Are you not familiar with the battle for my love? Click here to see why Max and Shirin are the best, and how their head-to-head battle is going.

Ok, we’re doing things a little differently this week. Don’t act like you don’t know why.

Let’s start with a quick look behind the curtains: I write the Twitter portion of this post well in advance of the week’s episode. When Max or Shirin post an interesting tweet or photo, I dump it in this post, save it as a draft, and come back to edit it all after the episode airs on Wednesday. Even the featured image for this post, which features Jenn for the first time, was done before the episode aired.

Why do I tell you this? Because I’m going to put the social media portion of the competition first this week- unchanged from how I’d originally written it- so that as we switch from the Twitter portion to the episode portion you can see the joy inside me slowly dying.

This week on Twitter: 

This week we’re dragging a few other members of this cast- and some from previous casts- in on the social media fun. Let’s start with Max attempting to stage an intervention with Mike about his firewood obsession:

Mike actually made several decent “go collect some wood” jokes this week. But this contest isn’t about Mike, even though Mike and Jenn are like my junior varsity versions of Max and Shirin (Mike would have been on Hype Team Four if I’d had more material to work with). So let’s see what else Max gave us this week:

Kooky monkeysex voyeur or strong woman who knows her shit? @theshirin & I only talk RE: each other in confessionals. http://t.co/0npvF1vRtz

— Max Dawson (@fymaxwell) March 13, 2015

Wow. Can’t imagine why that scene didn’t make the final edit. The best part of that clip is that, judging by what made it onto last week’s episode, Max’s confessional there came after producers were prodding him to say something about how Shirin is annoying. They’d gotten Tyler, Carolyn, and Joaquin saying it on camera, but Max didn’t bite. Also, did anyone else have trouble seeing Max in that video because of all the hearts and stars in front of their eyes? No? Just me?

Predictably, people were noting that Max was mostly absent from last episode. As his bandwagon driver, I felt duty-bound to defend him:

Unlike Max, Shirin had screen time last week. What did she have to say about it? Let’s check her Instagram:

Oh no, Shirin has the plague! No wonder those howler monkeys were having sex last episode; they were convinced it was the end times! I hope Nicaragua uses these pictures in their tourism ads: “Come to San Juan del Sur and experience life as food for other species!”

But enough about last week’s episode, what else did season 30’s most-beloved Survivors do this week?

Magical. You can’t see it, but right now I’m basically making the same face Shirin is in that picture. Also, I’m asking Yau-Man for a car. Just in case. You never know, he might just have a thing for giving cars away.

I can’t get enough Yau-Man. It’s a shame they cast him with a bunch of fairly awful people in Fiji (although being cast with those awful people did allow this incredibly satisfying Yau-Man moment to happen), and that his stay in Micronesia was so short. He’s adorable. I bet he’d be the coolest grandfather ever. Way better than the racist one you probably have. And he’s an MIT grad who studied physics, so he-

OHMYGODHE’SPETTINGADOLPHIN! With Sandra! Adopt me, Yau-Man. We’ll go on Survivor the next time they’re stupid enough to do a Blood vs. Water season and we’ll just wreck shit. You do all the figurative heavy lifting, I’ll do all the literal heavy lifting. Because you’re tiny. Tiny and awesome.

Looking at the scoreboard, Max has some Yau-Man pictures, a graduate-level discussion on the pervasiveness of casual sexism in Survivor, and a tweet fucking with Mike about firewood. Shirin has some photos of her as patient zero. Work harder, Shirin! Or, as our dear friend Jeff Probst would say, “DIG, WOMAN!”

Baller. Now that’s more like it. I bought a parking space at my work, too. I had them write “Reserved for A Huge Asshole” on it, but everyone else kept parking in it.

Hang on a second, I have to check something…Sorry everyone, Andy says I can’t make this picture the new Purple Rock logo. He’s a dick. I’m going to give credit to both Max and Shirin for this picture, though, since they both retweeted it. (Getting credit for the work of others? Who do they think they are, Chris Daugherty?)

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Shirin is putting up much of a social media fight this week. We’ll let Max get one last shot in- with an assist from Jenn- and hope that Shirin comes out swinging next week.

On the episode:

Do you enjoy excessive profanity? Are you really into grown ass men hurtfully lashing out at people who are just playing a game on TV? If so, it’s about to feel like your fucking birthday.

But first, let’s flash back to around 8:30 p.m. last night. Carolyn, horribly awful person and unofficial leader of the Wet Blanket Alliance on the white collar tribe, has had enough of Max and Shirin. Max, in particular, is “like a cult leader.” And the others in her tribe are drinking the Kool-Aid.

You’re on a tribe with fucking Joaquin! How is anyone less palatable than Joaquin the Sentient Erection? I hate the Wet Blanket Alliance. Fortunately, Max barely pulls out an immunity challenge win over Rodney and sends blue collar to tribal council. Carolyn, Tyler, and Joaquin are denied the chance to assemble into history’s shittiest Voltron.

Even better, the white collars avoiding tribal council means that both Max and Shirin will make it to the tribe swap. Drop those buffs and free yourself from the soul-sucking leeches at the Masaya camp! Let’s see how these tribes shook out:

Shirin and Max are still together! Jenn is now with them! Holy shit, this is like a Survivor dream come true! Sure, Carolyn is in there too and the other tribe is all strong dudes (and one strong lady), but I’m sure nothing horribly fucking terrible will come of all that. This is a time for celebration!

All the better, at this point it is clear that Max and Shirin are airtight. They’re thinking, “We’ve got this thing. We are going to dominate. Someday soon, some fucking weirdo on the internet will write up blog posts about us and put us on Hype Team Four Three (sorry, Dan!).”

But then, something strange happens. You may remember, because I mentioned it again in this fucking post before we even got to the episode, that I love Jenn almost as much as Jenn hates humanity. Jenn is like a bird- a beautiful, soulless bird that soars above us and shits on anything she can. And one cannot keep such a bird caged. So maybe I should have seen what was coming here.

Jenn does not instantly take to Shirin and Max. In fact, one might say- if one were trying to be an asshole and rub salt in my wounds- that Jenn can’t stand them. This is the exact point where my heart is broken.

At this point, Survivor pours on the foreshadowing: Max excited about tribal council (Ruh roh), Shirin and Max saying they feel completely safe (No!), and Shirin getting the “awkward weirdo” edit (NO NO NO NO NO!). The only thing tribal council would reveal would be whether I was getting punched in the face or the balls.

Not even the sweet freedom of leaving two-thirds of the Wet Blanket Alliance behind could save Max and Shirin. The remaining Wet Blanket partnered with chicken-beheading Hali, Walking Head Wound Kelly, some guy who was in a YouTube video once, and heartless Dementor Jenn. Five scraps of parchment later, my dream of a Jenn-Shirin-Max power trio was permanently crushed, with Jenn playing the Brutus to my dream’s Caesar. Et tu, Jenn?

 

I’ll be honest: This one is tough. So tough that I actually expended the effort to make a YouTube video. Not a lot of effort, clearly, but some. Love you, Bay!

 

 

Final verdict: Nobody wins here. Unless you hated my love of Max and Shirin and you’re into schadenfreude. (If you are, then you’ll really enjoy this week’s podcast.)