We begin with a look at the many animals of Africa, most of whom played no part in this season of Survivor whatsoever. I do not recall the episode featuring murderous, rampaging deer, nor any horned deerlike things that are not quite deer, which frankly I suspect of being fictional beasts created by the crew by tying cardboard horns to some actual deer, and frankly, shame on you, deer-defiling crew members.

Aw, I missed you guys.

Anyhoo, I do recall one elephant scenario, and then the Let’s Look At The Giant Sheltered Totally Tragical Gorillas incident involving giant sheltered tragical gorillas. But compared to the Africa season I recently watched, during which the players had to stay up all night and tend the fire so they wouldn’t be devoured by real actual things with big teeth, and which was played behind a lion-proof wall of thorns, the idea that there are renegade deer wandering around kind of makes this look like the kiddie pool of African landscapes. I’m just saying.

Anyway, previously on Survivor: As Jeff “No Fat Chicks, Or Skinny Chicks, Or Really Any Chicks” Probst recalls, 36 days ago, 18 yahoos were stranded with nothing but a giant American television production to sustain them. Charlie wore a tie – remember that? Jeff claims that “every move was shadowed by dangerous wild animals,” and then we cut to – you guessed it! – the single elephant scenario, which you’ll recall happened only because a couple of dudes went out in a boat chasing the elephant, who says in the clip, “AH AM BEING SHADOWED BY DANGEROUS AMERICAN DOUCHEBAGS!” “They were as far away from civilization as a person could possibly be,” says Jeff Probst, forgetting that some parts of non-civilization do not include crew trucks. It’s like going to Epcot and pronouncing, “It’s as close to Europe as a person could possibly be.” Because: beer steins!

I swear, the music they use for the next transition sounds exactly like Justin Timberlake making fun of himself on SNL. And then we are reminded how the yellow tribe, Kota, dominated the red tribe, Fang, from the start. (Even though four of the final five are original Fang, so “dominate” is kind of a term of art.) The way Jeff tells the story, after the tribe switch, Crystal and Kenny were able to double-handedly destroy the entire tribe, which doesn’t make a lot of mathematical sense, but hey, Jeff is trying to tell a story here WILL YOU GIVE HIM SOME ROOM? Skipping to later, we are reminded that Crystal and Kenny (although it was actually Sugar and Bob, but same difference, I guess) tricked Randy into using a fake idol, in a move that was not worth much strategically, but that really humiliated Randy, which Randy really deserved.

So now, we are left with Susie, whose decision to go all flipsydoodle originally allowed for the overthrow of Marcus’s “It’s The Great Onion, Charlie Brown” alliance, which had included Charlie, Marcus, Corinne, and some blonde women nobody remembers; Matty, who’s a personal trainer but plays challenges like a corporate trainer, if you get my drift; Sugar, the pin-up model who has gone to Exile Island enough times to build her own wailing wall, and don’t think she didn’t; Bob, the affable older physics teacher with the annoying tendency to do things and then complain about how guilty he feels; and Kenny, the video game professional who started out just trying not to step in big holes in the earth while talking to women, and who now sees himself as some kind of mastermind. Kenny, we are reminded, still has a beef with Bob, because Bob promised (after deceiving Kenny during Corinne’s Fake Idol 2: Counterfeit! fiasco) that he’d give Kenny the next immunity necklace if he won it. Later, Bob reneged on this deal. Probst inexplicably repeats the absurd statement that Sugar played her hidden idol to “save” Matty, despite the fact that this emphatically did not happen, and there were enough votes among Sugar, Bob, Susie, and Matty to boot Crystal, so Matty had no need for the idol and her playing of it made absolutely zero difference.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Who will outwit, outplay, and outlast? And just how hard will that be, considering the people you’re up against?

Credits: Night-vision big cat says, “Stop filming me, nature paparazzi.”

It is Night 36 at Nobag, and can I pause to offer my opinion of how weak-ass that tribe name is, and how much it indicates how unimaginative and stale these people are? Seriously, “Nobag”? You couldn’t come up with a single word that at least sounded like something? You had to get distracted by the idea of spelling words backwards, which is the equivalent of making your jury question, “My question is, I know you are, but I’d just like you to please answer this question: what am I?” Is it the privilege of getting to say “bag” a lot? Sugar immediately begins loudly congratulating herself on the “perfectly executed play of a hidden immunity idol.” You know when I think a hidden immunity idol is perfectly played? WHEN IT CAUSES THE OUTCOME TO CHANGE. Matty got two votes. Crystal got four votes. Dear Sugar: Four is greater than two. It didn’t matter that the two votes did not count because of the idol, when you could have just made them not count because of being only two votes. What that was? Was a superfluous play of a hidden immunity idol. “I used it to save Matty,” Sugar nonsensically repeats. “I, like, literally have never felt so powerful!” From now on, you can just assume I’m thinking, “No you didn’t, you goober” every time she makes this remark or a similar one. (I suppose the only argument is that if people hadn’t known she was going to give Matty the idol, they’d have voted him out, but would they? Susie and Matty were close; she seemed happy to toss Crystal. I think the votes were there, idol or no idol, to vote out Crystal.

There is another round of Kenny being mad about Bob going back on his word, and Bob feeling very self-righteous about his decision to go back on his word, and they both bore the crap out of me during all of this, to be honest. Perhaps it’s the former attorney in me, but when you make “deals,” both sides have to give something. This was nothing but a guilt-ridden promise of a “gift” to begin with, so Kenny really has nothing to enforce. HOWEVER, I think Kenny’s point is that Bob shouldn’t go on about his integrity and being a man of his word when he’s just grubbing to get farther in the game like everybody else. Which is also true. They’re both right, and I don’t care either time.

The next morning is Day 37, and by the fire, Sugar and Bob talk about their new alliance with Matty, and how the three of them have decided they’ll be the final three, because they’re the good people. Or at least that seems to be Sugar’s theory. She takes Kenny off and convinces him that she’s with him, and that they’ll vote out Bob next, or if he wins immunity, they’ll vote out Susie. Kenny believes her, for no reason that I can really fathom. They grab some treemail that includes bundles of colored cloth. The treemail instructs them to use the cloth and some paint to decorate themselves like warriors, which means it’s Make Like A Stereotypical Native In A 1940s Bob Hope Movie time again.

When they all arrive at the challenge all decked out, Jeff quickly says he thinks Bob will take the most guff, because his getup is sort of “Village People.” Get it? Jeff finds it kind of gay, Bob. Deal with that! Jeff Probst accuses you of being kind of gay! Be a man, Bob! What are you, a sissy? Boy, I’m glad Jeff offered up this year’s Manliness Seminar – we were running out of time! When he doesn’t offer it, I forget what real men are like.

It turns out that this challenge involves running along the top of an above-ground maze and then searching around for some puzzle pieces and assembling a puzzle. Need I tell you that Bob wins the challenge? There’s some ground we don’t have to spend a lot of time covering.

Everybody returns to Nobag after the challenge, and Kenny says in an interview that since Bob won, it should be Susie going home next. Matty comes to Kenny and tells him that Susie won’t be told that it’s her until late in the day (read: “Um, don’t be alarmed that she doesn’t seem to think it’s her. It’s toooootally her”) and promises that he’s not a blindside guy. If Matty’s going to write your name down, he’ll tell you! Because he’s honest like that.

For her part, Susie is nervous because she usually coordinates with Matty about voting, and now, he’s not saying anything to her. She correctly reads this as “You are on your own, sister.” Hilariously, Matty pretty much tells her to vote with her heart, which pretty much means “I don’t care how you vote with five people left, one of whom has immunity,” which pretty much means “It was nice knowing you.”

Meanwhile, Matty tries to cement his alliance with Sugar by repeating “you and I you and I” and combining Barney Stinson eyes-to-eyes finger gestures with a sort of Mr. Miyagi “Look eye, always look eye” kind of weird intensity. It’s freaking me out. Matty tells Sugar that he thinks the F3 should be him, her and Kenny (apparently, he hasn’t gotten the “good people” memo, to the degree it includes “the kicking of the other good people’s asses by Bob”), and he says that he’s perfectly okay with voting out Sue. Sugar interviews that her deal with Matty is that Sue goes next, but Kenny is “smart.” She goes on with all this stuff about people being dangerous to keep around, which is ridiculous with five people left. You aren’t keeping anybody around at this stage, except people you can beat in the jury. The idea at this point should be simply who you can beat in front of a jury and possibly who you can beat in a final challenge, if anyone. Since Sugar will never beat anyone in any kind of challenge, she should be looking to get rid of the person most sure to beat her in a vote, which would be, since Bob is immune, Matty. The only sensible choices are Bob and Matty, which is why she’s choosing between Kenny and Susie. OH MY GOD SHE’S DUMB.

Sugar goes on to say that she wants to vote for Susie, because she has no loyalty to Susie. Parse THAT. But she also wants to vote for Kenny, because he’s “a liar” who could potentially manipulate Bob. At what stage, gingersnap? Bob’s not going to vote you out; the jury clearly doesn’t like you. She tells us that whatever happens, she thinks Matty and Bob will do what she says, as between Susie and Kenny. (Those being: the two people least likely to win in front of a jury, other than herself.)

Tribal council! The jury is brought in. When they’re seated, Probst asks Bob about his challenge-winning, and whether he feels like a target. A target of what? There is literally no way Bob can be voted out on the basis of being a target because of challenge victories anymore. This is literally the very last vote that would ever depend on how good you are at challenges – the next vote is all about going to the jury. This is the last vote that would ever have to do with being “a target” for winning challenges, and BOB IS IMMUNE. Think for a minute about what an absurd, inconsequential question that is. It’s basically like, “Bob, do you think that in Fantasyland where you’re not immune, they might vote for you? Or do you think that in Fantasyland, where the next vote had implications for imaginary future challenges, you might be a threat? Or is there something even more hypothetical that I can suggest?”

Bob obligingly says that he does feel like a target.

Jeff orders Matty to praise Bob. Matty calls Bob “money.” Wasn’t Matty like eight years old when Swingers came out? Wasn’t he still on his first million-dollar pile of free cash? Heck, it was ages ago! Asked to describe the depths of his humiliation at Bob’s hands, Kenny chalks it up to outdoorsiness. Yeah, that’s probably it: not enough fishing. How about Susie? Does she feel comfortable? She does not. Jeff asks if he thinks he’s repaired damage from the last 37 days, and he says he hopes so. Jeff brings up the whole “deal with Bob” issue, and Kenny just reiterates that Bob broke the deal. See, my thing with this is, I don’t actually think Kenny is offended that Bob broke his word. I think Kenny just doesn’t want Bob to skate to the end saying he’s a man of his word who plays with integrity when, in fact, he’s just trying to win. Which is fair, I think. Bob argues that he only went back on the deal after he found out Kenny intended to vote him out. In other words, “The thing I agreed to sacrifice because I felt bad for screwing you over, I never intended to sacrifice if it might actually affect me negatively or cost me something.” Which makes your gesture of reconciliation a trifle less meaningful, there, Bob. Bob says that this was the “small print” to which Kenny referred: that of course, he only offered the idol on an “I help you, you help me” basis. I would think reciprocity might be a term you’d want to spell out ahead of time.

There is a ton of smug mugging in this tribal council – especially from Sugar, who specializes in smug mugging, and from the jury, which is signaling all over the place where its allegiances lie, in a way it used to be encouraged not to do. I mean, there comes a point where this affects the game, where the jury’s reactions tell you what to do, you know? Anyway, it’s finally time for the vote, and Bob is (naturally) keeping his immunity. Susie votes for Kenny, saying she has no idea what’s going to happen. Bob votes, Matty votes, Sugar votes, Kenny votes for Susie.

Hey, Kenny got all the votes except his own! That’s not very surprising. The best part is that Charlie and Marcus knuckle-chuck, which is so idiotic that it manages to disappoint me even though I don’t even like them. Guess what, nitwits? He still kicked your asses JUST AS MUCH as he had done five minutes ago. This is no victory for YOU. You did NOTHING! You were useless against him, and this is not going to advance your legend, of which you have none. Furthermore, SHUT UP WITH THE DEMONSTRATIONS, jury! Unless you are Eliza, that is not allowed.

“Another blindside!” Jeff announces. You know, Jeff, we used to call that “voting.” Very rarely did the person being voted off have assurance that he or she was being voted off, and it wasn’t considered a “blindside” every single time. Blindsides were things like Rupert getting voted off when he had NO idea, Edgardo getting voted off when he had NO idea, Nate getting voted off when he had NO idea. I’ll even take Ozzy last season. But this business where every time someone is sitting there twitching but tells you he feels okay and then he gets voted off, that’s a blindside? E-freaking-nough, dude.

So the final four – Bob, Sugar, Susie, Matty – head back to camp. Kenny is good-natured and gracious in defeat, saying simply that he got played, and that he lost despite playing well. What, no vows that you want everyone you didn’t like to lead a miserable life? Did Corinne teach you nothing? Oh, we’ll get to that.

Day 38 dawns at Nobag, and the music suggests that it is time to do yoga. (Careful with that stuff. I horked a muscle in my neck/shoulder doing that more than a week ago, and I have just started feeling normal again.) Matty remarks that Susie looks nervous, and they agree that the only option she has at this point is to win immunity. He’s not flat-out saying that he’s voting with Bob and Sugar against her if she doesn’t, but the sense is sort of there. Matty asks her what she’ll do if she wins immunity herself, and it seems like she’s never really thought about it. She says she guesses she’d vote Bob out.

The treemail sends everyone to Exile Island for…the Walk Of Dead Survivors! Yaaaaaay! Burn them! BUUUUUURN them!

Michelle talks about her surprise at being unable to “mentally overcome” the challenges of…the first day. I swear, when her name came up, I was like, “Mi-who?” Gillian learned that she is too awesome “compromise [her]self.” Well, sure. Paloma says that with nine days of a TV show under her belt, there’s absolutely nothing she can’t handle. (Fate: “HA HA HA!”) Jacquie…was in the game for a while, and I swear, I could not have picked her out of a lineup, unless it was a lineup of only contestants from this season and it did not include Kelly. G.C. is still unhappy about being forced into leadership. But he knows himself better now, he says. And he presumably knows that he’s not so much a camping guy. Kelly is a different person than Jacquie, almost totally.

We get to Ace, and Sugar goes on about how she feels bad about Ace, because someone tricked her into getting rid of him, blah blah blah, best move you ever made, sweetheart, so suck it up. Ace’s reminiscing interview is just awesome – he basically says, “When a truly great person tries to blend in with a bunch of people who are much, much less great than he is, a lot of times, there is a culture clash that occurs that has to do with wildly divergent greatness levels, and I think that’s probably what happened in my case, maybe.” The editors get in their true opinion of him – as they tend to do at this stage – by superimposing his self-aggrandizing speech over footage of him getting hit in the face with a melon. Which caused my Music Stylist’s son Mini-Music Stylist to say, rather wonderfully, “Ha ha, he got hit in the face.” Exactly, Mini. Exactly. Some things translate to people of all ages.

Oh, Dan. You are not a guy who fits in, but I think I would like you. Marcus, for his part, has decided that Survivor is an allegory for life, and that is very, very unfortunate. He’s on about good and bad choices, and you can just tell that he’s loading up two barrels of moralistic suckshot that he’s going to unload into our collective audience ass very soon. Very, very soon. The best part is that he has utterly rewritten history, because he now claims that he encouraged the throwing of the idol into the ocean as a way to make the game “less sneaky,” which is the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve seen since the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Seriously, dumb-ass, we heard you talk to the camera about how it preserved your alliance and we heard you brag about what a master manipulator you were for convincing them all to throw it into the ocean. My guess is that if you did it in order to increase the game’s transparency, you would have mentioned that among your motives. “I forgot the part where I did it because of my superior morality.” Yeah, I bet.

Charlie was impressed with his own patience. All righty.

When they get to Randy, Bob says he liked the fact that Randy spoke his mind. Sugar can only blow a raspberry. Which I sense that Randy deserved, but: enough with the little-girl gestures, pumpkin. This isn’t going to play when you’re a grown-up. Randy claims that he was liked and disliked by equal numbers of people, and he hasn’t felt as close to people in many years as he was to, like, Corinne. AIIIEEEEEEE!

And then we reach Corinne, about whom I have already spoken. She says the saddest, most pathetic thing ever about how the reason she’s so mean is that there’s nothing else to her personality, and she can’t stand the idea of being ordinary. Seriously, she does. I’m not really interpreting very much. Sad, sad.

Crystal says it’s hard to be a professional athlete and basically trip over your own feet right before the finish line. True, that.

Everyone agrees that Kenny was (1) nice; and (2) underestimated by everyone. For his part, the “mastermind” says that he grew in the game, which the MS and I agreed is kind of…true, in the sense that he really seemed comfortable only in the “affable dork” role early on, and it’s probably healthy for him to feel dominant outside a video-game-based reality, even if only temporarily.

And now, everyone’s little identifying tchotchkes are burned in an uninspiring campfire that deprives children’s charities of needed auction income and doesn’t even get a satisfying flame going. Can’t we just burn them in effigy? Do we have to burn valuable little masks and name tags?

When we come back from the post-Tara-Ariano-has-a-snack portion of our show, it’s time for a challenge. This is “building a house of cards,” but the cards are actually rectangular tiles. They’re probably six inches across and eight inches long, or so, and you have to build them into a tower. You win when your tower is ten feet high, or if nobody has a ten-foot tower after 30 minutes, then the highest tower at that point wins.

So here’s the tower-building report: Susie builds steadily if a bit iffily at first. She’s relatively calm and proceeds carefully. Sugar can’t find the right balance of stability and speed of building; she keeps building tall but highly unstable structures that, when they reach a certain height, simply collapse on their own. She also falls for the temptation to arrange them so they stand on end, which indeed makes each level taller, but also makes the entire thing far less stable. Bob absolutely cannot make heads or tails of this challenge, which is shocking. Matty actually builds the most stable tower, I believe, and without the 30-minute limit, if you actually had to get to ten feet, I believe Matty would have won. But Susie is faster, and she’s able to get to about eight feet before Matty does, and his time runs out when he’s a bit behind. I don’t think she could have gotten to ten, and he could have (his method is more supported), but that wasn’t the challenge – the challenge came down to getting the farthest in 30 minutes.

So somewhat shockingly, Susie walks away with the victory. I KNOW! Not exactly what everyone was expecting from the final tribal council. In an interview that speaks to some things that are about to happen, Susie says that she didn’t expect to win. And then Sugar tearfully tells us that she kicked off the wrong person when she took out Kenny, figuring Susie couldn’t win a challenge. Oh, Sugar. Here’s where I am with you right now: cram it.

Back at Nobag, the atmosphere is very sympathetic to Bob, whom everyone seems to understand needs to be voted out, because none of them can beat him with the jury. The other plot point is that Susie cannot stop talking about how surprised she is that she won, and it’s definitely getting on people’s nerves. I think it’s mostly because Bob and Sugar and Matty wanted to go to the final three together in a sort of “worthwhile people, unite!” thing, and now they feel bad. Or, particularly in Matty’s case, they’re kind of glad that Bob didn’t win, and they don’t like to talk about it, because they’re actually really relieved and they feel guilty. Sugar says that Susie is voting for Bob (as she told Matty), and together with the fact that nobody would beat Bob with the jury, they have to vote for Bob. Boo hoo hoo.

As for Susie, I do think she talks way too much, but I don’t think there’s any malice to it; it’s nervous tension. Moreover, in an interesting move, Susie asks Bob how many jury votes he really thinks he’d be likely to get. Bob and everyone else interpret this as crowing and speculating and talking just to talk, but Susie reveals that what she was trying to get at with Bob was that she was willing to take out Sugar. Also, Bob’s reaction to her is very superior and smug, making it clear that her inquiry has been deemed less than worthy, and I find it really off-putting. I sort of wonder whether Bob’s aw-shucksy New England persona is made up more of mannerisms and signifiers like being old and being a teacher and having bow ties than it’s made up of very much that I actually like. I find myself trying to hearken back to moments when I found Bob really warm and likable, and I find that they are…surprisingly few. I recall a lot of bellyaching after the fact when he’d done something to advance his own position and then would complain about somebody talking him into it. But moments when I really liked him? The way I have liked past contestants? I can’t really think of many. And it’s easy to look like a nice person when you’re standing next to Randy. It’s like being the tallest person at the Munchkin Reunion.

Furthermore, he’s got his head so far up his rear that he doesn’t catch on to what Susie is trying to do, which is explore whether it makes sense to, you know, not vote him out.

Of course, Sugar takes it upon herself to lecture Susie about how to behave, and while I understood it when she did it to Corinne, I’m starting to sense that Sugar really likes to put herself in the position of being the Niceness Police, which is a little bit stupid. I was not a Sugar appreciator early on, and while others came around to her more, I really kind of…didn’t, and this is why. There’s a lot of self-righteousness in her, in addition to a lot of drama-queen bullshit that I would rapidly grow tired of.

Speaking of which, Sugar tearfully interviews that she envisioned Bob in the final three, and then she suggests that she and Bob can vote for Matty and create a tie, and Bob’s like, “Ooooooh, FASCINATING IDEA!” Like, did you just think of this? Do they not have counting in physics? It’s only four people; did two-two never come to mind? Once Bob wanders off with this in his head, Sugar tells us (still crying, of course) that she lost her dad recently (you may have heard) and that Bob is like a “father figure” to her. I have seen no evidence that Bob has any interest in being any sort of father figure to Sugar at all, but I guess any port in a storm. “It’s like choosing between my dad and my brother,” she moans. And we say, where we are: “Oh, it’s just so very much not anything like that.” It’s like five minutes ago, this was Death Race, and now it’s Ordinary People.

For all of Sugar’s claims that she’s doing this because she cares about both of them, she doesn’t treat them the same here – she tells Matty that Bob knows he’s going, and she gives him no hint that there’s a tie coming. Meanwhile, Bob knows, so he’s off practicing fire-making, since that’s a common way ties at this stage have been resolved in the past. Bob goes on to tell us that he doesn’t know why Sugar’s being “so kind,” but “she’s been an absolute doll” these last few days.

And now, tribal council. The jury enters. Jeff asks Susie about how it feels to be safe. She says she knew she’d be gone without the win, so she’s glad she got it. Bob explains to Jeff how much of a threat he is because he’s so well-liked. Gosh. Don’t hide your light under a bushel, there, Bob. Matty tells Jeff there wasn’t much “scrambling” at camp.

Jeff now forces everyone through a discussion of the two people they can possibly vote for (or, in Susie’s case, three). Sugar invites everyone into her Theater Of Uncomfortable Family Issues, with the “My father! My brother! My father! My brother!” business. There’s a lot of schmucky relationship talk here, and Bob says that he feels good that he’s such a great father figure to Sugar, and he chokes up talking about himself, which is kind of hilarious, because he can’t even get through his own statement of his own greatness as a father without crying. Tuck that away; we’ll go back to that.

Okay, so now, there is voting. Two votes for Bob, two votes for Matty. Unsurprisingly, Sugar went with her daddy issues over her brother issues, which may be more limited. So now, we have a fire-making challenge, and the entire jury openly celebrates as Bob kicks Matty’s ass, and Matty is sent packing.

So the next time you see the jury, they will be making their choices for what they want to be the lasting impression they leave. In his farewell, Matty says he learned a lot and grew up, and he’s glad for the opportunity.

The next morning is the long-awaited Day 39, and they all mark it off on the tree together. The traditional brunch is left nearby for everyone, so they make their breakfast food. Sugar brags that she played a part in ousting everyone except Marcus who’s on the jury, so she figures they don’t like her. I’m not actually sure that’s why they don’t like her; I suspect the histrionics play a larger role than she understands.

So Bob tells us that he’s building his final “gadget” of the season, which turns out to be a bonfire. Which doesn’t really qualify as a gadget, dude. It qualifies as piling stuff up and setting it on fire. Many college students would be making a lot more money from patents if that were the case. As the MS always says when the hut is burned (though I stepped on his joke earlier), take that, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation!

As the final three walk to tribal council, the jurors preview their idiocy. The highlights: None. Mostly spiteful asses relishing the chance to be spiteful asses some more. Perhaps I’m just getting old.

And now: Spiteful Asses On Parade! We shall begin with opening statements. Susie says all she did was try, try, try. Seriously, you will hear the word “try” a lot from her. She also rattles off everyone’s occupations, just so you know that she knows everyone. She adds that she’s unafraid to stand up next to Bob. She does not mention Sugar. Ouch. Bob says that he played with his heart and that his strategy was to make everyone’s lives better. He thinks he outlasted, not really outwitted or outplayed. And he sucks up to how great they all are, which is pretty amazing, given how much they all suck. As for Sugar, she says she played a perfect social game, which apparently means that she didn’t want to have any friends. She says she played a “pretty good game,” and calls out her own physical weakness. I’ve gotta say: I understand why she gets on people’s nerves. I do.

Oh, man. Jury questions. This is always the time when I doubt the value of humanity the most, in any season. I knew this was going to be a really sucky jury. I sense that they will not let me down.

Charlie goes first. He does okay with Sugar and Susie, asking them why they should get the money when they were rated low by their teammates in the famous peer-ranking business. If it were me, I’d say, “Well, that’s why you should give me the money,” though their answers really just repeat their opening statements. And then Charlie ruins it by asking Bob whether he enjoyed their camp snuggles just a little more than he admits. Oh, Charlie. May you be warm and comfortable this holiday season by the pleasant glow of gay panic.

Crystal stands up and gives Susie a lecture about coattail-riding, which is pretty stupid, given that everyone agrees that Susie’s vote was critical halfway through to, you know, the fate of Crystal, among others. (That’s if coattails existed in Survivor, which they don’t, as I’ve explained a million times before.) Crystal then tells Bob that Sugar “remote-controlled” him strategically, which…I think her analogy failed there, just a little. “He controlled you like…something with a controller!” Crystal asks Bob to think of one thing he did strategy-wise that wasn’t stolen from Sugar, and he pretty much admits there’s nothing. Finally, Crystal asks Sugar why she voted Crystal out, and Sugar gives Crystal a lecture on how to treat people, which I don’t think Crystal really welcomes. You know, there are a couple of these votes that Sugar, with a little more self-awareness, might have gotten. Not enough to win, but at least a couple.

Kenny asks Susie why she deserves the money, and she explains that she, like Kenny, was an underdog. And then Kenny tells Sugar that she was the first girl he trusted and she “scarred” him, and he asks her why, and she weeps all over herself by telling him that she thought he was a threat, which he doesn’t believe. Naturally, he asks Bob about their deal, and Bob repeats that it was all fine until he found out that Kenny was not helping him in return. Kenny tells him it was the wrong answer before sitting down.

Corinne. Oh, Corinne. Can we start with the fact that this dress is not as flattering as you think, because your boobs look fake and far apart like they are calling out “Yoo-hoo!” to each other from opposite sides of your chest, and also you need to find a way to make your eyebrows look less harsh? Okay. Anyhoo. Corinne declares that she has one question for Susie, which will earn her vote with a yes: Are you willing to have your vocal cords removed? Oh, wait, I get it – she’s saying Susie talks a lot! That is a pretty impressive bon mot, Corinne!

Corinne then moves on to Bob, ordering him to insult Sugar for her entertainment. Which he does. And then when he begins to temper the insult slightly, she orders him not to, and he obediently shuts up. So Bob, knowing that Sugar sees him as a father figure, insults her on the command of Corinne, who is a horrible person and everyone knows it, just because he wants the money. And when told not to say anything nice about Sugar to soften the blow, he agrees not to. Don’t kid yourself into thinking Bob is some kind of big-hearted warm guy, y’all. I think that’s just the accent. The guy himself? He’s pretty ordinary when it comes to how you behave. I’ve always been disgusted by people who ask the “I want you to insult [so-and-so]” question at tribal council, but I’m sort of equally put off by people who actually do it. He was going to get Corinne’s vote anyway, and he knew it. He could have just said, “You know, I’ve tried to play the game a certain way, and I’m going to gamble that you’ll understand if I decide not to go down this road. I respect everybody I played with.” She still would have voted for him; it was just unnecessary.

And then, of course, there is Sugar. Corinne says she’s an unemployed leech, and then goes on about how she’d love to give Sugar a fistful of antidepressants, “so it would seem a little more sincere when you’re crying about your dead father.” The INSTANT Corinne says “dead father,” Sugar’s eyes immediately fill with tears, and she flips Corinne off, which is about one percent of the ass-whupping Corinne deserves. No matter how many times I watch that, I still sort of can’t believe Corinne really did it, or that months later, she was so proud of having done it, but she did, and she was. It is, hands down, the worst thing I’ve ever seen anybody do on this show. Not the adorably worst thing, just the worst thing. Not even the asshole Fairplay business was intentionally done for no reason but to hurt people. Whatever annoyance Corinne feels Sugar caused her, whatever annoyance all the crying caused her, however much of a spoiled brat Sugar is, how do you convince yourself that it’s a proportional response to torment her about the death of her father? Going from “she annoyed me with all her crying” to “and so I told her she was a big baby” is juvenile, but…it’s sane. Going from “she annoyed me with all her crying” to “and so I told her to fuck off about her father who just died” borders on kind of…not right in the head. People who actually understand emotion and know how to calibrate it properly would never believe that being annoying and having your grief over a recently deceased family member mocked have anything to do with each other. It’s really the act of someone who sort of vaguely understands that having your father die feels bad, and knows that having someone get on your nerves feels bad, so it’s kind of bad-for-bad, and it’s somehow playing fair. Watching it again, I find Corinne really…creepy. I think that’s not a well person. Among other things, the later arguments I heard that maybe she didn’t believe Sugar’s father was really dead? Let me tell you: I could catch someone with a book called 25 Ways To Pretend Your Father Is Dead, and I still wouldn’t openly mock her grief, because if you happen to be wrong? You’re going to hell, just for that. The consequences of being wrong are too great, so even if Corinne didn’t entirely believe it was real grief, it’s still unconscionable.

Anyway, Marcus gets up and informs Susie that he’s shocked – SHOCKED – at the fact that she shed her responsibility to be a role model “in the biggest game of all, and that’s life”. No question, just, “My question is: [shakes finger].” He also tells Sugar he supposes her dad actually died, probably – to which she gives a pained nod – and he wants to know whether she’d use part of the money to honor her dad, the way HE would have done for HIS deceased relative. Seriously, this guy has gone from zero to tool faster than I’ve ever seen in my life. I always found him kind of an earnest little weenie, but this thundering moralistic fuckwit business is a new routine for him. Sugar says she’d give money to fight lung cancer, since that’s what her father died from. The fact that two people have seen fit to make their questions to her variations on, “I doubt the sincerity of your grief about your father,” is how you can tell how weird people get when they’re off together waiting for this moment. Finally, Marcus wants Bob to take responsibility for one thing he did, and Bob says he can’t really name anything he was responsible for, because everyone else did great making the decisions for him. Special bulletin: Only boys can get away with that answer. Girls would be burned alive for that answer.

And now, it’s time for Randy. He wants to know why Susie once said she felt sorry for him, and he throws in a little insult about whether she knows what “elaborate” means. If you aren’t quick enough to catch the depth of Randy’s wit there, Susie was, as her bio says, “born into a Mexican immigrant family of crop field workers.” So Randy isn’t sure she speaks English. (Combine this with Sugar’s emphatic statement when voting him out that Randy was a racist, and I think you can start to come up with one of the reasons he’s so despised beyond what the show chose to dwell upon.) Susie ignores the slight and answers the question in a way I found very appealing, saying (quite correctly) that anyone who relates to people the way he does is probably really unhappy, so she felt bad about that. He may not like it, but…it’s the truth, and she’s not wrong in her supposition.

Randy then wants Sugar to apologize for laughing hysterically when he played the fake idol. Knowing she’s not going to get his vote (which she absolutely never was), Sugar pretty much tells him to get bent. “You were a jerk,” she says. He acts incredulous, apparently not having realized that making it very obvious that he hated her guts would make her unlikely to suck up to him at this moment. Randy asks Bob about the fake idol, and Bob gives an utterly bullshit answer about how he somehow didn’t really mean for that to happen – even though Sugar carefully explained that it was what was going to happen.

Matty goes last, and he asks Susie to explain why she’s most deserving. She says she didn’t like Sugar’s behavior regarding Randy, and she also says she doesn’t think Bob was very gracious to her after she won immunity at F4. It’s not the most vicious calling out I’ve ever heard. Matty asks Sugar to reveal something evil that she did, and she goes with “I broke Kenny’s heart, I feel.” Matty’s like, “WHAT? THAT’S IT?” I don’t know what he thought she was going to say, but it sort of seems to me like she answered the question. It disappoints me, because Matty is really condescending and shitty to her, like, “WHATEVER, Sugar,” like he caught the disease in one day spent with this jury. You can certainly hate Sugar, but she answered that question, she answered it with something she actually thinks she did wrong, she answered it with something she actually feels guilty about…what was she supposed to say? My sense is that for a lot of these people, nothing she said was going to be right. And then Matty asks Bob for reasons why Sugar and Susie might be more deserving, and he just says they aren’t. Somehow, Matty doesn’t say, “WHAT? THAT’S IT?”

And now, we have finally reached the time of voting. Marcus votes. Matty votes for Susie, citing their friendship. Crystal votes. Corinne votes for Bob. Charlie votes, Randy votes, and Kenny agonizes and agonizes and agonizes, and then finally votes.

Naturally, Jeff kidnaps the votes, and then we flash forward, and finally, we have reached the L.A. Finale. Susie and Bob in modern times look about as you’d expect – themselves, but gussied up. Sugar, on the other hand, looks very fancy, as befits a pin-up model. You can definitely believe she is a pin-up model.

The big surprise when the votes are read is not that Sugar receives zero votes, nor is it really that Bob doesn’t get every single vote as I originally suspected he might. The big surprise is that Susie receives three votes, and Bob only wins by one. I find this conclusion profoundly unsatisfying, as I found Bob’s behavior a lot less enjoyable than a lot of people did, and I think he got sort of a lot of mileage out of seeming old and sucking up a lot. I feel about this kind of like I did…Chris winning Vanuatu, where it was like, “Eh. Okay. I guess?” I have no hate for Bob, but I have no love for Bob, either.

All in all, a very disappointing season, mostly because of a very poorly chosen cast. There was really nobody here to root for, from the beginning. For whom would you ever have rooted, the way you could root for Earl or Yul (and his friends) or Ian or (in her first season) Stephenie or somebody like that? Bob was probably the least objectionable winner this finale could have produced, but in many other season’s, he’d have been the bossy, full-of-himself guy who wanted to get ahead and then complain about the pain he suffered from having to put himself above others. It just wasn’t a good cast, and that makes for a poor season.

I can only hope Brazil will restore my faith.