MONDO EXTRAS

The caption reminds us that we're in "New York City," in case we think that the audience has been brought to Panama. All sixteen contestants are here, and Jeff kicks things off by congratulating Aras 2.0 again. Aras 2.0, as it happens, is almost dressed the way I most like men to dress: a white T-shirt with an earth-toned snuggly-looking thing over it, but the snuggly-looking thing is actually a hoodie with a drawstring at the neck, so...no. If that were just a sweater, he'd look hot. As it is, I am distracted by wanting to pull the string back and forth in opposite directions while making funny "floop...fleep...floop...fleep" noises. Jeff says that Aras will soon receive a check for a million bucks, and adds that he has "one piece of advice: pay your taxes." Seriously, dude. I'm glad Jeff said that, because how ridiculous is that shit? Court is not tribal council, you dip. You're not going to convince a judge to lessen your sentence by being the one who can make fire, and nobody's going to believe, when you're in the pokey, that you meant for it to turn out that way.

Jeff asks about the rivalry between Aras and Terry. Aras 2.0 says that the rivalry was very important, because Terry was "an awesome competitor" who beat him most of the time and pushed him to do better. Terry is wearing a bright pink shirt, by the way. That is...an interesting choice. Aras 2.0 also points out that Terry winning immunity so many times basically protected him from being voted out, because any week that Terry hadn't won immunity, Aras's team would have voted for Terry, and Terry would have gotten his crew (if there were any of them left) to vote out Aras. As it was, Aras's team was forced to leave Terry alone, thus leaving the HII alone and denying Terry his opportunity to boot a person of his choosing, as he could have done if he had ever lost immunity. Gee, I think I remember someone saying something very much like that. Jeff drives home the point to Terry that the way he played the game really helped Aras win. Everyone laughs, because it's true, and nothing is funnier than watching somebody else's stupidity pointed out. A Survivor reunion is much like a high-school reunion where you don't have to be amazing or anything, you just don't want to be the one with the really bad boob job about whom everyone else says, "What the hell happened there?" On this show, nobody wants to be the one who most stupidly threw away the game, so everyone's up for laughing heartily at how much somebody else did.