At Zhan Hu, Todd"s brilliant plan to give the strongest person in the game access to two immunity idols "pays off" when James finds the second one. But he has to pull down two plaques to find it, one of which is basically the same as the idol, only without the printed words on the back identifying it as such. Because he"s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, James leaves the extra plaque lying in the middle of camp, where Jaime and Erik find it after Jaime notices that the plaques have been removed from the archway. They deduce that the plaques were related to the hidden immunity idols, and they further deduce (correctly) that James removed them while idol-hunting. While James is gone, Jaime looks in his bag and finds that he"s got two of the plaques in there, wrapped up in his clothes. Most likely because the rules don"t allow you to steal hidden idols -- a fact that the show chooses to leave out, because it doesn"t fit the "blonde girls sure are dumb!" script they"re pitching this week -- Jaime returns James"s idols to his stuff, either without finishing unwrapping them fully (since she could feel what they were) or without seeing in the dark that they have writing on the back identifying them as idols. While she knows it"s a longshot and might well not be the idol, Jaime decides to keep the discarded plaque anyway. James sort of figures out what happened, and instead of laughing at himself for being so dumb that he left the blank idol out, thus completely blowing his own cover and revealing to the rest of Zhan Hu that he had both idols, he laughs hysterically at Jaime -- to everyone who will listen, all episode long -- for thinking that something that"s identical to the idol but for writing she doesn"t know is supposed to be there might be the idol. Considering that she put the entire thing together on her own, and he had it literally handed to him by someone else, you"d think maybe he"d be less smug, but...no. When the tribes merge, everything Peih-Gee and Jaime figured would happen immediately happens when James goes back to his Fei Long family (as Aaron would have). Frosti wins individual immunity, and Fei Long targets Jaime. She tries to use her maybe-idol to bluff and get the attention off herself, but nothing doing. At tribal council, Jeff Probst"s girl-hating dreams come true when Jaime presents the plaque, saying she found it lying around and thought it might be immunity. When he mockingly hurls it into the fire, it"s clear that he"s never had more fun in his life. Jaime is sent home, and somehow, I don"t doubt that Jeff Probst believes that this is the result of throwing the challenge, even though it"s not. Despite the fact that Jaime is clearly, obviously not at all stupid -- right down to the challenge throw, a strategy utterly validated by everything that happened in this episode -- the show is determined, because she is young and blonde and pretty and made the mistake of saying in an interview that she"s not dumb, to proclaim her stupid. So they do, pretty much, which is depressing and lame, and while the show is getting more interesting, this episode was kind of uncomfortable, really. (Which you will read more about in the full recap in a few days, because Survivor is returning to full recaps, rather than weecaps, effective this week.)


