MONDO EXTRAS

Jeff asks Steph if she thought she could win, given the sourness of at least Judd, Jamie, and Cindy, all of whom blamed Steph for booting them. Steph says she realized somewhere along the line that her "second chance" status alone made it very unlikely that anyone was going to vote for her. This, she realized, was one of the reasons it was good strategy for other people to take her to the end. She also points out again, quite correctly, that she and Rafe played precisely the same game, and that it's kind of weird that Rafe might have won and she definitely wouldn't have. It's interesting that in all of his abstract moralizing, Rafe has managed to avoid this fact -- that he basically managed to avoid responsibility in anyone's eyes for the things he did out of self-interest, because he deflected the blame onto Steph. It's a perfectly good strategy -- it's the Amber strategy, really -- but it doesn't exactly make you a person of unblemished virtue so much as a very lucky and artful dodger.

Jeff now brings up the one "meta" thing we're going to talk about this evening, which is the "starstruck" factor that entered the game as a result of people who were already famous being allowed into the picture. Amy, as Jeff points out, is already shaking her head, since this didn't affect her so much. Cindy, on the other hand, apparently told Jeff at one of the challenges that Steph was part of the reason she was on the show. Cindy, whose lips are not so bee-stung as Danni's but are much, much too shiny, like they're slicked with a half a pot of petroleum jelly, says that while she wasn't "starstruck," she was "inspired." Boy, there's a strong distinction. "I don't think of her as a celebrity; just my inspiration." Cindy comes off like a bit of an oddball here, I have to admit, and not for the last time this hour. She says that she saw "similarities" between herself and Stephenie (which similarities I totally do not see, incidentally, whatever the flaws of both of them may be), figuring that if Steph could do it (and by "do it," I guess she means "come in seventh"), she could too. People cheer, but it's not clear what about this would logically inspire cheering.