New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

We come back to Zhan Hu and guess what? James is working! While he works, everyone else is in the water hanging out. Aaron is doing his best to fit in and Jamie and PG are drilling him for info. They're asking if Jean-Robert would be the first one voted off. Aaron is purposely vague in his responses. As he talks the tribe up for winning the challenges, they begin to discuss how mush of a threat James will be once the game becomes individual. PG tells us that she is very concerned with how long Sherea and Frosti will last in the Fei Long camp. She pulls Jamie aside and tells her that she expects the merge in two more votes (with ten people remaining) and she has a plan. She tells Jamie that with those two votes, you can pretty much expect Sherea and Frosti to be the vote getters. And if that happens, when the tribes merge, they'll be down in numbers 7-3 to Fei Long. PG suggests throwing the next two challenges in order to dump Aaron and James and get the numbers back to an even 5-5. And in the process, they can boot the two strongest individual players.

*Okay, I have to chime in here. I have to give PG credit for coming up with an incredibly risky, but potentially brilliant strategy. With Aaron and James out of the way, this becomes anyone's game. And at the same time, gives the tribes an equal merge. But, and this is a big but...there's no assurance that they're merging at ten. What happens if they boot Aaron and James and they tribes don't merge? They're toast in any further challenges and they'll just keep losing until only one remains. Like I said, the strategy here could be brilliant and turn out to be the best move ever in Survivor. One thing though, you don't throw a challenge. EVER! The one thing you never want to do is go to Tribal Council willingly. Too many things can happen. You can fall into a pattern of losing. The karma Gods of Survivor will see to it that you pay. You just can never willingly give up a member of your tribe and expect that to work for you. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if it requires you to purposely lose a challenge, you have just got to come up with a different way. You have to. ***

Probst sighting!! Also, there's a new swimsuit sighting. Apparently, the tribes were visited by the swimwear fairy last night and everyone has nice clean swimming suits to wear. Not that I have a problem with it, I was quite tired of the dirty nasty underwear and blurry patches all over the place. But would it kill them to show us how that happened? It's like they're not even trying this season. "Screw the audience, we'll tell them the players only get the clothes on their back and then will give them all their clothes later. They may notice, but who cares, we'll have them hooked by then." Anyway, all decked out in new bikinis and swimming trunks, the tribes hear about the immunity challenge. Each tribe will choose two swimmers. They will swim out to a platform, where they'll take turns diving down up to 12 feet next to a large underwater cage. Inside this cage are 12 discs representing the Chinese zodiac. (Frankly, they look like leftovers from the Dharma Initiative...all we need is Hurley and Sawyer to take us to the hatch...but I digress.) There are several bamboo poles sticking through the cage and holding the discs in place. The divers will need to dive in and remove as many poles as they can. Once they release all 12 discs, the tribes will load them into a little boat and pull them back to shore. At this point, the other three people will take the discs and put them on a big puzzle board. First tribe to get their 12 pieces on the board in the right place wins immunity. Fei Long chooses to sit out Amanda and Courtney. I understand that Courtney is a weaker player, but why sit her out now? She could easily do the puzzle and then you could sit her out at the next challenge. If the next challenge is physical and they lose due to Courtney's weakness, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5