Episode Report Card Miss Alli: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Rubbing Out of Amazon Rob
By Miss Alli | Season 8 | Episode 4 | Aired on 02.18.2004
More thunder, and even more lightning, and then we are at Saboga. It's raining. It's miserable. It's like the Camp of the Damned, only new and improved, with 75% less Camp, and 50% more Damned. They also did a brilliant job with music selection for this sequence -- it sounds exactly like the part of a war movie where there is a lot of bleeding. Jenna and Ethan are huddled together. Wait...Jenna and Ethan? I guess it's for warmth, but that's also going to come in handy if they get up a game of charades later and have to think of something for "any port in a storm." Jerri, meanwhile, is huddled in a shivering ball, and you can almost see her sanity wafting out of her ears in puffs of blue smoke. Rupert inspects the Shelter That Is No More. "Our beach is destroyed," he says. "Our stupid shelter that I built is destroyed...digging into the sand is the dumbest idea I've ever had in my life, and we paid dearly tonight for it." You know, it's swell that he takes responsibility for being wrong about the shelter, but to me, it's okay to be wrong. What was much more offensive was the oh-silly-girl routine when Jerri tried to raise concerns about it. It's the know-it-all jackass attitude, not the substantive mistake, that would be much harder for me to get past if I were a member of his team. He goes on to lament that with the loss of the Great Hole, the tribe is "homeless." "I gotta build us another shelter today," Rupert says, which I guess tells you how much he learned about not expecting to dictate everything that goes on without talking to anyone else about it. It's like he can accept the notion that he was a bad Daddy, and now he needs to be a better Daddy, but he can't accept not being the Daddy at all. Jenna and Jerri sit miserably in the rain, looking about as hard-up as I've ever seen anybody look on this show. Jerri interviews that they've been "shivering in the rain for probably five or six hours," and that once it started raining, "the whole shelter filled up with water." Kind of like she said it would, no? Gravity is stubborn. Jerri laments Rupert's unbending insistence on putting Saboga in a hole, and then she breaks down crying. "It's not worth it," she says.
Morning does ultimately come to Saboga, and as Rupert, Jenna, and Ethan stand on the beach, they wordlessly compare hands, accompanied by the Snare Drums of Adversity. Everyone's hands are all waterlogged and white, so in case you were thinking it wasn't really that bad? I'm pretty sure it was. Ethan, in particular, looks like he put in extra hours last night at the Hostess mini-donut factory. That's just gross. Jerri remains huddled on the Home Depot box, looking like she may never stand up again. As Rupert and Ethan look into the old shelter, it looks like the old hole entirely collapsed and filled with sand, actually, because there doesn't appear to be a hole there at all. Rupert comments on how insane the storm was. Ethan concurs. "Other than the time when my father passed away, I think that was the worst night of my life," Ethan interviews flatly. He says that there actually were those among them (I don't know who, but I suspect just from his contemptuous, snotty tone that this is a reference to Jenna) who thought it was so bad that someone might come rescue them, but he says that "this is Survivor." He goes on: "It's our own fault that we built a crappy little shelter." Well, right. Especially those of you who knew what a crappy little idea it was, and said nothing in the interests of saving your own asses. I feel terrible for Jerri, but Ethan? No. Elsewhere, Jenna brings Jerri out from under wherever it is that she's huddling. "Come on," she says, "you have to start warming up. I promise you it's warmer out here in a bathing suit. It's dripping and wet in here." She leads a truly horrible-looking Jerri out into the sun -- or what sun there is. Jerri interviews that she has no idea what's going on at camp at this point, other than that they're taking apart the lame old shelter. She doesn't know what they're going to do for a new one, and at this point, she "could give a rat's ass." Normally, I would be all over that kind of bad attitude, but I honestly can't blame her. I mean, she was right the entire time, and two of her teammates failed to back her, and the other one...is Rupert. So she has a point. Rupert tries to get Jerri to drink a coconut, which she doesn't want. Then, still all bossy-bossy, Rupert interviews that Jerri will be fine if she just gets some water and daylight. But they all must "get it together now." I'm glad to see that his taste for authoritarian rule wasn't diminished by fucking up so spectacularly that the tribe almost died.