MONDO EXTRAS

You know...it's only now, as I write this, that it occurs to me that there's a decent argument to be made that if Todd and Amanda are indeed much like Rob and Amber, as has been said over and over, he's the Amber, and she's the Rob, and not just because he won. She's the one who got out James. She's the one who recognized what a threat Peih-Gee was. She's the one who kept immunity away from Peih-Gee when that mattered and Denise when that mattered. Good at challenges, good at thinking of the right strategic move, bad at getting votes: Amanda and Rob. Hopeless in challenges, not much with strategy, but there to scoop up votes at the end: Todd and Amber. Very different delivery and affect, but ultimately? Similar role. I'm just saying.

And now, Jeff asks Todd about the decision to hand over two immunity idols to the person who was then believed (falsely, it turned out) to be an immunity threat already. Sitting behind Todd, James starts mugging and head-shaking, and Jeff promises to get to him later. Todd says, basically, that he gave James two idols because he "needed the strongest person on [his] side." Because...? What exactly is the reason why you need to be allied with the strongest guy, as opposed to trying to get rid of the strongest guy? What was that again? Oh, that's right. There's no explanation, because it doesn't make any sense. And, again, it has nothing to do with why he won. There's not one thing that happened after Todd aligned with James that benefited Todd and had anything to do with James being the strongest guy. And yet, here we are, talking about why that's the strategy. Todd also omits entirely what appeared to be the actual reason for giving James the idol he could have kept at the time, which was that it was so incredibly important to get rid of the all-powerful Jaime. Mentioning that, of course, would create a problem, because show mythology is now that Jaime was a useless idiot, so for Todd to remind us that he was so afraid of her that he gave James two idols as part of a plot to get rid of her would interfere with the show mythology where Todd is a genius. So now we have a different explanation, which is that Todd did this to cement a bond with James, because being in an alliance with the physically strongest guy -- which, again, has nothing to do with why Todd won -- was so important. Furthermore, Todd is obviously full of shit when he claims that he intended from the beginning to befriend James as part of some grand plan he formulated when he was fifteen years old, given that he looked right into the camera at one point and vowed that he was going to get rid of James, along with J-R, as part of "taking out the trash." Since he's making all this up, Todd gets himself in the weeds quickly, so he retreats to another vacuous explanation of his Theory Of Winning, which is all about how you have to be willing to roll the dice and take the risk and it's a game. I can kind of see how he's a prolific message-board enthusiast.