Survivor season premiere recap: The Scariest Showmance Ever?

FINALLY!!!!!!! Geez Louise apple cheese, I’ve been waiting forever to write about Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains. Seriously, I think they filmed this back in 1981 right around the time of the first Space Shuttle launch it seemed so long ago. It was actually last August. I went on location through the first Tribal Council and have been dying to share some behind-the-scenes stuff with you guys that you didn’t see in the episode. But first we had to get all the way through season 19, argue about whether Russell was robbed or not, go holiday shopping, argue more about whether Russell was robbed or not, nurse a New Year’s Day hangover, argue more about whether Russell was robbed or not…. And here we are! Finally. But then again, not quite. Because before we get to the episode (and all the stuff you didn’t see), there are a few matters of protocol to get through regarding what we have on tap for you this season.

As all 17 of my @EWDaltonRoss Twitter followers already know, there will, unfortunately, be no Survivor Talk this season. I’m bummed. You’re bummed. Everybody’s bummed. Well, maybe not Dave Ball. Hey, I kid! (Actually, no. I’m pretty sure he hates us.) It just came down to some scheduling, timing, and not being able to get a crew in on Fridays to shoot. Anyway, hopefully it will return in the fall. But are we leaving you hanging? No, say I! We’ll still be doing interviews with the ousted contestants on Fridays. You’ll just have to read them instead of staring at my ugly mug talking on the telephone. (Pretty fair trade-off, all things considered.)

And we have some other goodies in store for you as well. Probst’s blog? Back! Deleted scenes? Back! We also have another special video treat: Before the game all the contestants recorded pep talks for themselves in the unfortunate event that they got voted off. Just a little pick-me-up in case they were feeling blue. And this week we have something else that is very special and just for you EW.com readers: Jeff Probst delivering his thoughts right after the first Tribal Council and predicting who will go next. Check that out, as well as Sugar’s pep talk to herself, and the deleted scene from last night’s episode, all at the very end of the column.

Okay, housecleaning over. Wait a minute! What the hell is happening? HOLY CRAP! JEFF PROBST IS BEING ATTACKED BY FOUR MILITARY CHOPPERS! Run, Jeff, run!!! Wait? What’s that? You say he’s not being attacked, but that rather people like Coach, Jerri, and Randy are on those choppers? Oh, well, in that case… run, Jeff, run!!! I was actually on the beach sitting underneath a palm tree when this whole scene went down and I still have the sand stuck in my hair to prove it. This week’s recap will be a bit different as I will try to hit on some of what we saw in the episode (best line of the night courtesy of Boston Rob: ”I’m a Villain?”) as well as giving you some bonus intel from being out there. And I’ve got some good intel on the reward challenge that kicked off the episode for you right now on the next page. Click on over for the scoop!

NEXT: What really happened at the reward challenge

* As some of you may know, often when there is a challenge on Survivor that is presented as a ”first team to three wins,” in actuality, it was something much longer. Take this reward challenge: What you saw on TV was a ”first one to three wins.” But in reality, the teams actually played all the way to five. Remember how the Villains went up 2-1 after Coach dragged Colby back to the Villains mat? In actuality, the Heroes had a whopping 4-0 lead when that contest took place, and that Coach victory merely got the Villains back to 4-1. But this was just the tip of the out-of-order iceberg, and what I am about to tell you is so convoluted and confusing we may need Lost expert Doc Jensen to decipher it. The first-round match-up you saw with Stephenie and Cirie vs. Parvati and Danielle was actually round six and got the Villains back to being down only 4-2. But wait, it gets even more confusing. Remember how you saw Stephenie dislocate her shoulder and Probst remarked how she injured herself in the very first round of the very first challenge. Well, that was true, but it wasn’t the round you saw. The actual first round (that you did not see) featured the exact same match-up (Stephenie and Cirie vs. Parvati and Danielle) and it was actually a Heroes victory. Not only that, but the injury appeared to occur while Stephenie was slapping the mat with her extended arm to give her team the win. So, the round you saw presented as the first match-up was actually a rematch that Stephenie was participating in after she had already dislocated her shoulder! (How tough is she?) So, the injury happened in one place, but was edited into another. Now because this is all a bit hard to follow, let me be clear about one thing: There is no monkeying around when it comes to Survivor challenges. The teams compete and the winner is the winner. Nothing is rigged. When you saw people winning rounds, they were winning rounds, maybe just not in the exact order it actually happened. Like all elements of the show, the producers just often record much more than can actually show so then have to figure out the best way to condense it all. (For example, the one round where Coach dragged Colby to his mat took over nine minutes by itself. It was an epic duel that was mesmerizing to witness, but simply too long to show in its entirety) And Stephenie did injure her shoulder in that competition against those same players, just not in the round they showed us. I’m actually surprised they edited it this way because watching Stephenie dislocating it as she won, and then coming back to compete after injuring it was pretty dramatic in itself. Again, just not enough time.

* The fact that Coach out-muscled Colby was pretty shocking to everyone. Remember: Colby was a challenge dominator back in Australia, and Coach is… well, Coach. The whole thing led to Tyson’s first —and certainly not last — borderline offensive quote of the season: ”Colby getting owned by Coach? Oh my Gosh, dude. I can only imagine what Colby’s thinking. He’s gotta be like ‘I may as well just become a woman, because there is no point in trying to maintain my masculinity now.”’

* It’s about time someone on Survivor flipped everyone off while topless! How did that take 20 seasons to happen?

* One last reward challenge note: After the challenge, Rupert was attended to by medical for his toe. I couldn’t see it, but man could I and everyone else within a 500-mile radius hear it. He was screaming like I’ve never heard anyone scream before. Howls of pain and anguish. And Rupert is a tough guy so I can only imagine what the pain must have been like. (Of course, I’m the dude who gets a paper cut and goes running home to mommy. What? Paper cuts hurt!)

NEXT: Coach is feeling the love

* I know there are many of you who want to douse my keyboard with Milwaukee’s Best so it gets all sticky and I can never type again when I start talking about what a great player Russell was last season. Sorry, I think he was. But one thing I’ve never been crazy about is great players constantly telling us how great they are. Watching Russell lie, steal, and manipulate is fantastic fun. Watching him sit there and brag is not, so I was eye rolling right along with all of you as he compared himself to the Michaels Jordan and Phelps.

* Randy is a super Survivor fan who knows the show inside and out, so I was surprised to hear him say how it’s impossible to make fire without flint. Extremely difficult? Absolutely. But it’s been done before. In fact, I was at the camp when Yau-Man did it in Micronesia. ”Nobody’s gonna get voted off for not making fire and nobody’s gonna stay trying to make fire, so why don’t we blow it off?” he opined. So, of course, Boston Rob then went and made fire. Make no mistake: That is pretty damn impressive. I watched Rob try the same method unsuccessfully in All-Stars, but he had his mojo working here, so much so that Coach started rocking a man-crush on the Beantowner. ”I’m a little in awe of Rob,” Coach informed us, before letting Rob know that, ”When you talk, I’m literally hanging on your every word.” Okay, that would be really, really creepy if we weren’t too distracted by Coach’s other budding showmance with Jerri. Seriously, what the hell? Am I the only one freaked out by this potential union? The Black Widow and the Dragon Slayer? And just imagine if they had a kid? That child would have the craziest hair ever! Let’s hope there’s no ”iron sharpening iron” on this front, if you know what I mean. (P.S. I have no idea what I mean.)

* The Villains camp is infinitely more interesting than the Heroes camp. Not that I don’t like a lot of the people on the Heroes side — Tom, Cirie, and Stephenie (among others) all have serious game. But the villains are just kookier, cockier, and a whole lot more likely to give you a killer sound bite. The Heroes side did provide one precious moment, however, when Sugar went looking for a little snuggle buddy. Sugar entered the game looking for a showmance with J.T. but she appeared to change her focus to Colby, at one point even taking his hands and wrapping them around her. And what did she do when he left the shelter to get away from her? She followed! Survivor Stalker, baby! Poor Colby looked like he wanted to wring her neck like one of J.T.’s chickens.

* Here’s an interesting aside on the immunity challenge. As you saw on TV, each tribe had to pick six people to run the course, and four people to do the puzzle. On the Villains side, Boston Rob was originally going to help with the boat. ”Big mistake,” Probst said to the lovely and talented (she made me say that) Mara Reinstein of Us Weekly while the final preparation was being done and the teams were on the other side strategizing. Probst went on to say how great Rob was at solving puzzles and how it was a complete waste to not have him do it here. Apparently, Boston Rob came to same conclusion, switching it up at the last minute. It paid off, as the Villains came from behind to win thanks to B.R.’s puzzle-solving prowess. And you know what a Heroes loss meant: Here come the waterworks from Sugar. Sugar promised me she wouldn’t cry as much this time around, but all Survivor does is amplify your emotions, and Sugar is a very emotional girl.

NEXT: How does this damn pen work?

* Wow, was that some serious scrambling by the Heroes tribe on whom to vote out or what? When I visited the Heroes camp on day two, it was obvious to me that Sugar was the one tribe member not fitting in. She’s a goner, I said to myself. And that was the original consensus among the tribe. But then strategic concerns began to outweigh social and team strength ones. Tom started targeting Cirie. Candice, Amanda, and Cirie talked about gunning for Tom. Then Cirie began eyeing Stephenie. But in the end, it all came back to Sugar. Which brings us to….

* Tribal Council. This is the third Tribal Council I’ve been to and was the shortest so far. Obviously, these are a lot longer than what they show on TV but how much longer depends on how long it takes for Probst and producers to get what they need. I remember the first Tribal in Gabon going on forever as Probst hammered away at the tribe to pick a leader. (They finally selected G.C. Whoops!) This one didn’t take nearly as long as that or the one I saw in Cook Islands. Frankly, as far as Tribal Councils go, it was pretty uneventful, both in person and on TV, although I think the shot of Sugar trying to figure out how to open the pen at the voting booth pretty much sums up her entire three-day stay on the island. (Although I suppose if that was truly the case she was have started snuggling the pen and then followed it back to its prop shed for safe keeping until the next Tribal.) I remember while watching it all go down thinking to myself, ”Man, she has no clue she’s going home,” but in her final words after, she acknowledged that it was the right decision and that she was the weakest link. Would it have been nice if she had once again removed her top and flipped off all of her teammates? Of course! But maybe she was operating under a one-flash-per-episode limit. (A limit I will now make it my life’s work to repeal.)

* The other big difference about this episode is that it was double the length at two hours. I know this is something that producers have talked about doing in the past, and here’s my take on it, and this may shock you: It was too much. Now, don’t get me wrong, if there were a 24-hour Survivor-only network, I’d probably never sleep. I could watch this crap all day long. But I’m not an average viewer and my guess is that for the average viewer, this two-hour installment featured too many dead spots. Take the very beginning: There was this amazingly physical and brutal challenge awaiting the contestants, but it took too long to get there, as Probst and the contestants shot the breeze for a few minutes, in effect killing the momentum. And later, that whole scene with Boston Rob daring Coach to scale a tree? C’mon. Sure, it was slightly amusing, but worth all that time that was devoted to it? No way. Look, I’m never going to complain about getting too much Survivor, but imagine what a lean and mean episode this would have been if they had edited it down to the usual time. Not unlike my iPod, it would have been all killer, no filler. I’m very interested to know what you all think about the two-hour episode, so please share your thoughts on the message boards.

Speaking of which, it’s about time to get there. I hope you dug some of the insight I was able to share from my visit to Samoa, but now I want your insight: Would the two-hour episode have worked better as a single hour? Who would you have voted off in the Heroes tribe? And, finally, who should Coach start slaying… with his heart: Boston Rob or Jerri? Hit the boards and let us know. But first, enjoy the video treats below, including an exclusive deleted scene, Sugar’s pep talk to herself, and Jeff Probst directly from Tribal Council predicting who will get voted off next. Speaking of Probst, don’t forget to read his take on the action on his own EW.com blog. And finally, check back tomorrow for my exit interview with Sugar. If you want to know right when it will be up, just follow me on Twitter @EWDaltonRoss. See ya next time when we’ll find out what in the name of Sam Hill causes Boston Rob to pass out. Will his new boyfriend Coach sweep in to the rescue in time?

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