A review of last night's "Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains" coming up just as soon as I hide your machete... Well, that was much more fun than last week, I thought.
Obviously, some of that came from watching the Heroes completely own the Villains at the sumo challenge from Palau. (This makes sense, of course, since the Heroes dramatically out-muscle and out-tough the Villains, and it was a completely solo contest; their downfall in previous challenges came whenever they had to think and/or work as a group.) Tom once again was the man, Colby got to beat Boston Rob after Rob took him to school in another wrestling-type challenge in All-Stars, people got muddy but no one got seriously injured, and a good time was had by all (on one side at least).
But what made the episode click was how much time we spent in each camp, and how much of that was spent on strategery rather than people yelling at each other. Ordinarily, episodes with only one challenge tend to fall flat, but the extra time saved this week gave us a lot of good stuff from both camps, including a very necessary extended stay at the Villains camp to see how alliances are forming and fracturing. (Since the first two episodes were dominated by the Heroes' bickering, some people like Randy had barely spoken at all, and some people like Tyson and Courtney have still barely done or said anything.) We got strategy, we got cattiness (Jerri and Parvati hating on each other, Jerri primarily because Parvati won the million bucks playing the game Jerri thought she was playing in Australia) and we got a touch of craziness (Coach quoting Martin Luther King on the way to Tribal).
I'm disappointed that Parvati seems to be taking her alliance with Russell seriously, since it was implied in the first episode that she was just playing along to calm his crazy ass down. But I did like that everyone at Tribal Council laughed off the missing machete, suggesting that Russell's latest "brilliant" scheme to destabilize things came for naught, even though he's wisely latched onto the most socially powerful person on his team.
And it's because Parvati is apparently so charming in person, and because she's friends with the leaders of the dominant alliance on the other team, that the Villains made a serious, serious error in not voting her out last night. Boston Rob should be smarter than that, especially given his talking head at the start of the show about the dangers of letting couples stay together. Still a lot of season left, but it's very easy to imagine a circumstance where the final six are Parvati, Russell, Danielle, Cirie, Amanda and one of the guys from their alliance. Opportunities to vote out power players don't come around that often, and it's not like Parvati is so great at challenges or at camp that they would have been weakening the tribe by sending her home.
This ep has me convinced to stick with the season a bit longer, but it's going to require some time-juggling issues, since it'll be up against both the NBC comedies and, for the next two weeks, an "American Idol" results show. So it may be one of those things I don't get to until much later in the day on Friday, or even on a weekend. We'll see how it goes.
What did everybody else think?