Episode Report Card Sara M: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Stuporbowl
By Sara M | Season 21 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.15.2010
Shannon insists that it's very important that a "girl" doesn't win this season, interviewing that "it's important that we don't let these girls take over. I mean, we already get owned in marriage. Pretty soon we'll have a woman president ... a guy needs to sack up and we need to win this." Why are so many men on this show afraid of women uniting against them? Has that ever successfully happened? Doesn't the fact that we still don't have a female president when even freaking Liberia has one (as did Nicaragua, and she was elected twenty years ago, back when blonde jokes were new and cool) tell you that American women kind of suck at sticking together?
Anyway, it's time to remind the viewers that Kelly B. is missing a leg. She says she started getting paranoid that everyone was looking at her leg and wondering what was wrong with her, and not without good reason, as while I have no idea if the contestants are staring at her leg, the camera crew is making sure to zoom in on it and every opportunity. She decides it's time to show the tribe her secret. "I wanna say something to everyone," she announces, like, if you don't want the missing leg to be a big deal, Kelly B., why are you making it into one? And opening with some stupid, long-ass speech about first impressions and feeling comfortable with your team? And then she just drops trou and reveals The Leg. "I knew it!" someone says. No one else seems to really give a shit. Finally, someone asks what happened to her leg. "I had a birth defect," she says, and high-fives are exchanged until Jud, the moron, wonders how Kelly B.'s prosthetic leg works. "Like, how do you tell it to move?" he asks.
Shannon interviews that he feels really bad for Kelly B., and if he made it to the end with her, he'd tell the jury to give her the money to compensate for "what she's probably gone through in life." Really? You mean like how she's in freaking medical school and has competed in triathalons? Looks to me like she's done a pretty good job living her life to the fullest with or without two legs. And the fact that she's basically always been missing one leg as opposed to losing it later in life, like Vanuatu's Chad, means she doesn't really know what she's missing. Which is not to say that her life is easy or anything - this world is designed for people with two legs, after all - but I don't think it's really fair to Kelly B. for people to view her as someone deserving of pity and sympathy when I doubt that she views herself that way and doesn't seem to have let her birth defect stop her from doing anything. Anyway, Shannon's pity for Kelly B. doesn't go very far in the end, as he then says that she's a big threat for the sympathy vote so he wants her to go first. Because nothing makes you look better on national television than voting out the girl with one leg as soon as possible. As Kelly B. removes her prosthetic leg and hops into the water for a swim, NaOnka, who is supposedly a gym teacher, says something about wanting to race her. I kind of hope she does challenge Kelly B. to a race, actually, because Kelly B. would probably kick her ass and then NaOnka's gym students would make fun of her for years.