The fire is out, too.

"It's gonna be a long day," says a tired Colby, the big Texas stud.

We think so too. And it's gonna be a long series as well. Colby's part of the de facto ruling Ogakor tribe, which, after the tempestuous revenge of some raging outback porcine god upon Mike, the psycho Kucha warlord, is in the driver's seat.

At this point, it looks like the five remaining former Ogakors will summarily dismiss the last three former Kuchas: Ivy League Nick, farmer Rodger and sweetheart Elisabeth-with-an-s. The Ogakors, uneasily led by unpleasant, scheming Heather Queen Jerri, have taken out two Kuchas so far. The rest might as well be little tin ducks for the B.B.s that shoot out of Jerri's eyes every time she squints.

The last full episode, remember, was a long, elaborate ruse to make us think that there was some chance that physical trainer Alicia would not be Ogakor's target.

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In the end, she was sent to the Jury of the Damned. She now sits next to the ghosts of Sir Ernest Shackleton, Gloria Gaynor and the painful curse of modernism, the world's three greatest survivors.

Wait, Gloria Gaynor isn't dead, is she?

Anyway, the weather makes Ogakor's power seem dreary. Jerri says that she feels drained and lazy. She's sleeping in.

The others talk about the rain. Chef Keith starts a fire. It looks like we're going to get an episode about the quotidian details of life in the outback: hauling wood, filtering water, Jerri's a bitch, eating rice, the delivery of another Kucha carcass to the front door of Sumner Redstone.

We know what you're thinking: boooor-ing!

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Nick is having a hard time swallowing. He gargles. He says he has three enlarged "taste buds" as well. Even drinking water hurts.

We take the bait. We're pretty sure that this is one of those easy "Survivor" setups. We've noticed that in the past, the editing at the start of the show often subtly alludes to who will be thrown off at the end of the night.

In storytelling, they call it foreshadowing.

On "Survivor," we call it hackneyed.

The rain has washed a lot of the soil into the river, which is now cloudy and brown.

The survivors are hungry. As we've noted myriad times before, one of the revelations of this engrossing show is that, almost without exception, even people who self-select to be survivors have virtually no ability actually to survive absent a bursting tackle box and a sturdy Coleman stove.

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