Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Removal Of Rudy
By Miss Alli | Season 8 | Episode 2 | Aired on 02.04.2004
As the rain continues to pour, the contestants dive down underwater. First, the slipknots that hold the crates to the boat have to be untied. The usual suspects, including Ethan, Rupert, Lex, and Boston Rob are involved in this maneuver. The underwater shots of Boston Rob's back, by the way, are very flattering. Just saying. Big Tom is good at this, also, and appears to be the first on Chapera to get a crate out of the boat -- and he takes two, while he's at it. Jeff yells that there's two thousand pounds of weight in "that boat." Is that possible? If there are fourteen crates, that would make each crate 142 pounds. They're moving 142-pound crates underwater? That seems unlikely. Incidentally, there is an absolutely outstanding music moment as Ethan and Rupert throw over a couple of crates and the music goes, "Dum-dum-dumm..." and then it waits, and Rupert struggles with a crate, and as he finally gets it out of the boat, the music goes, "DUM!" It's hard to explain, but it's brilliantly cool. Team Burnett, as always, knows its stuff.
Saboga, with Ethan and Rupert working on the crates, is the first to get its boat to surface. When Chapera, however, gets the boat to the point where it's got five or six crates in it, Boston Rob and Big Tom dive down, grab one side, and dump the rest of the crates. Hatch does the same with the Mogo Mogo boat, though it looks like it's only with maybe one crate left. Rob and Tom were the ones who really gained time there over how long it would have taken them to get the crates out one by one. Saboga flips its boat essentially underwater, so that it winds up completely filled, sitting with the top of the boat essentially at water level. They then start trying to take water out of it in buckets. Jerri, with no bucket to use, frantically tries to kick water out of the boat. Chapera, meanwhile, drags its upside-down boat back to the platform. By getting Amber to sit on the back end, they manage to get the front end up and onto the platform. In the spirit of insane overanalysis of small moments, I was interested in the intense but very controlled way that Boston Rob says to Amber, "Get on the top of the boat." Despite the fact that he wants her to do this right this minute, he very intentionally does not yell, but says it very calmly. It appeared to me that a lot of this challenge came down to keeping your head and not creating a frantic atmosphere, and for all of his historically obnoxious qualities (of which he has many, which I fully expect to flower in the coming weeks), Boston Rob seemed to be intentionally not acting freaking out and yelling orders, but talking to her in an almost normal, though serious, tone. He had a plan for how to do it, and they believed him, and that's why I think what's going on back at camp does matter, because if you have total chaos and no leader (like Saboga), then there's nobody who can do that, and this challenge really did require some coordination. A good moment for Boston Rob. And yes, that was several sentences about one sentence, which is always a bad sign that one is paying too much attention.