Product integration is back, baby, and whoever works on the advertising team at CBS is getting a huge promotion after this episode. We’ve had the Charmin toilet, the Home Depot tool kit, and the Sprint call from home, but I think this Applebee’s reward will go down in history as the time when a sponsored challenge might have had the biggest impact on the game. I remember when Dreamz stole a car from Yau-Man, but I can’t tell you what kind of car it was. I will never forget that Liz nearly lost her mind because she didn’t get a Bourbon Burger from Applebee’s. (Fun fact: I have never been to Applebee’s.)
At the start of the episode, everyone is gunning for Q because they are suddenly sane people playing a rational game, and that doesn’t sound like this cast at all. That is everyone except Maria, who approaches Q on the beach after the vote to make sure that he’s doing okay. She says that she sees him as a number and would like to keep voting with him. Maria also goes so far as to say she trusts Q. She trusts Q?! His game may be so disassembled at this point that she thinks he has no choice but to vote for him, but trusting Q is absolutely stupid.
The problem with Q is that he is far too volatile a player for her to trust. It’s like Maria needs to open the entrance to a cave to win the game. She could dig, but that would take too long and isn’t very glamorous for her (god, I hate this word) resume. Or! There is a leaky stick of dynamite that she could use to blow the cave open. Big! Showy! The jury will love it! The problem is, one false move, one fly landing on it, one shift in the breeze, and the dynamite will go off, and not only will the cave not open, but Maria will most likely be killed. Q is that stick of dynamite and I can see her working with him for one vote but put the dynamite down Liz. I love you with all your limbs.
They get to the reward challenge where they have to do bunch of stuff and then get a sandbag to land on the top of a tall pole and the winner gets Applebee’s. Sadly, Jeff did not tell them that they get all the fixin’s, but I have no doubt they are there. Liz tells us that she and her daughter have a ritual where they go to Applebee’s every Wednesday, where she gets a burger, and then they go home to watch Survivor. Not only is Liz starving because she’s allergic to everything except novelty glasses and love, but she also wants that taste of home. Then Jeff announces that they’re going to eat a Bourbon Street Mushroom Swiss Burger, and Liz absolutely loses her shit. It’s almost like Jeff said those words, and they Manchurian Candidate-d a preprogrammed hypnosis in Liz, which was placed there by the marketing department. We have seen people be excited about prizes on this show, but never has a brand been given as much of a personal connection as this one.
Q wins and chooses Tiff to go with him so that he can set things right with her. Then he chooses Maria because she’s the only one who is nice to him. Finally, as Liz literally begs and cries, hoping for a shot at that burger, he chooses Kenzie right there in front of her face, a move that even Kenzie says is cold. Then Liz absolutely snaps in a way I have never seen on Survivor or reality television, and I wrote an entire book about the Real Housewives franchise.
“You think you’ve gone without eating? I see you eat every day!” Liz shouts through rage tears. “Q, you almost blew up my whole game. You overshadowed everything I was trying to do, and I said it was cool. I didn’t say nothingggggggggggg. I don’t even want to be around y’all. Q, you blew up my whole freakin’ spot. I didn’t know about the damn split vote last night.” It’s a monologue for the ages, and it’s all over a burger. If she’s getting this mad about it, then maybe I should go to Applebee’s for the first time and check it out. (I live in England, which has banned Applebee’s for crimes against cuisine.)
When Liz returns to camp, Venus tells her, “Don’t worry. We’ve all wanted to do that to Q at least once,” yet she is the only person who has. That’s good for Liz. The ultimate irony is that there is so much food at the Sanctuary (where good things happen … to bad people) that no one even eats the burger that Liz was so hungry for.
At the Sanctuary, Q is trying to repair his bonds with the Yanu three, but Tiff and Kenzie are so over him that the second he walks away, they’re planning his ouster, unaware that Maria sees things quite differently.
The immunity challenge is the classic “hold a bucket with 25 percent of your body weight as long as you can” challenge, but there is another bargaining for rice where four people need to sit out or two people need to give up their votes for a sack of rice. This time, Jeff also adds that if any individuals want to sit out but the group doesn’t want to, then the individuals can have their own little pot of rice. Once again, no one wants to sit out, but Liz does because she needs the food. I have a feeling the producers were huddling after the reward challenge and saying, “We have starved this woman to the point of madness. How can we just give her some damn rice before she bloodies that machete?” This was their solution.
Charlie wins the challenge after a stand-off with Tiff, and then he tells us that he has been working on his grip strength for two years in preparation for going on the show. It’s not a stupid idea since grip strength is a key indicator of health and vitality. Working on grip strength seems like good preparation because it could come in handy in a variety of scenarios and challenges, whereas 3D printing puzzles and doing them in the backyard seems a little bit like cheating.
Back at camp, everyone seems to want to vote for Q, and that is when you know a real blindside is a-brewing. Kenzie still wants to get rid of Tiff, but she’s worried about the idol because if she plays it and they all vote for Tiff, then it’s going to look really bad, especially for her. What transpires next is classic Survivor, which is so fun and wonderful to watch and why I love the game. Maria and Charlie go around convincing everyone that Tiff’s idol is more scary than the talking stick of dynamite that Maria has stashed under her pillow. They draw in Q, who is happy to vote for anyone who isn’t him, and Ben, who sees the threat Tiff poses and thinks it certainly does not rock. They just need one more vote. They don’t trust Kenzie not to tell Tiff, and everyone hates Venus so much that they don’t want to work with her. Poor Venus. I love her, and I can’t wait for her to be a returning player.
That means the key to this whole plan is Liz, a woman who not only hates Q but also wants revenge for the Bourbon Burger That Never Was. She’s weighing up whether seeing Q get his torch snuffed is more satisfying than possibly winning a million dollars. This is the first time that I didn’t know how the vote was going to go not because of editing tricks or all the whispers at tribal council because you couldn’t tell which way Liz was going to vote due to a variety of factors that are both social and strategic.
Liz is slightly worried that this is going to be a resume move for Maria and it certainly will be — she devised the plan and was the only person who thought to use Q for the vote. However, Liz can also sell it as, “Yeah, that was a great plan, but the decision was up to me. I got to choose how it went, so I was the decider.” But this looks great for Maria’s game, which I think is the best and most consistent so far. Now she just needs to hope she can make it to the opening of that cave before her dynamite trap ends up charring all of her flesh like she’s Wile E. Coyote.
