Retro Survivor rewatch: Borneo episode 6, “Udder Revenge”
Survivor: Borneo had another issue to deal with in episode 6: a certain comparison line that ended up getting two players in hot water.
Up to this point, yours truly has carefully rationed out watching episodes of Survivor: Borneo, as an attempt to simulate the weeklong waits that accompanied my original experience with this season back in 2000. However, in the ensuing 17 years, it’s hard to resist the siren song of the next part of the story.
Besides, the preview for episode 6 aired in episode 5 promised a “sexist remark” after a pretty calm episode, all things considered. Let’s get into it.
The recap of episode 5 didn’t contain much, but Jeff Probst’s voiceover actually said that Tagi’s alliance “reared its ugly head,” which sounds a little strange to a modern viewer’s ears. But at this point, it’s hard not to see how the expectation was that things would just play out as Pagong chose to generally play things out: focusing on the people and the attempts to live together and, well, survive. That’s what the opening to each episode stated, right?
Probst actually appeared first, stating that episode 7 would feature what he then called the “merger,” which sounds awfully corporate. But the episode also made it clear that the players knew when the merge was.
Keeping all that in mind, the show drew its sharpest contrast yet between the two tribes. On Tagi, Sue started plotting who to take out first in the merge from Pagong. Meanwhile, Pagong worked on killing the chickens they had just won so as not to share with Tagi.
But social things played a role on Tagi, too, since the show started showing Richard naked and even filmed confessionals with him naked! (Yet another thing Survivor probably would not do today.) He also leveraged his friendship with Rudy to pull him into the alliance, with some slightly ominous music, because alliances were bad at this point in time.
Then came the actual controversy: Gervase’s unflattering comment about women only being smarter than cows. Pointedly, Survivor didn’t show the comment itself, just Jenna’s retelling and a Gervase confessional about how stupid it was … as he also tried to explain it to the women on Pagong!
Survivor again brought a story-type element into the reward challenge with a little rhyme about an old fort on a can of what appeared to be dog food. Richard was the only one to try it on Tagi, but most of Pagong took some bites. Then came the nighttime reward challenge, accompanied by a Probst voiceover. The tribes had to search for three items in a dark set with a flashlight to win canned goods and chocolate. The latter element alone kind of disqualifies this challenge from coming back, really. Speaking of disqualification, Richard brought a second knife back and thus lost it for Tagi.
That night and the next day on Pagong, Gervase started bringing up banding together for the merge, with Jenna, Colleen, Greg, and Joel all basically agree. Gretchen did not. Also, all the ladies casually expressed some frustrations with Joel’s behavior, and the editors backed them up with lots of footage.
Survivor actually called in the Green Berets to build the final immunity challenge (an obstacle course) and also deliver the message to each tribe. Probst made sure to explain how pivotal this last challenge would be for the numbers at the merge one last time before the obstacle course. It was a four-on-four challenge, so both tribes had to sit people out.
The music accompanying the first part of this challenge was great — driving, fast-paced. It changed at the Blown Bridge, which was almost like a puzzle at the end of a physical challenge as we’ve come to expect, which made it easier to hear dialogue. Tagi pulled off the win by just a few seconds, then had to go get the immunity idol on a separate island, presumably to get additional dramatic shots for the show.
On Pagong, they had a chicken failure, because a monitor lizard partially ate one. But they boiled and ate the rest of the corpse while things played out. It came down to Gervase or Joel, basically, but the editors kept up Joel’s running commentary on things.
Probst brought up the comparison issue again at Tribal, and Jenna brought up that Joel was pretty much right there with Gervase on it.
Was the edit wrong? No, Joel took four of the six possible votes, with the other two going towards Jenna. Speaking of Jenna herself, she alluded to the cow commentary as she cast her vote.
Next: Big Brother 19 episode 2 recap
For episode 7, we’ll take a look at Survivor‘s first merge! (Did you know that there was a merge coming? Because episode 6 totally noted that the merge was coming.)