Survivor: Gabon, Week 6: The Powerful Pin-Up

The Fang tribe is surviving on a few spoonfuls of rice each day, and when Crystal accidentally spills some, Matty and Ace say nothing, but Crystal’s still upset because they looked unhappy. Crystal then refuses to eat, since she doesn’t want to take food away from the others, but she later says that Ace could’ve saved her some rice if he cared about her. Ace tells the camera that he sees Crystal as “the next lamb to the slaughter,” but he doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to lamb-slaughter predictions: When he said that about the Kelly lamb, the Jacquie lamb was slaughtered.

Over on Kota, Dan doesn’t like how tight Charlie, Marcus and Corinne are, and he talks with Marcus and Corinne about being an outsider. Dan feels better after their little chat, not knowing that Corinne came away from the conversation thinking “Dan is socially inept in a lot of ways — I don’t know if he’s a former fatty, or why he wasn’t liked as a child” and that Marcus sees Dan as “the ultimate paranoid human being.” (I wonder if Dan watched Marcus’ comments on TV and said, “Well, I am NOW.”)

The reward challenge is a game of keep-away, with three people tossing a ball back and forth while a member of the other tribe tries to get the ball to fall and break. Randy, Bob, Dan and Matty are very good attackers, tackling people and lunging after the ball. Emmy winner Jeff Probst’s assessment of Sugar’s performance as the attacker is “Sugar: doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.” That’s a little unfair; she wasn’t doing nothing — she stood, she said “grrr,” she cocked her head, she giggled.

Kota wins, exiles Sugar for the fifth time in a row, and goes on a reward trip via helicopter to a picnic, where they are surprised by letters from home. People cry over their letters, particularly Bob, who kisses the letters and has trouble reading them because he’s crying so hard.

Sugar kicks back in the Sugar shack on Exile and reflects that she doesn’t “really know what the hell is happening in this game.” She thinks others believe she’s sticking with Ace out of stupidity, but she feels it’s a good strategic move, as he’s the strongest player.

At the immunity challenge, Probst announces that both tribes are going to Tribal Council to vote someone out, and the challenge will be for individual immunity. The event is a logroll, with the contestants competing head-to-head (not necessarily against someone from their own tribe).

Even though Bob announces that he won a lumberjack logroll when he was in college, he is felled by Sugar in the second round. Marcus wins the challenge (beating Ace and Sugar in the final round), and he gets to choose one member of the other tribe to give immunity to. He picks Sugar, hoping that she’ll keep the hidden immunity idol to herself, and Ace’ll get booted.

Kenny doesn’t like how Matty and Ace seem to be targeting Crystal as the next to go, and he talks with Sugar. He says all kinds of stuff that Ace supposedly said about her, and while it’s not clear if she believes him (especially since Kenny had an “I’m making this up as I go along” look on his face during the talk), she agrees to blindside Ace.

Ace tells Sugar that he needs the idol from her. She says no, he doesn’t — there’d only be two votes against him, right? Just Crystal and Kenny, right? She says she’ll think about giving him the idol.

But Ace doesn’t produce the idol at Tribal Council, and Sugar does indeed join with Kenny and Crystal to vote him out of the game. This actually blindsided me — I didn’t think Sugar would kill her pet snake.

Earlier on, when Matty told Ace they needed to vote Sugar out, or at least make her play the idol, Ace countered with “But we have the idol in her pocket. It’s in our possession. Don’t you see the logic of that?” Poor Ace — thinking that “her” equates to “our.” Done in by possessive pronouns.

On the Kota tribe, Marcus, Charlie and Corinne say that Randy is part of their Final Four plan now, and the four discuss who to vote out — “Dan’s a bumbling idiot,” but Susie is more likely to flip come the merge. They decide to vote out Dan, barring some really stupid move by Susie.

Corinne tells Susie that the plan is to vote against Dan (leaving out the “barring some really stupid move by you” part). Susie says she appreciates being in the loop, and confesses that she’d planned to vote against Corinne. Corinne ignores the subtle difference between “Prior to this conversation, I’d planned to vote against you” and “I’m writing your name down,” and she says to the camera, “So this moron decided she’d like me to go. Really? I hate her. I hate her, hate her, hate her. I’m like, I really want to stab her in the face.” Corinne then talks to the others about voting off Susie instead of Dan.

After some Tribal Council discussion of Susie’s upper-body strength and of Corinne saying she respects when people come out of their shell rather than holding stuff in (of course she does — it gives her fodder to say snide things about them behind their backs), we see Dan and Susie voting for each other, and Marcus voting against Susie. Wait — doesn’t that tip us off as to the result?

But Dan gets four votes against him, and Susie gets three. Oh, I get it — they’re splitting the vote, to protect against the hidden immunity idol that Dan has a remote chance of possessing. My theory is they split the vote depending on what letter their name starts with — Bob, Charlie and Corinne vote for Dan, and Marcus and Randy vote for Susie. Corinne’s face-stabbing of Susie will have to wait for another day.