Neanderthal Man

Previously on How Much Worse Can It Get? Okay, Never Mind: Ulong was wee, wee, wee, all the way home from tribal council. Tom tangled with a shark and came out with all his fingers and toes, so it was a great night for seafood. The tribes built dueling SOS signals, and Ulong tried as hard as it could to look like it was in a dire emergency, but surprisingly, it could not accomplish even that. Koror took home a great big box of goodies. Ulong had yet another encounter with depression. The squeaky, hand-cranked, wheezing love of Gregg and Anonymous Jen made Tom twitchy. Ulong proved once again that it has never met a puzzle it couldn't confront with the opposite of a solution, and once again, it was sent to tribal council. Bobby Jon wasn't sure whether to stick with the ties that bind all Alabamans to each other, or to tie himself to the awesomeness that is Stephenie and hope for the best. Stephenie feared for her future, but when tribal council rolled around, it was indeed Ibrehem going home, leaving Bobby Jon and Stephenie as the only remaining members of Ulong. Poor Ibrehem. Truly, it has been a hard year for the pectorally enhanced studmuffins.

It is night, and the moon is full. On Night 18 at Ulong, after tribal council, things still feel grim. Bobby Jon blows on the fire that, as we all know, represents life. So you can sort of think of Bobby Jon as blowing on the pathetic little sparks of his life. The fire responds. Only Bobby Jon knows if his life will do likewise. Steph thanks Bobby Jon for keeping his word to her about their agreement, and he manages to grunt eight or nine syllables, some of which may or may not form words, none of which mean anything. To which Stephenie says, "I know." Probably wise. I mean, asking will only make it worse, really.

Steph tells us that she was very nervous heading out to tribal council, and figured she might be the one to take the boot. In the end, though, she notes that Bobby Jon kept his word to her and she edged through to this week. This glorious, wonderful week when things almost have to get better, right? Of course! There's nowhere for a tribe of two to go but up, right? There aren't any numbers smaller than two! Bobby Jon tells her, "You gotta learn that once I say something, it's over and it's done. Trust it." Unless it's something like "I will make short work of this cryptogram," in which case one is urged to exercise caution. It's nice the way Bobby Jon is always trying to be sincere, I think, even when he's sort of full of it. Bobby Jon now interviews that while he and Ibrehem had a "bond" and a "friendship," it is sometimes necessary in a game like this to "rule out feelings." Fortunately, it's not necessary for me. Which is why I can tell you that Bobby Jon is still as cute as a rubber duckie. Squeak, squeak! Bobby Jon explains that his thinking was ultimately that Steph had outperformed Ibrehem at the challenges, so he kept her on that basis: "I did what was best for the tribe." He looks rough, man. Not skinny, but a hell of a lot skinnier. He's got a little bit of the sunken-neck thing happening. Steph adds that she's happy they're both still there, and she says, "I'm still ready to bring home a victory!" Rock on, Steph. I'm totally ready to be the Pope. She tells Bobby Jon she thinks they can do it, and he halfheartedly replies, "Yeah, I do, too," but he doesn't. And why should he? I mean, really. Steph interviews that three people was weird, and two is even weirder, but that she's "still ready to win." Oh, Stephie. We know you're mentally ready. She tells us that she and Bobby Jon "are the two people best for the job right now," and...man. Her energy, it is boundless. Her delusion, it is severe.

The moon wanders off and is replaced by the sun of Day 19, and we are now swooping over some trees and landing at Koror. Camp Koror, it turns out, not only offers merengue lessons and daiquiris on the terrace at 4:30 PM on the nose, but it is extravagantly decorated with the rotting, bug-infested shark head that Tom landed last week. Of course, what's interesting about that is that Tom has consistently said that he emerged as a leader somewhat reluctantly, sort of in spite of the fact that he'd rather have hung back a little bit more. Hanging the shark head up in triumph like you're waving the undies in Sixteen Candles doesn't really jibe with that particular analysis. In any event, the biggest problem is that the shark head, predictably, is now swarming with flies. And equally unpleasantly, the camp is apparently crawling with nice, friendly rats. We watch as a rat enjoys a meal of abandoned coconut, only to find itself snapped at by Katie, sitting up on a table and watching the rats from a safe distance. So that's her purpose -- she's heading up the Ministry of Rodent Scolding. Tom and Gregg discuss the fact that the rats have apparently become bold, and are no longer afraid of the tribe. Gee, I wonder what made the rats think the members of Koror weren't ruthless, nature-battling warriors. Maybe it was the hammocks. Tom interviews that he's not sure if it's because the team is getting sloppy or what, but that the rats really seem to be having a field day at the moment. He personally just chalks it up to the miscellaneous emboldening of rats.

Coby, on the other hand, finds the rats' increased friendliness to be an obvious sign that other people are inadequate. Go figure. "It's all our tribe's fault, because nobody will listen to me," he snots, nicely summing up his philosophy of life in one shot. He mentions that the tribe is leaving food everywhere, so they should only expect that the rats are going to become more aggressive: "Every bit of rat that we get all over us is deserved." Seriously, people, it's like they've offended God. Coby has a chat with Caryn in which he declares that it's all the shark head's fault that there are all these flies, so he's moving it. Also, the shark head apparently is not smelling so fresh, for something that's being kept right close to camp. Apparently the advanced preservation method of hanging it from a stick isn't going as well as everyone would hope. Coby interviews that he's asked Tom repeatedly to move the shark head, and Tom hasn't done it. Coby then goes into a more general bitch session about how he's the one who does all the work around camp, keeping the fire going and making everything awesome and all that jazz. His beef, it turns out, is with "those girls," who don't do any work. He's pissed at Anonymous Jen, Katie, and Janu, all of whom he has weighed in the balance and found worthless. He blames Katie and Anonymous Jen for just sitting around, and now Janu has been boo-hooing for several days about wanting to quit. Which Coby thinks she should just do already and get on with it. And in my favorite moment, Coby says, "I'm too much of a feminist to watch this happen." Oh, I'm so happy to know he's acting out of concern for me. I thought he was just being a negative, obnoxious, bratty little punk. Clearly not, though. He goes on to complain that the guys are "waiting on" the women, and the women love it: "I want to take all three of those girls and push them in that fire." Wow, he really is a feminist. Nothing says "I love your kind" like "I want to see most of you reduced to a greasy ash pile."

We fly to a challenge beach, where Jeff welcomes Koror onto its big mat. And then, here comes teeny, tiny Ulong, trying to occupy a lot of space. Like hockey goalies. Jeff points out to Koror that Ibrehem was voted off, in case Koror was having difficulty picking that out from the large crowd of people involved in the Ulong booting. Jeff tells Steph and Bobby Jon that there may only be two of them, but that they're "still a tribe." Steph says "Yep," in a way that's meant to be brave. Jeff tells the group that the challenge today "is going to require an adventurous spirit." And why? Because it's a food challenge. Everyone looks sort of half-amused and half-terrified, which seems about right. Jeff tells them that what they're going to be eating is a very nutritious delicacy, so, yay! The delicacy is called balut, and it's a fertilized egg containing partially formed duckling. As Jeff helpfully points out, they're about twenty days old, so you can see their beaks and feet and so forth. Tasty! The way it will work is that they'll do rounds in which you have to eat one balut, then two, then three, then four. It's not timed, so you just get a point for your team every time you can eat as many as there are on the plate. End of four rounds, the team with more points will win reward. And the reward this week? Well, it's 55 gallons of fresh water in a tank attached to a shower head. And to go with the water, they'll get the now-traditional collection of bath products. When she sees it, you can almost see Steph want to cry, so badly does she want to run over and grab it all up for herself. There are toothbrushes, there is mouthwash, there is soap, there is shampoo. I'm not sure how it's possible that Koror needs all this stuff, since it seems like they must be getting little toiletry kits every day when they have their rooms made up.

Now, Jeff wants to know which two people are competing. And it turns out that it will be Ian and Tom facing Steph and Bobby Jon. Interesting to me that Koror would throw Ian and Tom at a reward challenge, knowing it will keep them out of the immunity challenge, but I guess they feel like they have so many people now that they can always spare two others. It really does suck, because basically at this point, Koror doesn't ever have to put Jen or Caryn or Janu into challenges anymore.

Steph and Tom step up for the first balut. They both announce that they are ready. Go! They both take a bite. Man, that does not look appetizing to me. But they don't seem to struggle with it too much, all things considered. Tom is the first to finish, and he shows Jeff his empty mouth. Steph shows her mouth, too. As Ian is about to step up for his round, Tom mutters to him, "Watch the beak." As Ian steps up, he repeats this with a grin, which is really cute. Ian and Bobby Jon eat two balut. "That was a juicy one," Ian says with a smile through a mouthful of duckling. Ian then makes a sort of "arg-uh-poooey" noise, and Jeff asks him what's going through his head. Ian says there was some shell in that one. "You sure that was what was the crunchy part?" a delighted Jeff asks as Bobby Jon continues to look like he's struggling. "I don't know," Ian laughs, "but I need the soap." They both finish.

Tom and Steph again, up to three balut. Jeff asks Steph if she's thinking about what she's eating. "Eggs," she says. "Just don't look at it." "I got a chirp out of that one," Tom says easily. He certainly has the ability to act totally unconcerned about this. Tom clears his mouth first. "Damn, Tom," Stephenie says. She finishes eating. As she does, Tom announces that he could "feel the feet a little" on the last one. Oh, Tom. Steph finishes.

Now, it's time for Ian and Bobby Jon to eat four each. Eating, eating, eating. Chewing, chewing, chewing. Bobby Jon finishes first, but then Ian finishes as well. Unsurprisingly, we are going to have a tiebreaker, and unsurprisingly, it will consist of each team sending its strongest player to eat five balut, and this time, it will be a race. These always end like this, so I'm not sure why we have to go through such an elaborate dance. The tiebreaker pits Tom against Bobby Jon, and I realize that Bobby Jon ate the four pretty quickly, but if it's me on Ulong, I send Steph. This whole thing is partly mind over matter, and she's just mentally tougher than Bobby Jon. But they don't; they send Bobby Jon, the challenge choker of days past, who has lost to Tom repeatedly already in such a wide variety of arenas that I barely know what's left, besides archery and the Pillsbury Bake-Off. Tom and Bobby Jon do this quite differently, in that Tom goes one at a time, just eating them as fast as he can, while Bobby Jon stuffs them all into his mouth and then works on swallowing in stages. It's kind of tragic, the way Bobby Jon has it all in his mouth but can't get it down. He's trying very, very hard, but he cannot do it. When Tom shows his empty mouth at last, Bobby Jon tries to show his, too, but his mouth is still full of duck, so that's not going to work. Man, if I've ever seen pathos on this show any greater than Bobby Jon desperately flashing a mouthful of partially chewed embryonic poultry, I don't know what it is. Bobby Jon stares at Tom with reverence and hate as Tom takes a swig off the bottle of Scope. "Man, I almost had him," Bobby mutters to Steph as they leave empty-handed. Again. Koror takes its basket of goodies and heads back, victorious. Again.

Later, Koror returns to camp with its toiletry basket, and Katie reminds us of how they won it. Ian gives a particular shout-out to his love for the Scope Citrus Splash mouthwash, now available at a store near you. Janu interviews that the mouthwash was "tingling," and this was "wonderful." And then we watch her spit a lovely arc across the frame. I understand how much they all love the feeling of a fresh mouth, but if it were me, man, I wouldn't be able to think about anything else until I had washed my hair. My hair would be so revoltingly greasy by this point that I would have come back to camp, run out into the water, dunked my head, and been lathering by the time the camera crew caught up with me.

Gregg and Coby work on assembling their puzzle, and seem to get it almost right away. So now, they're doing the word search. And Bobby Jon and Steph are still trying to put the goddamn puzzle together. You know, I don't like getting all fairness-oriented about challenges, but it sort of sucks that two immunity challenges in a row came down to the ability to assemble puzzles. I don't know that I love puzzles so much that I would have put two back-to-back like this. Basically, Steph and Bobby Jon are ridiculously behind by the time they start searching for words, because by then, Coby and Gregg are trying to solve the three-word phrase. Steph peeks over at the Koror board doing the word search, which is apparently allowed this time, but when Jeff loudly calls her out for it, Coby covers it up -- an example of Jeff interfering in the challenge in a way I believe he totally should not, incidentally. Ulong keeps going, but Gregg and Coby spell out "Victory At Sea," and Koror wins immunity again. Again! Fucking puzzles. Jeff gives Koror back its thoroughly imprinted coconut monkey, and he tells Bobby Jon and Steph that they'll be coming to tribal council. But because there's no way they can vote, they'll face an individual immunity challenge, winner-take-all. And, you know, loser-go-home. They grab stuff and head back to camp.

Later, the jellyfish and other fish are frolicking as Koror returns to camp, all congratulating itself and stuff. Coby happily reports that his tribe has "won every single immunity." Which is true. "I never fathomed coming into this game I would be on a team this strong," he says. As the tribe sits around, Caryn says that she likes the fact that the tribe was sort of made up of old people, hairdressers, go-go dancers, heads in jars, and the like. And here they are. Totally dominant. Can't argue with that. Katie describes them in an interview as "kinda quirky-lookin'," and says she, too, finds their dominant stance hard to understand. All she's done is macram, and look how far she's come! Back at camp, Coby brags that they "all made the jury," and that's actually what's so offensive. Caryn is on the jury! Bleh!

And then Coby talks about how much it meant to him to be part of the team, because he never was part of a team when he was younger, and he was terrorized by jocks and so forth. We watch Ian telling Coby admiringly how much Coby stepped up in physical challenges, and Coby tells the group as well that he was always left out and whatnot. He interviews some more that he was considered a sissy, and then he cries and says he quit school because people made fun of him. And believe me, it's not that I don't sympathize, but I'd be happier with him if it appeared that all that pain had made him a nicer person, which it kind of didn't. Anyway, he talks about how he refused to quit, blah blah blah.

Over at Ulong, things are still pretty fucking depressing for Bobby Jon and Steph. She interviews that, of course, they lost their last shot at team immunity. "We had a great lead," she says. "We just suck at puzzles." Which is true, and that's what Im saying. I'm not wild about the entire season coming down to sucking at puzzles. But she says there's not anything they can do now, and Bobby Jon interviews that nothing the tribe did the entire time to try to get itself some traction -- planning, strategizing, psyching itself up -- was in any way effective. He says, among other things, that he's done all the "grunting" and "swinging from vines" that he's got in him, really. He adds that, now, it's just him and Steph. The two of them talk about their shared feeling that if they go home tonight, not having won a single immunity-related challenge, they'll feel like crap. And who can blame them, really?

A scene follows in which they discover that the fire at the cave is entirely out. Bobby Jon, with the help of the flint, gets the fire going again. "It caught fast," Steph says. "You always get it started." And it is at this point that I turn to Miss Alli's Mom and say, "They're totally going to have to make fire for the final immunity challenge." ["My sister said exactly the same thing to me. You're both geniuses!" -- Wing Chun] Steph talks a little about the fact that if she winds up coming back alone, it's going to be pretty creepy to spend the night without anybody else there. Except, you know, the camera guy and the boom mic guy and the guy from craft services and the reporter from TV Guide and the crab wrangler. ["But still!" -- Wing Chun] She also admits in her interview that Bobby Jon does a lot of work she can't really do. If she's stuck alone, she won't have any help at all. Bobby Jon, on the other hand, interviews that if he has to stay out here by himself for a long time because there's no merge, he can do it. He knows how to make fire, he knows where the trees are, he can fish... "I can stay out here for weeks by myself," he says. I do believe that at that point, it would cease to be a Mark Burnett tale of intrigue and become an Edgar Allan Poe tale of one man's descent into grunting madness. Steph adds that of course, she and Bobby Jon have been teammates all along, and now they have to work against each other.

Steph and Bobby Jon have a little chat in which Steph asks him what kind of challenge he thinks they'll have. Bobby Jon interviews that Steph is just that kind of a thinks-all-the-time girl. "I think she even thinks when she sleeps," he says. "So she's thinkin' right now, 'How am I gon' kick Bobby Jon's ass?' That's just how she is." And yes, he says it admiringly. He promises, though, that he can get "just as bad-ass as anybody." As they leave for tribal council, Bobby Jon voices over that he's been doing the team thing quite a bit, but now he's had enough. "It's Team Bobby Jon raaaht now," he says. I'm totally doing that the time I face a challenging moment. I'm declaring myself a one-woman team. I think it will give me strength in the face of adversity, and also, it sounds vaguely insane. Steph and Bobby Jon paddle.

Tribal council. Bobby Jon and Steph file in. They sit in front of Jeff. Just the two of them. He points out to them that this is a new thing, and asks what it was like. Steph claims that they were enjoying their time together (pfft), and says that they do think they're the strongest members of Ulong, so whoever wins can win, and that will be okay. Jeff asks whether it was weird at camp, and comments on the strange fact that it's like they're in an F2 situation, but we're only halfway done with the game. Bobby Jon says something incomprehensible about how much there is left to go. Jeff asks Bobby Jon whether there's been a highlight yet, and he says that catching the fish today was pretty good, actually. Jeff asks Steph how she feels about surviving. She says she's learned a lot, and Bobby Jon actually jumps in, rattling off all the stuff Steph is perfectly capable of doing for herself, including getting coconuts, getting crabs, starting fires... "She can do anything a man can do, I'll tell you that." Aw. I mean, it's totally retro that he thinks you have to point that out, but still. He's trying. Jeff asks Bobby Jon what he thinks is the key to survival, and Bobby Jon immediately says it's fire -- both the ability to make fire and the ability to keep fire going. Steph nods in agreement as Bobby Jon explains how they had to get the fire started. Asked if she thinks the same, Steph says that she's "frantic without fire, absolutely."

And now, on to the immunity challenge. Because I am awesome at spotting iron-skillet-like foreshadowing, it turns out that it is indeed a challenge requiring that they make fire. They will sit in front of identical little firepots, and they'll be given matches -- matches? -- and they'll have coconut husks and kindling. They'll each make a fire, and the first one to get their fire high enough to light the torch that's over their pile will win immunity. The other person? Will go home. You can kind of tell that Steph and Bobby Jon both initially think Bobby Jon will win.

Steph and Bobby Jon head over and sit in the little fire-making area. Ready? "Good luck," Steph mutters. And...go. They both stack up some coconut husks and kindling, and Bobby Jon lights his first. Then Steph lights hers. And then Steph blows on hers, and Bobby Jon totally doesn't blow on his, which I don't understand at all. In practically no time, Steph's fire flames up and lights the torch, so she's staying -- all by herself -- and Bobby Jon is going home. Aww. That really wasn't very suspenseful. I mean, flint, okay, but...twenty-five matches? It's like a food challenge where the food is Cheez-Its. Bobby Jon brings his torch over to Jeff. "Bobby Jon, the tribe definitely did not speak tonight," says Jeff. "Nonetheless, it's time for you to go." And he snuffs the torch, but what's so weird is that they totally tone down the "ohhhhhhh" that usually plays after the snuffing, and they don't play the usual exit music. It's like they're acknowledging that it's more like a disqualification than a vote-off, you know? They certainly do know their own formula. At any rate, Steph sits on the bench and looks gamely at Jeff, like, "So!" Jeff grins at her. "It's just me now!" she says in surprise. She tells him that when she left, the fire was stoked and her bed was made up, in case she had to come back by herself. And now, apparently, that's just what's going to happen. "We'll see what tomorrow brings," Jeff says, and he sends her back to camp. All by her lonesome, as no one on this show has ever been before. Yikes.

In his interview, Bobby Jon says that he feels great, and hopes to turn all of his experiences into something positive. And he's proud of Steph, who he thinks is probably "the top player in the game." Aw. "The girl's almost invincible," he says. AW! I'll miss him, that big nutbar.

week: Coby gets pissy with Tom, which isn't so smart. Steph works to survive on her own. Yowza. Tune in to watch one woman against the elements, and eight people against the pain that is delayed room service.