Episode Report Card Sara M: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Debbie Does Dumbass
By Sara M | Season 18 | Episode 12 | Aired on 05.07.2009
Stephen, J.T., and Erinn take a walk and discuss Debbie. There's a shot of a praying mantis that should tell you all you need to know about what the editors think of Debbie's promises. J.T. tells Erinn about Debbie's promise to give him immunity. "Yeah, okay, she's out," Erinn says immediately. Heh. J.T. interviews that if Debbie can promise something insane like immunity to him and Stephen, then she can and probably has promised things to other people, too. "Nobody wants third place in this game," he says. "She goes. Do not let her win immunity," Erinn says. I could not be more angry at Debbie for basically ensuring that she'll be voted out tonight and Douche will stay at least another week. She sucks.
Immunity Challenge! The tribe walks in and Taj returns from Exile wearing her new shirt. She gets a round of applause from everyone and hugs from Douche even though he was so mad at her for her cowardly vote for Debbie and lack of integrity. Probst takes the necklace back from Douche, who makes Probst remove it from around his neck, much to Probst's annoyance. Everyone else just takes the necklace off and hands it to Probst, but not Douche. Never Douche. Probst explains the challenge: each contestant must race through an obstacle course, consisting of a sand pit to tunnel through, a balance beam, and a rope crawl, to a sequence of ten math symbols. The contestants must memorize as many as possible and race back through the course and write them down on a chalkboard with numbers on it. When all the symbols have been placed between all the numbers, the contestant must do the math and solve the equation. Judging by her math skills during the auction, I think it's safe to say that Debbie is right out of this one. In fact, they're all going to struggle if their performance when Probst asks them to do the math and say what their chances of winning this game will be if they win immunity is any clue, as they just stand there looking at Probst blankly for a while until Taj and J.T. finally come up with the right answer.
The contestants line up, and Probst calls go. J.T. is the first to try to crawl through his tunnel, and he gets stuck halfway through and has to use his elbows to dig his way out. Taj tries next, and also gets stuck. J.T. makes it through his tunnel, past the balance beam, and under the rope crawl effortlessly and starts trying to memorize. While he's up there, Debbie makes it through the sand pit and a boob makes it out of her top. As Douche makes it through his tunnel, J.T. is back at the start, writing down the symbols. Taj and Stephen finally escape their tunnels, leaving skinny little Erinn as the only one still stuck at the start. Stephen gets stuck at the balance beam section, falling off his beam over and over again, while J.T. heads back out to memorize the rest of the symbols. Meanwhile, Debbie is on her way back to her board and Douche and Taj are at the memorization station.
As J.T. heads back for the second time, Erinn finally gets through her tunnel and Stephen finally makes it across the balance beam. But J.T.'s got all his symbols on the board and just has to do the math now, so it looks like he's going to win this one for sure. Hilariously, he's written the order of operations down on his board as if he was expecting to see some tricky math stuff out there. There are no parentheses, J.T., so just go from left to right! After a while at the memorization station, Stephen finally makes his way back to his board. But J.T. and now Debbie have all the symbols on their boards and are doing the math at this point. With his face full of sand, Stephen starts writing down what he memorized -- which would be all ten symbols. And considering what a terrible job he did on that balance beam, this is a good plan. He knew he wouldn't get another chance to go back to the memorization station. J.T. is almost done with his equation when Stephen races past him and asks Probst to check. And he's right! That's pretty freaking impressive. Stephen is shocked to have actually won immunity, although considering that our last two winners of this prize were Debbie and Douche, it's really not such a big deal anymore.
After everyone (except Douche, who is lying on the ground in defeat) is done congratulating Stephen, Probst asks him how he memorized all ten symbols. I think I could do it in one try, but I also have a photographic memory. Then again, I don't know how well it would work after thirty-two days of starving. Stephen had a clever trick -- he assigned a number to each symbol and then memorized the resulting ten-digit number in two parts, since he knew that the brain is capable of memorizing a seven-digit number and that's why our phone numbers have seven digits. Basically, he memorized two five-digit numbers. And then he did the math part really fast, as we all saw. Probst congratulates Stephen on an impressive come-from-behind victory and puts the necklace around his neck. J.T. provides us with the post-challenge wrap-up, saying that Stephen winning the necklace was just like J.T. winning it himself, which he would have done if Stephen wasn't such a math stud. "We can do this," says J.T., who seems to have forgotten that Survivor is not a team sport.
The tribe returns to camp. Everyone once again congratulates Stephen on his impressive immunity win and then the former members of Jalapeño all head for the water to wash the sand off/continue to run this game. Stephen interviews that they expected to come into the merge and be picked off one by one, only to find themselves in total control of this game with individual members of Tempura coming to them. "We feel pretty good about it," Stephen says. I suppose they should, but this really says more about how much Tempura sucks than anything Jalapeño did right. While flies vie for the attention of an alligator, J.T. and Stephen tell Taj all about Debbie's promise to give them immunity and take third place and then how they turned around and told Erinn about it so she'd be on their side to vote Debbie out ASAP. Taj just laughs at how stupid everyone is and says she told her husband, Football Star Eddie George, that she had two brothers on her side keeping her safe in the game. J.T. interviews that he's happy to have Taj on their side, but he seems to consider him and Stephen to be the core alliance.
Taj disappears, and Stephen and J.T. discuss Debbie. Stephen now seems to think that getting rid of Debbie is not a good idea, then interviews that she's a strong worker and a positive presence around camp (except, you know, when she's throwing her nearest and dearest friend under the bus to save her own skin) and he thinks she really would give up the immunity and take third place so that J.T. and Stephen could win. Whoa, there, Stephen. Don't let the immunity win and all the congratulations for it go to your head. People around camp seem to like you, but not that much.
Oh, yuck. Douche decides to join J.T. and Stephen at the waterfront. Stephen interviews that one compelling reason to keep Debbie in the game is that it'd mean voting Douche out tonight. Douche talks strategy, saying that Taj definitely needs to go just in case she has the idol. J.T. agrees, and says their alliance of four has the numbers to take out Taj or whatever. He then interviews that it's "hard to deal with" Douche when he's constantly looking for reassurance that everything is going according to his plans because it means J.T. has to lie to him, and J.T. doesn't like lying. But at least he can admit he's doing it, which is more than I can say for Douche or Debbie. Douche then decides to "throw a reality check" on Stephen and J.T. that one of the three of them is going to win this season of Survivor. LOL, Douche having anything to do with reality checks. J.T. says he wants to get rid of the people he has to lie to as soon as possible. Don't tease me, J.T.
J.T. and Stephen head over to fill up the water jug. They talk about their plans tonight and hope whatever move they're about to make is the right one. J.T. says he trusts Stephen one hundred percent and that Stephen trusts him just as much, which has got to be leading up to the horrible inevitable blow-out between them whenever Stephen decides to make his move against J.T. "Right now, we have played an awesome game," Stephen pats himself on the back once again. And also once again, I have to point out that their success on this season has much more to do with their opponents being morons than them being master strategists. That said, I do think Stephen is really good at this. But we'll never know how good, since he's playing with idiots that anyone with half a brain could outsmart. Stephen notes that no one wants to vote them out. J.T. agrees, but has no idea why people haven't wised up to them yet. Stephen