It's a sad day, sportsfans. Gary Hawkeboom, landscaper who is absolutely not under any circumstances involved in football in any way, has been voted off Survivor.
Gary's team, the Yahtzee Yaks found themselves being decimated by their superior opponents, the Nukem Nukes. As the game wound down, the Yaks found themselves down by so many points that a Nuke victory seemed certain. The plucky underdogs were facing defeat and relegation.
But Gary Hogehawk, the Yaks' star quarterback staged a remarkable comeback. In the last quarter of the game he scored some amazing touchdowns that kept him alive. First, the hidden immunity idol, which shocked even his teammates. Then Gary helped take down Jamie 'Grunt' Newton, the Nukes' cocky young starter who thought he was way better than he actually was.
The fans' imagination was captured. Could Hawkehoag actually achieve a miracle comeback and win the game?
Sadly it was not to be. Gary's attempts to convince the other players to send Stephenie 'Eyebrows' LaGrossa back to the dressing room failed. The Boom's last Hail Mary pass missed the touchdown line and he was tackled and sent off. Rival player, Judd 'The Gorilla' Sergeant, celebrated by eating the football and throwing up in his helmet.
With their star quarterback gone, the Yaks' only hope for winning the Survivor Superbowl and lifting...whatever the hell kind of trophy they lift in American football rests with Danni 'Bones' Boatwright.
And that's the extent of my American football knowledge so the painful sport metaphors end here. Well, one more: Gary was like the Ghanaian soccer team. He was expected to go home weeks ago but he pulled off some surprise victories. Unfortunately in real life, underdog tales rarely go all the way and he was crushed by a group of people he could not hope to compete against. The Axis of Evil is like Brazil, only with none of the skill, grace and charm. Judd however does rival Brazil in size while Steph consumes enough food to feed the country's people.
Poor Gary. One of the things I loved most about him was his fighting spirit. He always approached people and tried to convince them that voting someone else off would be in their best interests. He was always looking for angles, trying to determine the person most likely to switch alliances.
This week it was Lydia to whom a stench of discontent and simmering resentment clung like a tiny, fishy stink-cloud. The rest of the Axis of Evil finally noticed that Lydia existed when they saw her and Gary chatting away. After determining that this woman was not a tourist who had wandered off from a guided tour of the pyramids but was in fact one of their allies, the Axis discussed what this meant.
"Gary's trying to get Lydia in bed with him," Judd informed his alliance-mates gravely, "he's working her so hard." As far as imagery goes, the thought of Gary working Lydia hard in bed is marginally less scarring than the naked Judd of last week but Judd still needs to stop doing and saying things that make me reach for the brain bleach.
Lydia did not immediately inform Steph of Gary's blasphemous suggestion to vote out the Great and High Stephenie, blessings upon her, leading me to wonder for the first time whether she was not Steph's trained monkey. It seems that Lydia has realised she is less important to the Axis than firewood and that freakin' Cindy is somehow higher on the totem pole than her.
Well, that and Lydia is just as sick of Steph as I am. She made her dislike abundantly clear in a pot-smashing RC where she pointedly smashed all of Steph's pots.
Our Blessed Lady Steph, praise be, took this about as well as any god-on-earth would take a lowly mortal's unnatural defiance. She moaned about the betrayal non-stop, making special mention of how it wasn't a big deal to her as if that negated the moaning.
She then made the magnanimous gesture of telling Lydia that she wasn't going to take Lydia's terrible betrayal personally. This was immediately followed by a confessional where she said that it was totally personal and she would smite the blasphemer soon enough.
Good thing Revered Steph, blessed be her name, is a god or else I might think she had a sense of entitlement to rival Rupert's. Can you imagine someone getting angry because someone else targeted her in a competition? But Steph is an immortal deity, so how can us mere mortals question her godly wisdom in feeling wrath towards someone who dares compete in a competition.
Ooh, I almost forgot the best part of Steph's persecution complex - when she dismissed any dislike of her as jealousy. Ah yes, the 'dismissing any criticism of you as jealousy' thing. If ever there was a mark of pigheaded stupidity in a person.
(Also a mark of stupidity, albeit the regular kind rather than the pigheaded kind: answering Sanskrit for a question about Mayan languages.)
Weirdly, Lydia's own bitchfest against Steph made her even more unlikeable rather than less. In complaining about how Steph always gets to eat, she certainly had a point. Steph is getting to be like that plant in The Little Shop Of Horrors, never satisfied and always shouting "Feed me, Seymour!"
I could almost understand it if she looked ready to keel over like Danni does but she looks fine. It's like she's annoyed because she expected one of the perks of being the Greatest Survivor Ever To Walk The Earth (or whatever Jeff's always calling her) is that she gets fed three times a day.
But to have Lydia of all people, probably the person who's done the least and benefited the most from Steph's rule, point it out just makes her look bad. Where were your complaints about Steph when you were dancing for her like a jester? Where were your complaints when you were gleefully telling her of possible plans to vote against her? Where were these complaints when you were running your every move by her whenever someone approached you for your vote?
This is the first original thought Lydia has expressed since she built a trap to catch fish way back in the Paleolithic era when the season began, and it too has the stink of entitlement all over it. Lydia was annoyed because Steph has eaten so many rewards and she wanted to let other people (ie Lydia) eat food. Wasn't Lydia one of the ones who sat out the first individual IC and ate instead? I'm pretty sure I saw her head peaking over the low table.
Steph may be a Food Zombie, craving meals instead of brains, but she earned most of the food rewards. She threw the Mayan launcher thingie close enough to the target to win a burger (which, and I can't believe I'm being charitable to Steph, she shared with Gary when she sat with Judd) and she was part of the winning team in last week's squelchy mudfest.
Lydia on the other hand is useless at challenges and thus does not deserve to get the rewards. If she hadn't gotten herself sucked into the mud in a symbolic representation of her entire sucky existence, it would have been her team that would have won the spa reward and all related foodstuffs.
Here's a crazy thought, Lydia. You want food? Try earning it.
Now Lydia is on Steph's hitlist because she was stupid enough to speak out instead of plot in secret like normal people. Steph, like everyone else in the world, is wondering how the hell Lydia managed to make it so far and why she isn't gone yet. See, that's the problem with being a trained monkey. If your only purpose is entertainment, you lose all value when you get all surly and stop being funny and you eventually get sent to the SPCA or the zoo or one of
Cindy's monkey cruises. Or something. I kinda lost control of the metaphor.
Anyway, point is Lydia sucks. Steph sucks too but in a different way.
Taking note of the suckiness of both these ladies and the budding animosity between them, Gary tried to turn one against the other. He tried to get Lydia, as well as Rafe and Cindy, on his side against Steph. Since Gary is gone and Steph is not, we all know how that worked out.
More strategic brilliance from Cindy, Lydia and Rafe.
Fools. All of them. They're all aware that Steph's in control of the game and they talk and talk about how dangerous it is to let her keep control and how they have to do something before it's too late. But they never do a damn thing. They always vote the way Steph wants them to, even with their knowledge. It's worse somehow that they're clearly smart enough to recognise how Steph had made all of them her bitches but that they're too chickenshit to do anything about it.
It's Boston Rob all over again, only with a New Jersey accent instead of a Boston accent.
OK, so I just called Rafe an idiot. Since I do love him, I'll try to plaster over this strategic idiocy by pointing out how much I love that he's the one going on immunity runs and either winning or coming second at all the challenges.
Once again he donned the immunity necklace after an IC where Jeff told them the story of ancient Mayan mythology's version of Brooke Logan. Ixchel was a goddess who had lots and lots of affairs and slutted around the Mayan cosmological arena.
The survivors then had to test how much they remembered of this Ancient Mayan soap opera by answering questions and getting either hankies for the right answer or sticks for wrong answers. You'll be shocked to know that Mr "I don't have ADD" got a load of sticks because during the story he was must have gotten distracted by a bug. Or a cloud. Or his hand.
For some reason I was convinced Judd might get votes during TC despite all evidence to the contrary. Such is the power of wishful thinking that I ignored every cue the show dropped that Gary was the one who was going home. Before he left, he did manage one good zinger against Judd. The gorilla was as usual babbling about how he'd never lied and was pure as the driven snow (the only truthful thing he said was that he was a bad liar) and hypocritically called out Gary for lying while pretending to be honest.
I was momentarily confused and wondered whether Gary was losing his mind when he babbled some nonsensical thing about an idol on the ground but then he clarified about how Judd had lied to everyone that the itsy bitsy immunity idol was on the ground when it was really in a tree. Hee, I'd forgotten about that. In one fell swoop, Gary made Judd look like a clueless moron. Not that it's hard to do, but Gary gets points anyway.
Sigh. Then, just as my Gary love was at an all-time high, they voted him off. Even Danni wrote his name down. Et tu, Danni? Gary's own vote was just as perplexing though - he voted for Cindy, just as he'd done to equally pointless effect at some or other TC. He really doesn't like her, does he?
His closing statement, where he talked about his ridiculous and unnecessary yet hilariously mockable lie, just made me miss him even more. Goodbye, Gary Hogeboom, footballer who pretended to be a landscaper. You will be missed, silly lies and all.