Ready? Go! Steph racks herself on the balance beam. Her sizable anti-cheering section hoots and takes a large swig of beer. Jamie scoots along the beam on his crotch, which Jeff comments does not look comfortable. If it keeps him from reproducing, of course, I won't think it's entirely bad. Bobby Jon falls off, and Judd hits the ground with his foot. Ultimately, Steph is the first to finish, followed by Gary, Jamie, and Rafe. So those four will move on to the second round. In round two, Gary never seems to quite get the hang of it, while Rafe does very well. Ultimately, it's Rafe and Jamie making it through to the last round. In the final, Jamie scoots right across the rope bridge, while Rafe has much more trouble. Ultimately, Rafe performs a majestic swan flip-dive over one of the ropes, first dunking his head and then dumping his entire self in the water, while the team -- which clearly loves Rafe in spite of, or even because of, what a doofus he is -- tries not to giggle too hard on the sideline. Technically, Rafe could climb up a ladder and get back on the bridge, but he doesn't have nearly enough time, and we know how Rafe does on ladders getting up out of the water. So Jamie wins immunity -- boooo! Man, I don't like the way that necklace looks on him. Jeff sends everyone back to camp to wait for tribal council.
Definitely animatronic spider.
Back at Camp No-Fun on Day 24, nobody is entirely happy but immune old Jamie. Speaking of whom, he and Steph have a chat in which Jamie reiterates that he wants to vote out Gary, because Gary is gunning for Jamie, as Gary "confessed" earlier. This is, like, the saddest thing ever. This is what you get for failing to enunciate, people. Steph, not really caring about who gets voted out between Gary and Bobby Jon, agrees. I think one of the things she's done right as queen of this little cabal is that she doesn't throw her weight around too much just for the hell of it. She isn't insisting on a particular boot order, and she's willing to let Jamie have his way, even though she's clearly fairly dubious about what he told her about Gary. She interviews that, actually, she was considering getting rid of Jamie, but the immunity situation obviously killed that possibility.
So now, Steph, Rafe, Judd, and Jamie all have a chat in which they agree that the Gary boot will go forward. Steph does express some concern that it's all seeming "too easy." I think that's what I'd be thinking, too. I've always said that a properly played season is really boring, because the way you play properly is to get a group together and then not have anything change, and that's pretty much what they've done. So she's doing it exactly right, and I'm about to doze off. Steph tells us that the Gary ouster makes sense both because Gary is a threat in challenges and because he's "always in game mode." Gary interviews that he knows it could be him tonight, and then we watch him go and talk to Steph. She fibs that it's Bobby Jon going, not Gary. But Gary tells us that he knows there's no way to know whether this is true or not. "That tells me that I need that idol," he says. And then...he goes off to look.













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