Surviving the Amazon: the Recap Episode

It's time for that part of Survivor which is meant to bring everybody up to speed on what has happened to this point. Or, to be more accurate, to make sure Survivor is pushed well into May sweeps. Because, let's face it, if people just want to be brought up to speed, they can read the recaps here on RealityNewsOnline!

But anyway, we take an hour to look back at highlights from the first 27 days, and some unseen footage as well. As usual, the "highlights" far outweigh the unseen footage. So to save both your time and mine, there is little point in recapping much of the highlight stuff. We'll stick mostly to the unseen footage except where the highlights are worth mentioning. For this reason, you'll forgive me if the text seems to skip around a bit without as much segueing as usual.

And we get one of those early on as we see Rob beginning his strategy of playing both sides. He told Roger he would vote against Ryan; he told Ryan he would vote against Roger. So his vote was the tie-breaker that caused Ryan to leave. Even now, 27 days later, Rob is still playing both sides. Will it carry him 'til the end? That we don't yet know.

A lot of the new footage in this episode are discussions by the players who have been voted off. Ryan says it sucks to be the first one to go, especially when it's by one vote and that vote was cast by somebody who supposedly was in an alliance with him.

In Jaburu, we see new footage of Jeanne and JoAnna searching for food and finding a small pineapple. This is great, because I was really afraid we wouldn't get a chance to hear JoAnna scream "hallelujah" at the top of her lungs again. Of course, she does, and the editors show us animals looking up as if to say, "What the hell was that?" while birds fly away in terror.

Moving on, after Janet was voted out, she comes back to tell us that they had trouble boiling water so there was barely anything to drink, and then they had hard labor too. The 23-year-olds were dropping like flies, how much could a 46-year-old take? It was a mid-life crisis gone extremely wrong.

After Janet left, the night brings out more jungle noises that we hadn't heard about before. Heidi gets up to go to the bathroom and is creeped out by animal sounds and eyes looking at her. She walks around making noise and swishing her arms around to scare off the critters, making herself look quite humorous in the process. Then bats come swooping down at her and Jeanne.

Time to hear from Daniel after he was voted out. He says he had never gone camping before in his life and never would - but he did this for pure ego. He wanted to be the first Asian guy to win. But he's sitting there so that didn't happen.

The following day, Shawna, Heidi, and Jenna approached Deena about forming an alliance. This is obviously not new material. However, I just wanted to point it out to reinforce once again how bizarre it was for Heidi to say last episode that her "original alliance" was of her, Jenna, and Alex.

That point made, we'll move on to Rob talking about his strategy. He says his plan is to never be lazy and to scheme and plot a lot. Well, that covers two rules from What Amazonian Survivors Should Have Learned. I wonder if he's a fan. In any event, looking back then, he is concerned that he may be the next target for the Roger/Butch/Dave/Alex alliance. After all, Matthew provides food while Rob provides jokes. He says the guy who does the wisecracks may not be as useful as the one who catches fish.

Jumping to JoAnna being voted off, she says she didn't expect to be voted off that night (remember, this was when Shawna was begging to be booted). She knew Deena would come after her eventually because she was strong and a leader (not to mention annoying as hell). Between the water being nasty, everybody struggling, nobody wanting to do anything, etc., she says it felt like she was doing the physical aspect of survival by herself. Surprisingly, she doesn't scream "hallelujah" or "glory" - or maybe the editors got as tired of that as the rest of us and cut it.

After JoAnna left, we see new footage of Christy catching some fish and being proud to show that they can survive without JoAnna. Also, Jeanne and Shawna commiserate about how terrible it is that JoAnna is gone when Shawna wanted to be, yadda yadda yadda. So Jeanne gets back at them by cooking up a batch of manioc that includes the pink fuzz, green fuzz, ants, etc. that have made the manioc barrel their home. Jeanne says the others devoured them, but she wouldn't eat them for anything. Hopefully, they'll all keel over.

Alas, they didn't.

But Jeanne was voted out after the tribal swap. She says Heidi sold out and Jeanne knew she was going to. Deep down she had a feeling Heidi would turn on her. Jeanne adds that she thought she could be sneaky but couldn't do that. She wanted to play hard and fair and it didn't work that way.