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
Anyway, Ethan is out in the water trying to fish. Rupert, from shore, laughs -- you guessed it -- condescendingly. "I tried to tell him it's not a competition," Rupert says with all kinds of warm and generous understanding. You know, it's really funny -- when Ryan-O sucked at fishing, Rupert still gave him all kinds of credit for trying, because Ryan-O was willing to act like Rupert was his daddy and had to tell him how to do things. Although Rupert is showing his insecurities differently this time, they remain entirely transparent, in that Ethan is a much bigger threat to Rupert's ego than Ryan-O was, so Rupert has a much greater need to treat Ethan like a joke than he did when it was Ryan-O. "Not a competition," indeed. Obviously, letting Rupert be the only one who fishes would be great for him, but it would be foolish for the rest of them not to learn how to take care of themselves. It's textbook Rupert -- supremacy over fishing is something that Rupert wants for perfectly legitimate selfish reasons, not magnanimous ones, and it bugs the crap out of me that he won't just cop to it. I don't care for Ethan, as you know, but I would love to see him catch a fish at some point, just because it would irritate Rupert. Jerri chuckles to Rupert that she hopes Ethan catches something, because it would be good for his ego. Ethan returns to shore and tells Rupert the story of trying to catch one particular fish and losing it when it swam into a little "nook." Ethan talks about how hard it is. Rupert yaps some more about how it can't be a competition, and I might point out that in the same breath, he says, "I like being the fisherman." And he also says it "can't be a competition between he [sic] and I [sic]." And then -- you won't believe it -- Rupert says, "It will just hurt his emotions." No, he really says that. Really. I swear. I looked at it twice. "It will just hurt his emotions." In other words, "I am so compassionate that I don't want him to try to compete with me, because competing with me will only depress him." I am so glad that Ethan and Rupert are on the same tribe. That was a brilliant decision. They're both so used-up and past their expiration dates and resentful of each other's successes...it's kind of like The Turning Point, if it had been about men instead of women, and fishing instead of ballet. Anyway, Rupert thinks this failure to "work as a team" is what beat them at the challenge yesterday. He's happy that they now have "harmony." Meaning "peace under my dominion." And he thinks they'll do fine: "Even though we're little, we're gonna be mighty."