Welcome back to John Rocker and the Famous Survivor’s Variety Hour. Personally, this has been a great week for me. My beloved San Francisco Giants have continued to march through baseball’s playoffs and now are only one series away from the World Series. Also, this Saturday my younger brother is getting married, which is cool, but I’m the oldest in my family and all three of my younger siblings are married, while I continue to try and lead the life of Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers before he settles down with Isla Fisher.

I stopped seeing the last girl I was talking to because she was single-handedly jinxing the 49ers’ and the Giants’ seasons. The second I stopped talking to her (no joke), they both immediately started winning again. I’ve been in a relationship with both of those teams for over thirty years. The choice had to be made. All of this leads us to tonight’s episode of Survivor. How? Well, I’m not sure yet but lazily connect it somehow. Sometimes you need to change your luck, maybe hope that the fates are on your side. Take John Rocker… last week Val basically pulled the “sticking your hand in a coat and claiming you have a gun” to John Rocker by telling him that she had two idols, and he believed her! I’m guessing prior to appearing on Survivor he let Hunter S. Thompson pack his bag for him to give him some “thinking help”.

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gxinz7tEJ8

Hardcore psychedelic drug use would be the only justifiable excuse for John to have believed Val..the only excuse. John does have an idol, but I’m guessing it’s going to end as well as homeboy here choosing the right/wrong grail.

I mean, can’t you see John being blindsided with that dopey look on his face and his idol in his pocket? I don’t write this after watching the show; this is all live, so I don’t know how this episode is going to play out. Based on the previews, it looks like we might start seeing the John Rocker that everybody was secretly hoping to see this season. Let’s go find out, as it’s 8 pm Portland, Oregon time!

8 pm

Previously on Survivor: Jeremy and John form an alliance called “Fragile”. Shockingly the plan did not work as we all know, as Val and her poopie attitude got 86’d.

8:01 pm

Black-and-white Survivor: Coming back from Tribal and I got to thinking, what if John Rocker just snapped and started killing people here on the island? He’s like 6’5, 240 lbs. Would the cameramen just keep on filming and post the video on CBS.com like they do for Survivor Ponderosa?

Baylor starts us off by talking in the third person. Good for her; you don’t get enough good “third person” talk these days.

8:02 pm

John is still lamenting about Val not playing one of her “idols”…yikes!

Once again Josh does some spin control; he seems like the only player on that team with a fully active brain.

8:03 pm

Life is good for the blue team as they make some cosmetic changes to their Survivor duplex.

Keith says something to us, the viewers, that we didn’t pick up because CBS forgot to turn on the Keith Captions, so we’re left having to guess what the hell he just said.

8:04 pm

Natalie is trying to set the building blocks towards a Drew vote-out by calling him out for not helping around camp. Drew does seem like he needs some smelling salts or something. Wake up, man. So far he’s been the Kato Kaelin of Survivor this season.

8:06 pm

Commercial:

Preview for that Steve Carell new movie Alexander, which one of you posted a comment about during the first week when I talked about this movie probably being a bomb, saying that he was probably going to be nominated for an Oscar for this role. Um, I would love to bet on that not happening…Can we bet, please? I mean, he’s wearing a pirate shirt that catches fire at a Benihana’s. Unless that movie is being improperly marketed as a comedy and in reality has scenes like this:

then it’s not going to win anything but a Razzie.

8:08 pm

Back from commercial and we’re at the reward challenge, which looks like one of the Saw movie death rooms.

Jeremy sees that Val is gone and decides that it’s his moment to try to win a Women’s Rights Award with an awkward semi-monologue to the orange team about not voting out the strong women. Everybody there looks horrified.

8:11 pm

After a compelling rock/paper/scissors competition, it gets decided that Wes and Keith will start us off.

Jeff provokes Wes into playing a little more reckless; it works as Wes takes the victory.

8:14 pm

The victory leads to an awkward moment in which Keith starts crying about his son beating him, which leads to Wes crying and here we are again. I am really not heartless. I get that this game can be emotional, but really….. after this competition where you balanced a square thingy on a balance beam? That’s going to bring the tears? What’s going to happen if they show Marley and Me as a reward prize? 2/3rds of the show that night would be all these players crying…They would have to postpone both competitions that day.

8:15 pm

Wes sends Josh to join his dad at Exile. Keith looks like he can barely hide his excitement over that choice.

On the way out, John whispers to Jeremy that he did all he could to try to save Val. Jeremy doesn’t want to hear it. Jeremy is looking like Sayid when Ana Lucia shot Shannon on Lost:

8:17 pm

Commercial:

CBS dark raspy voice: “Stalker is America’s newest obsession”….really?….really? I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard one human being say one word about Stalker. Before that, we get Jennifer Love Hewitt back on network TV. Remember when she was a thing? I mean, granted she’s probably making a pretty penny to mail-it-in for a shitty CBS procedural show, but there was definitely a time when people thought maybe she could have Michelle Pfeiffer’s career…speaking of which…Where in the hell is she these days? I’m falling down a rabbit hole again..Let’s get back on track.

8:20 pm

Back from commercial. Jeremy is holding court putting John Rocker on blast. Jeremy kind of has a whiny, bratty, child-like presentation going on right now in my honest opinion. Obviously, he’s bitter which is understandable, but there’s something about the way he’s venting that is unlikable to me right now.

Julie is off crying and hyperventilating about the whole scene, telling us that Johnny R. isn’t that bad of a guy. I think that battle was lost long ago.

8:22 pm

Off to Exile with Josh and Keith. They get the idol clue and both determine that John and Jeremy have idols. It also turns out that Josh and Keith are America’s new Odd Couple. They bond even with Keith’s slightly homophobic apprehension about camping with him.

8:25 pm

John catches a fish for the camp. Everybody seems appreciative of him, which probably means he will be voted off later tonight.

Next we get Baylor talking about trying to get the younger boys on her side to get John out. Wes and Alec appear to see right through her ploy, but we will see…..

8:27 pm

Commercial:

So is anyone else nervous about this recent Ebola thing? Isn’t this exactly what happened in the movie Outbreak?

Where in the hell is Dustin Hoffman and when is he going to save us from this?

8:30 pm

Back from commercial and it’s time for the immunity challenge. Looks like a competition for short people. I’m 6’3. I would hate this challenge, other than shooting the ball in the hoop. No puzzle tonight, I guess, which I thought broke some Survivor commandment.

Dale gives us a very enthusiastic “Way to go, Wes” while standing on a pole of some kind. Hard to explain how out of place the timing was for this moment..It was like forty seconds after Wes had won.

John’s turn and he goes out of his way to bump the other team which elicits fake outrage from some of the other players, even though other pairs did similar things.

John wins and once again Dale celebrates awkwardly. This has been the highlight of the season for me so far.

8:37 pm

Blue team wins. Natalie starts shouting at John. Natalie starts demanding that they vote out John. John implodes and tells Natalie that if she was a man, he would knock her teeth out. Natalie was acting absurd and annoying, but John took the bait and responded in a horrible way. It’s not looking good for him.

8:39 pm

Commercial:

Yet another preview for future Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Alexander:

Wow, he fights a kangaroo. So not only do we get a contrived Benihana pirate shirt fire scene, but we also get a kangaroo fight in this movie? Wow, this movie might be as powerful as Saving Private Ryan. Look, Steve Carell seems like the nicest guy in the world, but I think the movies he has starred in over the last six years have been one giant bomb. He needs Judd Apatow to pull something out of his ass and quick for him.

8:42 pm

Back from commercial and Baylor thinks she is toast. She thinks her only hope is getting John.

John tells us that his best friend is gay. John tells the two girls that he wants to vote out Dale, but he really wants to vote out Baylor. John tells Josh that he has an idol. Josh doesn’t like what John is selling.

Josh conspires with Baylor and Wes to blindside John. I’m guessing that John is not going to know what hit him.

Seems like Josh is emerging as the de facto leader of the orange team. IF he pulls this off, then you have to say he’s El Presidente of that tribe.

8:49 pm

Tribal Council starts and there’s a random blonde girl named Jackie whom I haven’t seen speak or move in two episodes.

Everybody is doing a pretty good acting job to fool John into not playing the idol. I’m guessing that John is not going to play the idol based on his expression, which can best be described as vacant.

8:53 pm

We go to the votes and John doesn’t play his idol.

Thirty seconds later, he is voted out. Nobody there makes a move or even breathes as John gets up to leave. It’s like they’re hostages waiting for the gunman to walk out the door while they hold their hands up like statues.

Recap:

Why do I feel bad for John? I do, though. I feel genuine sympathy for the guy. The last half of this episode felt like the parents of Elm St. were coming for Freddy Krueger. Yes, Freddy Krueger is a monster, but for whatever reason it just didn’t feel fun. With that said, it seems that Josh has assumed the role of the cerebral leader of the orange team. Granted, on the orange team that statement isn’t saying a whole lot. Baylor seems like the only other player on that team with a pulse, but she seems desperate or unlikable to her other tribemates which, fair or not fair, appears to be the reality of her situation. Alec and Wes despite joining the blindside tonight basically seem like high school play versions of the lead characters from Dude, Where’s My Car?. I wouldn’t be surprised if every conversation around camp with these two sounded something like this:

The rest of the orange tribe (not counting Josh) seems like the cliché “Red Shirts”, meaning their main and only role this season is to be voted out. They’re the window dressing to get us to the merge, where hopefully this won’t turn into a two-man race of Jeremy and Josh. I like Keith on the blue team, but I don’t see him having the “pull” power, meaning I don’t see other players following any move he wants to make. Obviously, it is still early in the game and things can change on Survivor swiftly, but in my opinion the two generals of this season are Jeremy and Josh. They don’t know yet that they’re building their tribal armies to face one another, but to me they are. It’s a race as to who can build the most loyal numbers on their side. So far this season, the edge appears to be with Jeremy. Survivor for viewers can be like a Warshak test, with each viewer having a completely different view on what’s transpired than the other, so what I see at this point is a two man battle.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.

Power ranking:

1. Jeremy

2. Josh

3. Everybody else