Episode Report Card Sara M: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Russell Dies
By Sara M | Season 19 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.22.2009
With that, it's time to vote. Or rather, it's time to announce that there will be no vote, what with Russell leaving and the challenge not being finished and all. So everyone gets pizza! Actually, no. They still don't get pizza. That sucks. Liz is very happy with this, of course, as is Monica. John and Erik are not quite so thrilled. Probst asks Erik how he feels about the news. Erik says they already lost a tribemate today, so regardless of whether or not there's a vote tonight they're down a member. Li'l Russell, on the other hand, says this is great for Foa Foa, because now they won't be down to just four members. And the five of them, he claims, are a very strong unit and he thinks they're about to turn the tables on Galu. Various members of Galu shake their heads. Probst goes to his he-man Erik for his opinion. Erik says he'll do a challenge right now, "because that's what Russell would do." Yes, he would. He would do ten challenges in a row and not drink any water in between them and then he would collapse. Oops. "There's five of them over there and there are eight of us over here... every bead of sweat that he put into everything he ever did -- we're bringing that to you. We will bring that every day, every challenge," Erik says. "We welcome it," Mick says without hesitation. I would too -- it'd be awesome for Foa Foa if Galu took a page from Russell's playbook and went around camp starting fires in the middle of a rainstorm and then collapsed at the challenge like four times. Probst claims that the rivalry between the tribes has truly intensified and it's sure to be a "great finish." Doubt it! Probst gives Galu Russell's stupid chief necklace (they didn't let him keep it after all that? So mean! He loved that thing!) and tells them to pick a new leader when they return to camp. Both tribes head out.
But there are still five minutes left in the show! So let's jump back in time a few hours. Or we can pretend that Russell is still sobbing on the ground at the challenge the next morning. Whatever. As he's carried out of the game on a stretcher manned by like twenty people, he voiceovers that being forced out of the game like this is a terrible feeling. I'll bet the extreme dehydration feels worse, though. "To have my body fail me is utterly demoralizing," he says as he's loaded into a van. Your body didn't fail you, Russell. Your mind failed you by forgetting to DRINK WATER. He says rather do the show and fail than never try. And they have truly pulled out the epic hero music for this, haven't they? I believe the lyrics are "maybe if we make him look good/he won't try to sue us." And with that, there's a pretty awesome shot of the van driving into the dense jungles of Samoa. There's no hospital in sight, so it looks like that's going to be a long, bumpy ride. Kind of like the rest of this season.