But like last year's edition, the way Tina eventually won was unpredictable -- and arresting in its implications.

The final immunity challenge was a fair one -- a mental memory game of trivia about the players' personal lives, not a physical test. It's also a game with humanistic implications: Who had taken the time to learn about his or her fellow survivors?

Tina had a fair chance at this game, and lost. Had Colby been playing for the sake of the money, he would have ejected her and taken his chances with the less likable Keith. He was obviously playing for different reasons, and that's what gave Tina the million.

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Last year's moral was similarly cloudy. While everyone wheezed about how Richard Hatch's manipulations won the day (an impression the good corporate consultant himself has assiduously encouraged), Hatch actually wound up first via a series of flukes. His endgame rival, Kelly, won a grim and astonishing series of immunity challenges to keep herself in the game and force herself into the final two.

The argument can be made that against anyone else Hatch would have lost -- and in the event, he picked up his fourth and winning vote when a voter named Greg made his choice randomly.

That takes away nothing from Hatch's victory: It's just to point out that in the insular world of a "Survivor" set, small actions have ripple effects, some of them explosive and some of them beneficent.

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Stacey, one of the cast members of the first "Survivor," has sued the show and its producers, saying that they manipulated the voting on the first series, persuading the contestants whom to vote off the island for better dramatic play.

Since the show makes such a big deal out of the contestants' fending for themselves, it'll be disappointing if it comes out that "Survivor" thugs were twisting the arms of the players off-camera to direct the voting.

So maybe some day we'll find that producer Mark Burnett somehow persuaded Colby that an endgame in which the Texas stud faced off against the dulcet Tennessean Tina -- rather than the abrasive Detroiter Keith -- would make for some darn fine television.

Is Burnett a cheater? A few years down the line, a tell-all book may come out, detailing a smorgasbord of indiscretions -- pressures on voters, manipulations of the environment, behind-the-scenes intrigue.

It's not as if Burnett is a stickler for reality. At last night's finale, we saw the show's sleek helicopter racing over Los Angeles on a clear Southern California night. It swooped over the brightly lit rides on the Santa Monica pier, raced over glittery Century City and glided down onto an impromptu "Survivor" helipad next to the CBS studios. Probst got off the helicopter and ran into the stage.

It was a nice dramatic intro for the last scene of the series -- except for the fact that it was 7 p.m. in L.A. at the time, and still light out.

What else did the "Survivor" producers finesse? Maybe the baby pig Michael so conveniently chased down and slaughtered on camera was simply let out of a little bag for his benefit.

Perhaps then producers manipulated the roulette wheel so that vegetarian Kimmi would get the cow's brain to gag on and not the Snickers bar.

Was the rice can really left out in the river wash, where it could be carried away by the flash flood?

We should remember that from a technical standpoint "Survivor" is a remarkable show. The production values are uniformly taken for granted. You only have to spend some time with some of the grimier entries in the genre -- "The Mole," most notably, but also "Chains of Love" -- to see how easy it is to make reality incoherent.

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