Forget the survivors; the rats steal the show. After futile fishing trips for both teams, Greg, Pagong's Brown graduate and one-time survival school program director, invents an ingenious spring-loaded rat trap. Gervase and Ramona watch Joel -- we know very little about Joel -- rip at the roasted rodents with suspicion. "As poor as we got in the ghetto, we never ate rats," says Ramona. She's later seen pulling the little loins with gusto.

Tagi members continue to snipe at one another, but the group is still too big for real voting blocs to develop. Stacey disses Rudy at every turn, and tries to persuade Kelly and Susan to vote in league with her. Susan plays along, but in private she tells the cameras that she doesn't trust Stacey. A pair of harsh physical challenges convinces the team that it needs to stack its tribe with brute force.

The first challenge the tribes face is the most absurd yet. Both must swim out to a buoy, dive down to an underwater sandbar and drag a weighted treasure chest across the ocean floor. Pagong struggles together, but Gervase, who has just learned to swim, can't pitch in. Tagi wins. The prize: snorkel gear and a spear. Dr. Sean and prayer-happy Dirk go out line fishing with Richard, but only the "large gay man with the fishing spear" manages to bring in anything worth eating. For the relatively sane immunity challenge one member of each team is strung up in a tree, as if they'd parachuted out of a plane and landed in the jungle. Each tribe must rescue its stranded member and return her to safety on a homemade stretcher. Pagong wins in a pinch, sending Tagi back to eliminate another member.

A storm sabotages some of the cheap theatrics at tribal council, prematurely extinguishing the torches that are supposed to symbolize each player's life on the island. Probst cuts short a rap session where Richard, who for all of his team-building corporate-speak, emerges as Pagong's Machiavellian schemer. "Don't vote me off," he says as the group faces tribal council. "I'm bringing in the fish." Richard doesn't have much to worry about. The team skips him and Rudy, and makes its second strictly Darwinian move, voting out a stunned Stacey, who lashes out at the rest of the crew and uses her final words to remind the team that she'd happily eaten the maggots. In what may be a harbinger of intrigues and betrayals to come, she complains that someone had switched his or her vote.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals mobilizes against CBS in New York. One activist claims that she was horrified by images of club-wielding islanders lustily chasing rats around the beach. The group doesn't say anything about the maggots.

(J.S.)

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