After Week Eight’s GREATEST EPISODE EVER in the “Survivor” enterprise, this week’s episode was CBS’s way to do the yearly Thanksgiving catch-up. This is the time for all families who have been belching up their turkey meals on a Thursday night to snooze in front of their fireplaces and remind themselves what a blast Survivor Gabon has been this season. And, there is ample opportunity to hop in and join all the shenanigans. Because this week, CBS managed to actually show not just some nicely edited recaps from the first several weeks, but it also unveiled some of the contestants’ application videos. Some were quite revealing because it helped explain some of the treacherous and evil behavior of some of the castaways up to now. Read the rest of this entry »

27 days in captivity with the contestants and this is what we have learned about the Survivor: Gabon this season thus far:

•    This has been a season of blindsides. And not just this, but, in true safari style, some of the victims have been big lions. Ace the mastermind, the sometime British-accented guru: gone. Marcus, the ringmaster doctor who felt he could sway anyone with a wave of a hand: gone. And last week, it was Charlie, the lawyer from New York, who was also as self confident as Marcus, and was possibly in a bro-mance with him, and was trying to call the shots on Fang with evil Corinne: gone. Not that the remaining players are all weaklings, because they’re not. But there is some kind of triumphalism in that comparative weaklings like Susie and Ken, and especially Crystal are moving past the established players. Read the rest of this entry »

How the mighty have fallen! Wow! Score one for the underdogs! After last week’s searing blindside of Ace from Fang, at the hands of his supposed kewpie doll/sorta love interest, Sugar, this week’s ouster was just as stunning. Marcus, the mighty doctor, leader, motivator, who liked to hear his own voice, was knocked to his knees at exactly the moment when he thought he was controlling his entire tribe. Uh uh. Here on “Survivor”, people’s fates can change in an instant and this was a classic, if not entirely unsurprising, moment. Here’s how this all went down: Read the rest of this entry »

Time to get caught up with the goings-on in Gabon. Week Five did not generate much drama, actually. As we know, Sugar has the hidden immunity idol, which she found weeks ago on Exile Island. Everyone on Fang knows this, including the Mephistophelian Ace with the maybe-phony British accent who seems to have taken a liking to the former pin-up model. In fact, on last week’s episode he told her that it seems that everyone knows she has the idol. To which she smiled gamely and said it didn’t matter much to her.

Also, Ace managed to pad his alliance with Sugar a little more with Matty, who seemed to be the most physically imposing of any of the other players. Matty gladly agreed, since no one else seemed to approach him about anything. Matty is a strong player, and he really stepped it up on a competitive level last week when lesser players like Kelly and Crystal could not. In fact, Crystal, Kelly and Ken attempted to sway Matty away from the clutches of Ace, i.e., how to tell him that Ace is a menace to everyone and that he is some kind of evil guru. Well, Matty for one isn’t seeing it. And given the fact that this lot is meager, starving and quite lacking in performing in any of the challenges, the choice for Matty was fairly clear. Read the rest of this entry »

We are still in the getting-to-know-you phase of Survivor. Jeff Probst is firmly at the helm of the reality show juggernaut, commenting at every turn about how both Fang and Kota tribes are settling in at their camps, winning or losing challenges, having some skirmishes between purported “:leaders” or followers. Each tribe is trying valiantly to win both reward and immunity challenges because they need the momentum and moral boost to carry them through these initial weeks.

In last week’s double episodes, Kota burst out of the starting gate with relative ease. People found their roles to play in setting up a shelter, finding water, digging latrines, and the stronger personalities prevailed over the lesser ones because of basic survival instincts. You need water and you want to complain that Ace, the worldly and slightly stuck-up photographer, is bossy? No. Let’s get this all done first. And let’s win all the challenges –and then figure out whether Ace or anyone else manages to rise to the cream of the proverbial crop. Read the rest of this entry »