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by Scott Wyatt Published: February 3, 2006
The other new twist is Exile Island. Every week, one castaway will be voted to spend at least one night on Exile Island. The island appears to be a really small island with a large skull on it. I’ll bet that several people try to take shelter from the rain that is bound to be frequent and heavy. Again, no food, water or fire so it could potentially destroy someone’s psyche not only from the isolation but also worrying about the politics that is being played in their absence. The first couple of episodes should be easy for the one voted to the island but as we get deeper into the game and their bodies start to become emaciated from lack of food, a stay on Exile Island could be a death blow to a castaway. The catch to all of this is a hidden immunity idol on Exile Island. There is also a different twist on the voting. A player could be voted out of the game and then drop a bomb on everyone and pull the immunity idol and save his butt. From media interviews, Jeff Probst has revealed that if this situation were to occur then the next person with the most votes will go home. WOW! This is going to play havoc with voting strategies and trying to figure out if someone has the immunity idol or not. I love this twist! Okay, enough of the previews and speculation. Let’s see what happens on the premiere… 39 Days, 16 People, 1 Survivor – is there a better way to start a season? Four boats arrive and even though the players are arranged on four colored mats, Probst finds it necessary to ask if they have figured out the first twist. When he confirms that we have four separate groups, Cirie gets hacked being called old and whines out loud about it. Melinda doesn’t look too thrilled about it either. Next, we hear Bobby give us our Quote of the Week, which is listed at the end of the column. He’s going to be a weekly candidate for this award. Meanwhile, Austin is busy trying to flirt with Danielle and Misty instead of listening to Probst explain the rules of Exile Island. The silver lining is the hidden immunity idol that can be played after the vote and is good until the Final Four. Awesome! REWARD CHALLENGE The next surprise is the first reward challenge is right now. Each tribe will select one person to run to the other end of the island, to the big skull, insert your own King Kong reference here since it is a Skull Island and start sorting through a pile of skulls. Smash them and find an amulet and race back to the start. The first three teams back win flint for making fire and allow all of their tribe to head to their respective beaches. The losing tribe will vote one member to stay behind on Exile Island. Damn! Our four racers are Terry for the Love Boaters, Austin for the Beefcake, Ruth Marie for the Golden Gals and Danielle for the Spice Girls. How can you not like these nicknames? Thank you Bobby. Austin slips at the start but recovers enough to reach Kong’s hideout in second place. No one finds an amulet on the first pick but it’s not long before Terry smokes everyone by finding an amulet and getting back to the finish. The Love Boat will be making another run with a full crew. Can’t you just hear the theme song in your head now? Austin is the second one back so the Beefcake Crew is safe while they pose like Hulk Hogan in the ring. That means a woman will be the first one left behind but which one. After what seems to be an eternity, Ruth Marie finally emerges from the jungle with the third amulet. The Golden Girls are safe. And bringing up the rear is Sporty Spice, I mean Danielle. One of the young girls has to stay behind. Probst says they need to determine who that will be right now. Danielle offers to stay behind but the group is hearing none of that – they want to play Rock-Paper-Scissors. Huh? When did this become a day care? Anyway, Misty, the engineer, is the Biggest Loser sorry NBC and is chosen to be left behind. Probst explains that she will remain on Exile Island until the first immunity challenge to think about how she sucks at Rock-Paper-Scissors. She will have a machete and a barrel of dirty water. He sends the tribes to their boats and leaves Misty all alone. Where’s Wilson when you need him? Now we cut to the accommodations for the four tribes. The Golden Girls, now known as Casaya, get right to work with Tina getting the fire going and start building a shelter. Tina quickly emerges as the workhorse of the group as she is swinging the machete as if she wants to kill. Well, she may get her chance because Cirie is not only worried about being called old. Apparently, she is also afraid of leaves and anything that might be underneath them. She did know she was playing Survivor and not Big Brother, right? Cirie describes herself as a couch potato and resembles one too and thinks she should have stayed on the couch but she’s here so she is going to make the best of it. Geez! Over to the Beefcake Crew, now known as Vivero, where they think this is a Sandals vacation. Instead of making a camp, building a shelter and boiling water, they are playing baseball with a bamboo stick and a coconut. Finally, they decide to get to work but first Aras has all of them, sans Bobby, do some sort of yoga thing with their hands to instill the will of the fire into Austin. Did they raid a mental hospital for contestants this season? Bobby watches all of this and you can just see the balloon over his head appear with all of the visions of his soon-to-be found wealth. When Austin and Nick go to start the fire with some leaves in the pot, he just can’t get it going. Let’s read that again. They were trying to start the fire with leaves and grass that are in the pot. What a shock – it doesn’t work. Since the fire is a bust, let’s build a shelter. What they get is something that a room of 2-week olds could build better and still not want to live in. Nick tries to lighten the mood by claiming they don’t want to peak on the first night. Not even close there buddy. Our next stop is with the Spice Girls, or Bayoneta, who are spending their daylight hours haggling over where to build the shelter. Girls, this is not Malibu. While they ponder where to build, they take a quick dip in the water, which allows us the camera shot of young wet girls in bikinis, Courtney finds a sea turtle that has died on the beach. It’s at this point where we wonder if the spirit of Granny Jan from Thailand or Scout from Vanuatu, has been reincarnated in young Courtney. As she draws a heart in the sand around the corpse and launches into some babbling spirit baloney, Danielle and Sally look on in utter shock. Again, I wonder about the mental hospital casting choices? Finally, we get to, cue the theme music, the Love Boat and these guys are working like a group of Teamsters on HGTV. Bruce is chopping wood like there’s no tomorrow. Terry and Shane have a raging fire while Bruce has gotten some water boiling. Did we expect any less from these guys? Suddenly, Dan and Terry find themselves alone and the first alliance is born. Since Dan seems to trust Terry on sight, he reveals that he has flown on the Space Shuttle besides being the whitest man on the planet – he could scare ET away and Terry in turns tells Dan that he flew F-14’s before taking a job as an airline pilot. This could be a strong alliance if it holds. We also find out that Shane is hurting in more ways than one. He’s using the game to break the smoking habit. He says he has smoked three packs a day for 20 years and after a mere 32 hours, he realizes that misses the cancer sticks. Talk about an intense detox program. We already knew Survivor was great for weight loss but now smoking too. Mark Burnett is really branching out here. I hope it works for Shane but he is already showing signs of being irritable when he refers to Bruce as “Daffy Duck”. Shane is not happy being on the old crew. He feels he is out of place and begs Dan to convince the others to relax a little bit. Dan just smiles at him and keeps right on working. Guess what happens the first night? That’s right, it rains. We cut back to Exile Isle to see Misty just lying down and watching the lightning and trying to get some sleep in the rain. I hope as the game goes on that these exiled folks start going nutty and talk to themselves otherwise the camera dude would probably walk into the sea and never return. IMMUNITY CHALLENGE Now that we see that Misty is still alive, we race over to the immunity challenge where she tries unconvincingly to make the others think she has found the immunity idol when, in reality, all she did was pout and dig a couple of holes with the machete. Jeff reveals the immunity idol, which is a spear with three shrunken-heads on it. Cool! The challenge is both physical and mental. Everyone will swim out to the dock and on Jeff’s go, one at a time, they will climb over the wall and jump into the water and swim to the raft. Once all 4 tribe members are there, one of them will need to dive down and release the raft from the tethered hook. Then they will paddle to shore and race up the hill and solve a rope puzzle. There is a clue on how to solve the puzzle buried in the sand if you want to dig or just try to solve. Once they have the ring off, they will throw it out and try to get on the grappling hook then pull it back to release a flag. The first three tribes to release their flags win immunity and at least one more day in Panama. The losers go to Tribal Council where the first person will be voted out. Let’s play! On the start, everyone stays close together until they have to unhook the rafts. The Spice Girls get it undone first and begin paddling. Right behind them is the Love Boat but they have trouble paddling at first. Both the Golden Girls and Beefcake Crew have all kinds of trouble getting their rafts unhooked. Tina finally gets the old girls off the hook while Aras can’t hold his breath long enough to get to the hook. And this guy is a yoga instructor? Finally, they switch out and get unhooked and head for the beach. By this time, the Spice Girls are on the puzzle with the Love Boat rapidly gaining on them. Both use a strategy of two people digging for the clue and two people working on the puzzle. Finally, the Golden Girls and Beefcakes make it to shore. However, it isn’t long before the Spice Girls get their puzzle undone and pull in the grappling hook. The Spice Girls have won immunity. The Love Boat releases their flag shortly thereafter and they are safe. It’s now a race for third place. The Golden Girls have three people digging while Melinda just stands there. When they find the clue, they all argue about how to read it, which allows the Beefcakes to pass them and claim third place. The Golden Girls are going to Tribal Council. Jeff passes out the pieces of the idol and sends them back to camp. With three tribes now out of the picture for the rest of the week, we focus solely on Casaya. The wonderful editors of the show have decided to let Cirie continue her bitching and moaning gee, thanks guys as she tries to convince Ruth Marie and Melinda that Tina has to go. Apparently, watching Tina work all the time is tiring Cirie out. While Cirie works over the other two, Tina wanders out to the beach to be alone with herself where she tells the viewing audience about losing her only child to an automobile accident a mere 4 ½ months ago. While she reflects on her loss, she happens to walk upon a huge fish that has gotten stuck on the rocks when the tide pulled out. Hatch would be jealous of the size of this fish – it’s huge. Tina brings it back to camp and shocks everyone. Surprisingly, Cirie actually touches a “thing” and scales the fish. In the cutaway interviews, Cirie’s only goal is to not be voted out first. Melinda is hesitant about voting our Tina because she is so strong. It’s at this point that I realize we could have a tie vote right off the bat and it appears to be headed that way. TRIBAL COUNCIL Jeff is waiting for the Golden Girls at the top of the stairs heading into Tribal Council. Hey, it’s in a cave this time. Sweet! Probst has them get their torches and light them as he gives the fire is life song and dance. Jeff gets right into with Cirie who tells the couch potatoes at home to stay there because this is tougher than she ever realized it would be. She also admits that she’s done any camping or anything close to resembling living outdoors. She is a lock to go home in most seasons. When Jeff asks Tina if everyone is pulling their weight in camp, she gets a case of “diarrhea of the mouth” and says not as much as she would like to see. Melinda takes offense to this remark and says that no one is lying around but they are all working even though Tina may not see it. Jeff says it’s only been three days and with only 4 people there is nowhere to hide. It’s time to vote. Cirie votes for Tina stating they just didn’t hit it off right. Tina votes for Cirie because she is afraid of everything outdoors. When Jeff tallies the other two votes, its no real surprise that Tina is voted out by a 3-1 margin. She talked her way out of the game. After Jeff snuffs her torch and sends her down the tunnel of shame, he turns to them and acts surprised that they would vote out the one person that seemed to know what they were doing. We’ll see how it plays out. Grab your torches and head back to camp. QUOTE OF THE WEEK This weekly feature is back by popular demand once again. Each week, I’ll pull a quote from one of the Survivors and give them their 2 seconds of glory. My challenge to you is to figure out the quote before reading it here. Here’s a clue on how to spot it – It is rarely one that you think it will be. The first one for Exile Island is: ”So we have the Beefcake Crew (young guys), of which I am a charter member and president. We have the Love Boat Crowd (old guys), the Golden Girls (old women) and the Spice Girls (young girls).” Well, that was a great first episode except for the fact that the Golden Girls are the dumbest three people I’ve seen since The Three Stooges. Let’s vote out the one person that can make life easier – yeah, that’s the ticket. Exile Island and the role of the hidden immunity idol are going to play a huge part of the strategy in this game. It’s going to be interesting to watch Shane crash from his smoke addiction and Cirie freak out over the little things in nature. It still seems strange to me that she is that scared of bugs when she is a nurse and sees horrific things at work everyday but a little bug sends her into a conniption fit. And some people wonder why I constantly rag on the casting department. Jeff Probst has stated in several media interviews that he ranks this season in the Top 5 for best seasons. Over the course of the next 14 weeks, we’ll find out if he’s right but they got off to a good start tonight. Next week, the previews show another twist, which has already been leaked by Probst and CBS – the tribes are switched up into the traditional two, the weather gets rougher and Shane nears his crash landing to the point of contemplating quitting the game. Until next week, take care and God Bless.
Episode 1 Boot: Tina (Casaya aka The Golden Girls) |
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