Twila’s House Falls on Ami’s Head

I have to hand it Twila. She did something that I thought nobody among Survivor: Vanuatu had the brains to do, ie beat Ami at her own game. Admit it, you never thought it could be done, but it did happen, and all of a sudden there is suspense about the episodes and the outcomes of tribal councils. Returning from the latest tribal council, Ami had some a tougher job ahead of her than we have ever seen before. You know there was going to be conflict, and the new Twila, Scout, Eliza, and Chris pact seemed to be working, but if we have learned anything, it is that Ami is a master manipulator. She has proven she can steer the game in a direction that benefits her, and she was going to have to do just that to stay in the game.Arriving back at the Alinta camp from the latest tribal council, Ami employed a strategy that many who get blind sided in reality shows try. She tried to guilt everybody in the alliance back onto her side. I call it the Lex school of Survivor post-voting strategy. The main talking point was how Twila could have lied to her about sticking with the all girls plan. Ami accused them of not really liking Eliza, and using her only for their own benefit when it was needed. Now, I am not sure what world Ami is from, but in my world, I watched her write down Eliza’s name. She shouldn’t complain about people trying to use Eliza to their advantage when she already decided that Eliza’s usefulness to her was done. Granted, Ami was not the one who was pushing to get rid of Eliza, but voting for Eliza last week meant thse was down with the plan. Ami also tried to take the sanctimonious moral high ground by saying she couldn’t believe Twila had sworn on her son’s life. She said it was “yucky” and she completely lost all respect for her. Once again, Ami is living in some alternate universe. On this planet, we all saw when Twila swore on her son’s life that she would stick with the plan, that Ami and Leann mocked her in her face. To say that she used Twila’s promise to base her trust is a joke. As Ami said it herself, she got a little cocky, and that is what did her in.

For her part, Twila got a little cocky herself. She told Ami she deserved it for acting so high and mighty and better than anybody else. That is more of the reason for the audience to dislike Ami, but it is true for the most part. Ami has had control of this game from the beginning, and depended on being the leader of the girls alliance to get her through, but clearly showed that she thought some people were more important than others in the game, and she never really wanted anything to do with Twila, other than french braiding her hair. Twila took time to congratulate herself saying “I got a great mind sometimes. It’s great”.

The reward challenge continued the Vanuatu theme of ots of water, lots of difficulty. A water obstacle course was setup, requiring each contestant to swim a little ways out to shore, then make their way across several platforms and outriggers across the water. On the other side of the obstacle, there were three flags tied to posts under the water. The first person to get all three of their flags back won a Pontiac G6 and a spa vacation. The next two people to finish didn’t win a car, but got to enjoy the spa along with the first place contestant. It was a very exciting competition, with Eliza and Ami battling for first place, but Eliza finally winning in the end. Chris and Julie battled for first place. They were treading water about to get their last flags and take them back, when Chris asked “Do you want this bad?” in a tone that made you think he was going to make a deal and give up the spa. Instead, he dove down, and raced Julie back to the beach. Chris won, and to add insult to injury, Julie bit it hard in the water on her way back. Twila was never really in the hunt, and Scout managed to return one flag. She is going to be worthless in the endurance challenge, and whoever keeps her in the final three is going to be feeling pretty good about getting a shot at the grand prize. She complained later that if it had been six years earlier, she would have beaten everybody out there physically. Well, you knew of your knee problem when you signed up. SHUT UP ALREADY.

So, Eliza, Ami, and Chris piled into the G6 and drove to the spa. Yes, they drove to the spa. I thought they were out in the middle of nowhere. If they were able to drive to this Spa, it meant that their camp was not as remote as we thought. And it wasn’t one of those joke spas that they sometimes pull out that you can tell was temporary. It was an actual structure. Perhaps it was where the staff stayed while they were on the island, and perhaps they left out a helicopter ride someplace between the challenge beach and the spa, but god that really took away a lot of the belief that the Survivors are that far away from civilization. A dirt road is a lot when you are in the middle of the jungle.

Anyway, as expected, everybody enjoyed their time at the spa, and got cleaned up. They also got something to eat, becasuse while Chris and Ami aren’t very sickly, Eliza was completely emacieted, and demonstrated as such with a quite disgusting trick with her shoulder blades.The real suspense was going to be how Ami would be able to work her magic on Eliza and Chris. She tried to talk about how secure they should think about breaking up Scout and Twila, and how that would benefit them. Eliza took the bait, but Chris was having none of it. He correctly stated that Ami wasn’t making sense. If he and Eliza stuck with the plan, they were guaranteed the final four, and their competition would be Scout and Twila. Unless Survivor drastically changed, Scout is not going to be a factor in the challenges, as mentioned before. Twila has always been fairly strong, but swimming challenges are difficult, and her performance has sort of waned as of late. Ami tried to work Eliza one more time, and tried to talk up about how it would be a shame if Scout would be in the final two, then tried a little reverse psychology by telling Eliza that “she doesn’t expect any miracles” and went to sleep.

Back at camp, it was clear what Ami’s strategy would be. She would try and win immunity, but if that didn’t work, she would need to depend on Eliza and Julie for their votes. Julie is kind of lost right now, and hasn’t come up with a strategy to get herself out of her predicament, so she is going to do whatever Ami says. Eliza has all of a sudden come up with these feelings of how great she loves Ami, somehow forgetting that neither Twila or Scout have ever written her name down in a vote. She and Ami proceeded like a couple of Bonobo chimps and started grooming each other. Apparently they forgot to tweeze their eyebrows at the spa, so they were getting some time in right away. While they were doing this, Scout asked for help with gathering wood. I was surprised that Ami would try this isolation technique. Any hopes of her trying to get Twila and Scout to vote for Chris were flying out the window with her laziness around camp.

The immunity competition was a shuffleboard game. Always a staple of reality competitions, and always one of my favorites on survivor. Each survivor had five discs that they had to slide across a large table. The table was sort of a relief map of all the Vanuatu islands, and the person who ended up with the most discs touching any part of an island would win immunity. Once a person was on an island, other people could knock them off, but there were several “volcanos” which were places where the discs would rest and make it impossible to knock that particular disc off the islands. Strategy was non-existant early on, until Julie used her knowledge of math and pool to bank a shot off the side of the table and into a volcano. From then on, a lot of people tried to bank their shots in off the side, but more often than not, it failed. Ami was in the running to win, and foil plans of getting rid of her, but on her last shot, she actually knocked a couple of her pieces off, giving Chris the immunity win.

After immunity, Ami once again tried to work Eliza. Twila told Eliza not to second guess their plan, but was not convinced that Eliza was going to go along. Eliza was still going on and on about how much of a sister Ami was to her, once again forgetting who wrote her name down at the last tribal council. When Twila told Chris she wasn’t sure, Chris once again failed to scheme. He said that Eliza would never risk a tie, because then it would go to drawing stones. Now, I am not sure when they changed the Survivor tie procedure, but I thought the first tiebreaker was how many votes a person had first, and then they went to drawing straws among the people who had their names written down. Apparently, that has changed to a process where if there is a tie, the vote will go again, and if it is still tied, the people who were tied would be safe, and the rest of the people would draw stones to see who goes. Slightly confusing, but I guess that explains why Ami was only concerned about the tie and not the win.

At tribal council, Jeff started talking about the woman’s alliance, and how it has fallen apart. He called Scout out for saying that she wanted to have the woman’s alliance go far, but then broke that plan when it suited her. Jeff was like “Hey, there is no problem with that, but that is what happened”. Ami took up that theme, and talked about how she couldn’t believe somebody would just disgustingly lie about the thing that meant the most to her, meaning Twila and her son. Twila had none of that and told Ami to “Grow up. Get over it. You’ve been had. Screw you.” SLAM! I love Twila a little more each day. Now, I know Jeff was simply trying to be an antagonist, but I would be remiss to mention that the person who was using the woman’s alliance only as far as it could take her was Ami. Ami was 100% women, until she needed to get rid of Lisa. Not only that, she got rid of Lisa in a week where it was quite clear that Leann was the weakest and should have gone home. Julie and Twila weren’t there to see that happen, but Scout and Eliza were, and that is the first thing that they should have mentioned when people started talking about using the woman’s alliance only as far as it took you. I’m no fan of Scout, but she never voted for Lisa. Her plans changed after the merge, and you can’t fault her on that.

There was a lot of suspense in the vote, because I thought Eliza might really vote to keep Ami around. Apparently, she finally remembered that Ami might enjoy her company, but did vote against her. When in doubt, you can’t keep a person around that voted for you. Ami was voted out, and it looks like Julie is going to be next. There was a nice moment while they were writing down their votes where Ami showed her true hostility for Scout saying that she saw Scout’s dark side, and that “You’re no part of any rainbow I’ve ever seen.” OUCH. Scout can’t even get any lesbian solidarity. That’s gotta hurt.

Ami’s gone, but I am kind of sad to see her go. She was a mastermind at the scheming game like we haven’t seen since Rob C. rocked the boat during Amazon. If Rob was in her position, I think he would have been able to get himself out of it. Ami was too blinded by her rage for Twila and Scout to realize she had to take a completely different plan of action. She had to make herself seem as small of a threat as possible, but instead showed that she was never going to settle for second place at anybody’s table. I’ll respect her for sticking to her principles. Like she said, it was more important to her than all the money in the world. But it did get her kicked off the game. Ami Cusack, we’ll wait for your return to Playboy once the show is over, and please bring Julie with you.