Back at camp after tribal council, Abi is furious at Mike for voting for her. Imagine that. Abi losing her temper. Little does she know Skupin voted with her alliance and Penner was the one who voted for her. He claims it was because he wasn't told about plan B. I must of missed the part where Penner joined Abi's alliance.
In an enormously generous gesture Malcolm forgives Lisa. I'm not sure what that was about but I'm pretty sure he has something up his sleeve with that move. Penner also tries to repair the bridge that Lisa burned with him by playing amateur psychologist. This brings Lisa to tears but she's still not ready to get on board team Penner.
The reward challenge is once again done in teams. Abi sits out yet another challenge when she isn't picked by either team, which makes her ineligible for the reward. This irks me a little. First of all, I've never liked post merge reward challenges being done in teams. I think they should do like they did in the early days and let them all be individual challenges after the merge. If they want to allow the winner to bring three people along, I have no problem with that. It bothers me even more when a player has no shot at winning a reward. I believe every player who comes to a challenge should be given a chance to win. I am certainly not a fan of Abi's, but fair is fair. After all, how many rewards did she get to share in, when she sat out challenges prior to the merge? At the very least they should of done as they've done in the past when they've had an odd number of players and allowed her to pick a side to root for. Then if her team won she got to go on reward.
Ok, time for me to get off my soap box and describe the actual challenge. Since they did a school yard pick, instead of drawing for teams, it's no surprise when the teams are divided by alliances with Skupin, Pete, Artis, and Lisa on one team and Penner, Denise, Malcolm, and Carter on the other team. In the challenge each person has to go through an short obstacle course, then dig up a sack of balls, then shoot the balls into a basket once all four sacks are retrieved. The first runners are Penner and Skupin. Although the mud pit where the balls are buried is meant to have each sack of balls dug up by each runner, Penner uses the strategy of digging all the sacks up at once. Not sure how that saves time, but his teams ends up taking a big lead and have only 3 balls left before the Tandang has all their sacks untied. Tandang makes a strong comeback when Kalabaw has trouble getting their last ball in, but it's not enough. Team Penner prevails and gets to go to a local village and act as Survivor ambassadors to give away school supplies. They also get to partake in a feast prepared by villagers. Malcolm especially becomes very sentimental and questions his decision to stop teaching poor kids in Micronesia over slinging drinks for girls.
Back at camp Abi continues her quest to overtake Russell Hantz in having the worst social game in Survivor history by berating Lisa for leaking information. Great way to win her back over. While she's doing this it's not too hard to imagine Pete and Artis wanting to tape her mouth shut. Due to this, Lisa considers defecting but is still tempted by the dark side. Pete on the other hand realizes he finally needs to make Mike feel comfortable. Probably should of been doing that before the fourth week of the game. Even if you want somebody out, you should never ostracize them because you never know when you might need them. That's why God invented blindsides.
The immunity challenge is an interesting spin on past balancing challenges. For this one each player has a paddle with six holes on the surface that one must slide balls down a ramp connected to the paddle and into the holes. The challenge turns out to be complete blowout with only Mike and Pete getting any balls in their holes. This immunity challenge is held on day 23 and just as it was in basketball, that number turns out to be very good for a guy named Michael. Skupin wins the challenge by a wide margin and is safe at tonight's vote. Now the question is will he stay loyal to Tandang or finally flip over to Kalabaw.
While he's pondering which way to go, Abi doesn't help her cause much when she accidentally deflects a coconut off a tree right at Skupins noggin. So even when he manages to get through an episode without hurting himself, Skupin still gets knocked around. This has to be the most accident prone guy on the planet. In case you didn't know, he was actually in a plane crash since the first time he played Survivor.
Jonathon is working on Lisa some more by appealing to her sense of morals by informing her that the audience isn't going to like her aligning with the bad guys. This seems like a desperate play since I've never seen too many players who managed their game play by what they thought the audience wanted. As long as America doesn't get a vote it will probably always be that way. Not surprisingly, Lisa keeps on saying that she wants to be loyal to Tandang. I think what she really means to say though, is that she wants to be sitting next to people everyone else hates at the final tribal council. Skupin on the other hand is itching to flip. The good thing for Kalabaw is at this point they only need one of them to flip as long as Penner doesn't make another bonehead vote.
Kalabaw decides to target Artis because they know Abi will never give him the idol. They try their best to enlist Lisa and Skupin in the plan which I thought was a mistake, especially with Lisa's loose lips. If I were them I would of went to them and said "hey, we can't tell you who we're voting for, but all you have to do is not vote with the fearsome threesome." That way it would be a vote of 3 to 4. Of course if only one of them flipped it would come down to a tie, but as long as one person flipped, that person could vote with Kalabaw on the revote.
At tribal council it ends up coming down to Penner and Artis, although Artis seems to be oblivious to this. Luckily for Penner he decides to vote along with his alliance this week and Artis is sent home. The four votes from Tandang for Penner does put him within striking distance of breaking Ozzy's record of most votes cast against a player. He's already overtaken Russell Hantz's and now needs only three more votes against him to break Ozzy's record of 27.
I was sure that Lisa and Skupin would vote together so when I saw four votes for Penner I was certain he was a goner. However Skupin decides to finally vote against Tandang. Judging by the furious look Abi gives Lisa after the vote, she is once again misjudging on how Skupin voted. Looking back, all the air time that Artis got this week should of been a clue to his departure. I think Artis got more air time this week then every other episode of the season put together.
The episode ends with a shot of an elated RC and Jeff Kent do his best to ignore her. You can see more of this behavior if you watch the Ponderosa videos. There's one scene where they are eating and RC is desperately trying to get Kent's attention and he's got his back almost turned completely towards her. I don't know if RC really is that annoying or if he's just trying to make sure his wife doesn't get jealous.
NEXT WEEK ON SURVIVOR! Will an alliance hold up for two whole weeks in a row? If Kalabaw manages to do that the remaining Tandang could be in trouble. The most interesting scenario is if Abi or Pete, and especially Pete win immunity. That could put Lisa in serious danger.
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