Kentucky Joe is singing a song for his fallen comrade. It's been two episodes since Mike, the scary religious hunter, was burned and evacuated. He's still the Kucha mascot martyr.

"Mike woulda been up three hours ago," says elderly Rodger (who's called Kentucky Joe by his tribe mates) to buff physical trainer Alica as he tends the fire. "From now on, every time we're around the fire we will think of it."

That's a lot of thinking about Mike.

What Rodger probably means to say with his indirect Midwestern-speak is that the four members of the Kucha tribe are spending a lot of time thinking about how they're all going to go down at the hands of five Ogakors because, in part, Mike went home in a MedVac.

"I felt like at the last tribal council we were outwitted by Ogakor," says Rodger.

And he's more or less right: When there were five members of each tribe, directly following the merger, Ogakor picked out the weakest member of the Kucha -- whiny Internet Jeff. Kucha foolishly chose the big, hunky and relatively charming Colby, apparently because he was a threat in the endgame.

With five votes against each, Jeff lost the tiebreaker. (He'd had one previous vote against him.) If Kucha had taken advantage of the obvious rebarbative qualities of evil queen Jerri, it could have voted for her and sent her back to the Los Angeles bar from where she stumbled.

Alas, on soap operas and reality television, the evil characters often win.

Now, Kucha has only four remaining members, Ogakor five. Rodger points out that Kucha could be "an extinct tribe -- no longer on the face of the earth."

It's a mildly offensive statement, considering that it's spoken by a glorified game-show contestant standing on the land where 300,000 people with roots going back 40,000 years were 80 percent wiped out in one century.

But Rodger's an old guy, and sometimes we give old guys little "get out of ignorance free" cards -- especially when they're carrying homemade fishing poles and dinged-up tackle boxes.

Rodger's plan is that he will keep catching fish for everyone and no one will vote him out. He's clearly alluding to the first season of "Survivor," where fat, naked Richard Hatch took the edge off his Machiavellian scheming with his ability to spear fish.

The problem in the outback is that pretty much anyone can toss a line in the river and pull out a decent-sized fillet, as we see here in one continuous-take cast-and-catch that takes all of 15 seconds.

Ol' Kentucky Joe doesn't have much of a chance.

To put an exclamation on the point, the show dishes up one of those cheap "Survivor" metaphors: A fish flops around in the dirt, gasping for air.

"This game has definitely changed," says Alicia, dragging out the exposition into the 10th minute of the show. She knows that the former Kuchas are in trouble.

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