‘Survivor: Philippines’ review: Why all the whining?

Let’s start off this review of “Survivor: Philippines” by saying the following: anyone who criticizes Skupin and Penner for organizing a deal during the reward challenge is crazy. These two tribes would have sat out there in the mud for hours, killing their energy and potentially even risked an injury that would have taken them out of the game. In orchestrating a deal, they at least both got something out of it. As for Artis … let’s just say that it is easy to complain when you are not actually taking part in the challenge.

Belly-aching was actually a pretty major theme of this entire episode, as we saw the likes of Artis and Abi-Maria sitting around the Tandang tribe after the challenge was over whining about Skupin arranging a deal to get them more rise in return for throwing the challenge. However, they do have a reason to blame the guy if he is the reason for them running out of rice, as was claimed by a few people.

The funny thing here is that despite all of this whining (and depriving us of a great tribal council), Tandang won yet another immunity challenge thanks mostly to Malcolm beating Jeff Kent at what was really his own game in catching balls in an open field. With that being said, the real goats in this challenge were the completely useless Katie and Carter. We at least did a good sense that the former player had some sort of game this week, we’re still convinced that Carter is the most useless cast of this entire season. He’s boring, whines a lot, and really just does whatever Jeff says. At this point, we’d be fine with just wiping everyone off the map other than Penner, Jeff, and Denise, who are all good players.

The vote really came down to Penner and Katie, and even one vote going Jonathan’s way was a surprise in that he thought that she was going to vote for Denise. Was this the right move? Even thought Jeff may want to ditch the returnee, it was. This way, Jonathan remains a bigger target than him, and the tribe is stronger leading to a potential merge.

What did you think about this episode, and do you think that keeping Penner was the right move?