Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Straight Poop
By Miss Alli | Season 12 | Episode 4 | Aired on 02.22.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Things are dicey at La Mina in the wake of the Misty boot, and they're also dicey at Casaya in the wake of Shane being Shane. Dan adopts Ruth Marie into the La Mina Boys' Club without asking anyone. Cirie sits back at Casaya waiting for things to explode. Casaya wins the coveted potty reward, and it takes the opportunity to try to behead La Mina by sending Terry to Exile Island. While Shane contemplates how Terry is suffering, Terry is finding the hidden immunity idol. When Terry gets back, he's just in time to see his team lose the immunity challenge as well, which puts Sally on the apparent chopping block, seeing as how everyone else in her tribe is supposedly in an alliance. It occurs to Austin, however, that Sally is much better in challenges than Ruth Marie, and that if they stick with Ruth Marie, they have a much greater chance of losing challenges and being down to four people heading into a merge, in which case they will be dead meat. With some help from a crusading Sally, he turns the tribe around, and in the end, everyone but Dan goes along with shifting over and getting rid of Ruth Marie. It's not a great season for women. It's especially not a great season for women over thirty-five. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on Good Night, Female Ladies: Bruce joined Casaya and kept Shane and company from baking like sun-dried tomatoes. Thanks, Bruce. La Mina struggled to make anything of its remaining fishing equipment, but it did win the reward challenge and banish Bruce to Exile Island again. The Casaya Alliance Of Suck began to self-destruct, which was pretty funny, especially to Cirie, because...you know, watching a Vegas casino implode and fall into ruins is pretty entertaining as long as you're not in there playing blackjack at the time. The immunity challenge was fabulous, featuring lots of grabbing and hair-pulling and "Stop choking me!" like we were all in the back of one big car driving to the Grand Canyon. Oh, and like we were all twelve, but: obviously. Casaya won, forcing Austin and Nick to make a choice between aligning with Misty and Sally and aligning with Terry and Dan. They chose the latter, and Misty and her cowboy hat got on the midnight train to Loserland, which was rapidly becoming an all-singing, all-dancing, all-girl revue. Who will be voted out tonight?
Credits. It's nice how they give you that shot right down Chiclets's swimsuit at the very beginning. The breasts of Chiclets are the new ass of Cindy.
A veritable visual feast of tiny wildlife -- highlighted by a yellow-and-black frog so cute it could have been designed by a Project Runway contestant (other than Santino) -- brings us back to La Mina on Day 9, the morning after tribal council. The guys are all sitting around working on the fire as Sally approaches. She reminds us in an interview about Misty being sent home, in case we forgot since we watched the credits. She explains that she had been told that the vote was going to be for Ruth Marie, so Sally's clearly the odd person out at this point. She also says that there's not much she can do except work hard and try to make herself useful. It's no wonder she embraces defeatism; she is from Duluth. Do you know how cold it is up there? It's, like, the "I can't come to work today, because I didn't get my hair entirely dry and after I got outside, I stabbed myself in the neck with some of it" kind of cold.
Behold the hermit crab, how he keeps to himself.
Dan and Ruth Marie take a walk on the beach, during which Dan decides to propose alliance to her. Dan seems to compulsively offer alliances to people in this way I find vaguely unsettling. I understand that they'd be much better off in an alliance of five than in an alliance of four, but I think you have to talk to the other people in your group before you go bringing other people into it. Furthermore, as much as Ruth Marie seems like a nice lady, she has been useless in challenges so far, and unless this crowd likes the idea of being picked off like Pagong and all its children, they need to start winning some immunity challenges, and I'm not sure Ruth Marie is the best bet for that to happen. Even furthermore, what does offering a spot in a five-person alliance within a six-person tribe really mean? "Say, Ruth Marie, if we wanted you to vote with us to get rid of Sally, rather than having us, say, vote to get rid of you, would you be down with that? Take your time; no rush to answer." Of course, Ruth Marie is thrilled, given that she's been without allies since the tribes mixed up. Dan voices over that he'd given this a lot of thought, and that he'd decided she was the one they should go with. I just don't understand why he would think he had the authority to add to an alliance without telling anyone, and I would hope Ruth Marie knows that if the offer comes only from him, he's the only one who's making any promises to her. At any rate, Dan's explanation for choosing Ruth Marie instead of Sally is that he doesn't think Sally feels like part of the group, so he thinks she'll flip as soon as they get to the merge. Ruth Marie, on the other hand, will stay "all the way to the end." There's something that's so hyper about the way Dan approaches the game, you know? I mean, there are still thirteen people left. It's very, very early. You have no idea what tribe switches might be coming up, what bonds are going to form after a merge, if you last until one happens...at this point, you can be thinking F5 if you want to, but you need to have a short-term plan as well, and Ruth Marie is not a good short-term plan.