MONDO EXTRAS

Let me pause for a moment and just say one thing: I don't particularly dislike Todd, except when he's going on about what a genius he is and refusing to give credit to anyone else for anything. (You'll notice that he does a lot of "Part of my strategy was my brilliant choice to put Amanda in my alliance," but not a lot of "I won in part because of Amanda's great play.") Aside from being a glory hog, he's probably a decent kid and a lot of fun at parties. My objection is to the insane way this season has developed, such that we never talk about why Todd actually won -- mostly a matter of discussing how everyone else methodically knocked himself or herself out of the game with missed chances, leaving a guy standing who probably wasn't very many people's choice for winner and should have been really easy to get rid of. Instead, we're talking about Pretend China Season, and that irks me, because so little was interesting about this season that I wish we could focus on the things that really happened. Okay. Anyway.

Jeff has more questions for Todd, asking him about his strategy of making an alliance with Amanda on the first day. Todd's only explanation for choosing Amanda, incidentally, is that they "had some sort of connection." He says that he proposed an alliance to her, which she took him up on a few days later. He then explains that he decided he needed Courtney in his alliance, because she was smaller than he was, so if they lost a challenge, she would be voted off and he wouldn't, because he wouldn't be the smallest. OH MY GOD THAT MAKES NO SENSE. That's a reason you'd hope she'd be on your tribe at the very beginning, I suppose, and it might be a reason you wouldn't pick her to vote her out the first time around, but it's not a reason you'd want her in your alliance. Quite the opposite. Courtney's the last person you'd logically pick for one of your close allies if your hope is that she's the easy boot in the event your team loses immunity. This makes no sense, it doesn't appear to be a theory Todd had an opportunity to put into practice nor a theory he actually put into practice, and I don't understand why we're talking about this instead of about things that really happened. I mean, the reason Todd's saying this is that the other option -- "Courtney wound up in my alliance because she was on my original tribe and wasn't Jean-Robert or James" -- kind of makes it sound like some of this fell in Todd's lap. Which it did, but we're not talking about that.