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.

Meanwhile, Dave says the new Tambaqui is coming together - the old alliances are melting into a focus on the team. Butch says they didn't want to lose another member because they'd all bonded well. Christy adds that it made her feel good about herself.

One thing that many people had asked way back when Jaburu was still all women was why they didn't take some time to learn sign language from Christy. Well, they didn't, but new Tambaqui did. I suspected as much when Tambaqui did a bunch of hand gestures after winning the meat-eating immunity challenge. But now we finally see Christy teaching them the equivalent of "Team Fish" (since a tambaqui is a fish). She thinks it's great that they want to learn.

Of course, after that meat-eating challenge, Shawna was voted out. She says that she thought she was a bad ass coming in but found out it was a total façade. She is disappointed that she gave in physically and came off looking like a panty-waist. But she admits she dug her own grave.

After the tribes merge, we get a segment about Rob and Heidi. They are working on painting a calendar of their entire time there. Rob says Heidi has both natural and man-made beauty - that's one way of putting it, I suppose. She's the hottest girl he's ever talked to, even though she is wearing a retainer all the time. I guess I didn't realize that a retainer was a big "hotness" issue. Perhaps we should check with the judges from Are You Hot?, since they're out of work now. He adds that it's exciting to be in such close contact with a hot girl and not have a handful of singles. Ah, Rob, you can always count on him for some quoteables.

After Roger was voted off, he admits he was cocky - and says he still is! He's self-confident, a type-A personality. He won't sit back. He's opinionated (yeah, we noticed) and that never goes away. He came to win, but he says he was not perceptive enough. He should have bitten his tongue. He has nobody to blame but himself. They were better than he was at the game.

Dave realized he was in deep doo-doo after Roger was gone. We already saw him plead to Deena and Heidi, but new footage shows that he tried his luck with Christy as well. During their fire watch together, he confesses to her that he had voted for her and now feels bad about it. Oh please. Then he finds out that Christy enjoys dancing but doesn't know how to swing dance. So he teaches her.

Christy is not as dumb as Dave seems to think, though. She says Dave seems like a good guy, but during that fire watch he exaggerated how much he appreciates her. If he really did, he could have shown it throughout the game instead of just the day before he thinks he's getting voted off.

Busted.

And so Dave went. He says it caught him by surprise that he was perceived as a threat - suddenly the bad guy. It's a prime example of how difficult it is to plan any more than a few days in advance. He miscalculated and found himself on thin ice.

Jumping ahead to Deena getting voted out - unfortunately we don't get any more insight as to why Rob chose to go with the Alex/Jenna/Heidi alliance than we had before - she says from the moment she got there it was game-on. People were jockeying for position and it was very intense. It was okay to be downright dirty. Obviously, Alex had a greater influence with the girls than she did. She thought she had it under control and in one fleeting moment she showed her hand and the house of cards came crashing down.

So that's about it. A few amusing moments and some thoughts from those who have been voted off, but no great additional insight into the game. Pretty much the usual for a recap episode.

Next week (for real this time), the alliance of four flaunts their power by not doing as much work. And an emotional moment leads to tears. See ya then!

David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at rno@pobox.com.

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