pencil, because that's really all that sequence needed, was sketching.
And it's over to Saboga, and over to some happier music. Jerri is hard at work chopping some wood into usable logs. She explains her plan to build a table by driving two pairs of logs into the sand in "X" arrangements, and then laying something on top of them. It's sawhorse construction, basically. Rupert condescendingly chuckles at her, because he knows how to do everything, and no one else knows how to do anything. And with that condescending laugh and all the ones to follow, he is managing to squander quite a bit of the goodwill he built up with me over the last two episodes when it actually appeared that he might have learned something from the last time he did this. But I guess not, because instead of admitting that someone else might have a good idea or might just want a damn table, Rupert interviews with great amusement that something has "gotten into the tribe" and there's all this "nervous energy," which he attributes in part to guilt about Rudy. Yeah, thanks, big guy, we'll just file that under "Projecting" in the Great File Cabinet Of Castaway Dysfunction. Jerri and Jenna carefully place the tabletop, and guess what? It works. Rupert looks on with that same smirky "oh, they're so cute" smile. Girls...trying to do stuff...that is so adorable. Jerri interviews that without being overconfident, she feels very good about how the tribe is doing right now. She says that the four who are left are "family" and "work really well together." Rupert brings home the world's smallest fish, and they all coo accordingly. Oh, except Ethan, who is unmistakably irked. Watching Rupert and Ethan knock heads might be the best entertainment I've had in several years. It's like watching the Yankees play the Braves -- I'm supremely depressed that someone has to win, but enormously comforted that someone has to lose. Ethan asks Rupert where he found the fish, and Rupert just gestures out to the water, saying, "Right there." Ethan takes the spear and says he's going out into the water. It's very hard to explain the funny music they use here to punctuate Ethan's futile efforts at fishing, unless you've ever heard Spike Jones, in which case I would say it's essentially sparse music littered with the occasional Spike-Jones-like sound effect. So it's like, "Bump. Ba-bump-bump-bump. [Zoing-a-zoing!] Bump. Ba-bum. [Splat!]." It's funny. Somebody is having a good time at Ethan's expense. You know -- somebody besides me.