"Survivor: Gabon" - October 16, 2008 episode

They start the show with a recap of what's happened so far. Ummm, ok, a little early for a recap, isn't it? Running short on this episode?

Sugar arrives at the Fang camp and is happy to be reunited with Ace, but she is surprised and disappointed to see Kelly there, which meant Jacquie had gotten voted out.

At Kota, they catch an electric fish among other types of fish. I was wondering if they were going to get some use out of it being electric, but nope. That was funny to watch in any case, as the people got shocked. The husband and I talked about what our cat Orkid would do with an electric fish. We agreed that she'd get shocked. Over and over and over again.

Back at Fang, the group see/hear an elephant grazing nearby and watch it for a while, in awe of nature being so close. Ace and Matty seemed to want to get even closer to nature as they paddled out on a kayak to get a better look at the huge elephant. OK, yeah, cool and all, but I didn't think it was really that smart to do.

The reward challenge is for an herb garden (self-replenishing since it would continue to grow), salt and oil, and they can keep their fruit from the challenge. The challenge is that some team members have to throw various fruit (cut watermelon, whole pineapples, whole oranges, etc.) through a particular opening in an overhead fence, and their teammate has to catch it. Meanwhile, someone from the opposing team has a bat and tries to whack the fruit away instead. Whoever ends up with the most fruit by weight at the end wins. Ace is doing a terrific job for Fang by rejecting almost everything Kota tries to throw past him. Kota finally finds a way around him by throwing two fruit pieces at a time, so he can only reject one, but the other gets through. Kota manages to make up a lot of ground with this new method, and in the end, they end up barely beating Fang. They choose to send Sugar back to Exile, to what she has deemed the "Sugar Shack", and she doesn't really care that much, because she likes it there - shelter, food she doesn't have to share or work to get, no work to be done, just relaxing and actually having some time to herself.

At Fang, they're still running out of rice, so they get very small portions, and GC is still complaining about how little food they're getting. Crystal does what all the viewers and probably most if not all his teammates want to do and tells him to just stop complaining and eat his food. (She later goes and tells him she was just kidding, but really, he needed that beat-down and more.) GC disappears in a canoe shortly before it's time to leave for the challenge, and many of his team members are yelling for him, and right before they have to leave, he comes back, without a care that he almost missed leaving with them. Ass.

The immunity challenge involves dropping big balls made of twigs/branches over a cliff, and the balls will hit other obstacles as well, and then they will roll into various pockets, each worth a different amount of points. A member of the opposing team will be trying to block the other team's ball, but the defender will be blindfolded and will be guided only by a caller. For Fang, Ace is the defender with Sugar as the caller, and for Kota, Dan is the defender with Randy as the caller. Both sides manage to block a ball or two that the other members toss off, and Randy and Dan actually have a very good rapport going with very definite instructions. When it comes to the last ball, Randy is able to get Dan to stop Fang's ball, but Ace seems on his way to stopping Kota's and with Fang in the lead, that would have led to Fang's win. In a brilliant move of thinking fast on his feet, Randy yells out to Ace to freeze, which Ace does, allowing Kota's ball to continue into a pocket, giving Kota the win. It was a great tactic on Randy's part, but it was an incredibly stupid move on Ace's part. Did he not remember that his partner was Sugar? Randy sounds *nothing* like Sugar. Ace should have just been listening for Sugar, not anyone else. It would have been different if both callers were the same gender and had the same kind of voice, since they would have been harder to distinguish, but between Randy and Sugar, there can be no confusion. I did notice that earlier in the challenge, Randy would periodically yell out Dan's name along with his instruction, so maybe he realized that yelling the name got the person's attention more. And Sugar is not faultless in this, because she stopped saying anything. She didn't tell Ace to keep moving, to ignore Randy, nothing. She just let Ace stop and stand there.

At Fang, the team has to decide what to do at tribal council. GC says he's fed up with the game and the suffering and work and personalities and lack of food, and he's ready to leave. While GC is off and Ace and Sugar are swimming, the rest of the team are talking about whether Sugar has the idol, and Crystal actually rummages through Sugar's bag and finds it, confirming for everyone that she has it. They then discuss voting off GC or blindsiding Sugar to get rid of the idol since she's dangerous in possession of it.

At tribal council, I was really expecting Jeff to ask about why Ace listened to Randy or why Sugar didn't say anything, but there was nothing, or at least if there was anything, it wasn't included. I was totally bummed because I wanted to hear them talk about it, since their joint blunder effectively caused Fang to lose. In the end, Fang ends up voting out GC. That was ok too. He really is an ass and a whiner and just has too much attitude. And he complains about the conditions. Really? You applied to be on "Survivor", and you had no idea what you were getting yourself into, that you'd have to work and get food and that there would be no fully-stocked fridge to help yourself to all the time, AND that it's a social game? Why the hell did you apply to be on the show? Good riddance.