So far this season on Survivor: Gabon, I've been a defender of Randy, at least as it relates to his gameplay and entertainment value. While obviously not a nice guy, at least at first he restricted his nastier comments to the camera, and to those he believed could no longer affect his fate, especially Crystal.

But as Crystal and her allies got the upper hand in recent weeks, Randy became increasingly hard for his fellow players to deal with, and it appeared that the Survivor producers had had enough of his antics as well. Thus, the events of this week's episode, which saw Randy not merely voted out, but humiliated before the viewers and the others in the tribe in a way never before seen.

For all their unpleasantness, Randy and his ally/partner in peevishness Corinne are pretty savvy in how to play the game, and following last week's departure of Charlie both realized that if you're in an alliance of three in an eight-person game, you're going to need to shake things up or find yourself on the sidelines very soon. Both figured their best chance would come if their other ally, Bob, had managed to find the hidden individual immunity idol, which would enable them to sucker the others in and ensure the eviction of a member of the main alliance (which would still hold a four-three advantage afterwards, but Randy and Corinne hadn't thought that far ahead).

Bob had not found the idol, but had managed to fashion a fake that looked stunningly like it could be real, certainly no less plausible than the actual idol that Sugar has held for nearly a month. To my surprise, Bob's first impulse was to tell Sugar that he had made a fake. Two points here: first, Sugar isn't in Bob's alliance. Second, Bob told her that he had searched the area where the idol had to be in vain -- apparently never considering that the reason he hadn't found it was that the person he was talking to had grabbed it for herself.

If Bob had known that Sugar had the idol (something her allies already know), he might have figured the smart thing to do would be to admit it. After all, his idol looked genuine, and the others couldn't be sure that there wasn't a second idol put in play, as there had been in the China season. Instead, all of his work making the fake ended up in service of a joke that doesn't seem to have benefited him at all.

Randy's bad attitude had been exacerbated by the traditional reward challenge auction, where players are given $500 to bid on food and luxuries. The producers have gotten better at using the auction to ratchet up tensions among the players, who are always exhausted and hungry by this stage, and while there were none of the gag gifts that sometimes amount to a waste of money, there were still opportunities to screw thy neighbor, such as Ken winning the right to steal someone's money on the spot and send him to exile (sorry Bob).

Randy spent $20 for a gift for the entire tribe, which turned out to be a plate of cookies. Sugar turned down her cookie, which Randy then broke in two and gave to two others; then, when he again offered her what would have been his cookie, she took it and promptly gave it to Matty (even though Jeff Probst had previously said food could not be shared). Randy ate well at the auction, but the Great Cookie Dis of 2008 made his already grim mood positively volcanic.

Back at camp, Randy engaged in "Operation Strong-arm," attempting to make himself so obnoxious that everyone in Ken's alliance would have to target him, at which point he would pull out Bob's idol (that at this point he didn't know even existed). Matty, possibly thinking ahead to wanting the unlikable Randy with him at the end but perhaps honestly going by who he thought was a threat, had been arguing for taking out Bob first, but after Randy said he had "whored himself out" to his new allies, Matty too was done with Randy.

Once the immunity challenge (won by Ken) had ended, it was a matter of Sugar talking Bob (who is suddenly spending an alarming amount of time with his shirt off) into giving the fake idol to Randy, and Randy accepting it with the words "Looks like an idol to me!" Again, I'm not sure what Bob got out of his ruse other than the chance to build a little rapport with Sugar, although the model certainly enjoyed it to the hilt, alerting her allies that something hilarious was going to be happening at tribal council. Under Probst's questioning, Randy was a bit more sedate than usual -- no talk about "posses" this week -- in an attempt to sell his worry.

The voting itself was personal in a way we almost never see on Survivor, with Sugar calling Randy an alcoholic (possibly unfair) who was in danger of dying alone (OK, I'll give her that one). When Crystal yelled her vote to the point everyone could hear it -- "Forget you, go home, goodbye!" -- Sugar began laughing uncontrollably and didn't stop until after Probst told a crestfallen Randy that he had played a fake idol. Randy went home saying that "being voted out by these bozos is probably one of the best accolades anyone could get." And in his case, that's no doubt true.

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