Survivor: Now taking bets on when Cirie will be on Oprah

That was a less-than-magnificent end to an enjoyable season. Once Cirie's fire went out, my investment in the outcome of this installment of Survivor plummeted. Since I assumed that whoever went with Danielle to the final would win, the result was hardly a surprise. And the jury trial was pretty tame.

But all that aside, the outcome was good. I believe Aras was a worthy winner. The ew.com site is filled with comments from people booing the outcome because "Terry dominated the game." I strongly disagree. Terry dominated the challenges. That's it. In every other respect he was a marginal player who had little effect on what happened to anyone else. Aras may have lost a lot of challenges to Terry, and but in every other respect, Aras was the stronger player. Pretentious and prone to flakiness when not in the throes of a roid rage, yes, but a strong player and not a bad guy. He deserves credit for holding together his alliance of kooks and winning immunity at a vital moment. True, the key moves he made were Cirie's ideas, but making a smart, under-the-radar player your most loyal ally counts as good gameplay. So I put him above Terry, no question. And Danielle was so clearly unworthy of the Sole Survivor title that it hardly merits analysis.

The only real surprise in the episode was that Danielle got to be the picker rather than the pickee. Who thought she'd win the final immunity challenge? I didn't. But the balance-based endurance test might as well have been designed specifically for her to win. When it comes to staying upright on a sinking, unstable surface, lowest center of gravity wins. The end. (And weighing 93 pounds or whatever doesn't hurt, either). It was dumb for Aras to jump off, thinking they had a pact, but he wasn't going to beat her, either, so no harm done. It was also a little bit dumb for Terry to win the reward challenge, because at that point it was probably more important for him to spend some time shoring up his relationship with Danielle than it was to have a meal. After all, Danielle had burned him twice before, so he should have realized that her word wasn't exactly gold and he needed to keep working her. But what's a million dollars when you can show Aras who's boss yet again! See, poor gameplay. He didn't deserve to win. And with that, I give you my final random observations about this crew:

• Shane: I can't believe he resorted to copying the lame, lame, LAME "pick a number" trick for his vote. And dude, what sort of deranged stylist got a hold of you before the reunion show? Has Angus Young started a men's clothing line?
• Courtney: What the??? Incomprehensible. Except for the hating part. I love it when people say they're "over it" and lecture on how bad it is to carry negative feelings around while they're clearly seething with animosity. But yeah, we totally hear you, Evil Hippie. It's all about the love. Except when it's not.
• Cirie: I wasn't expecting the Reunion Show to be such a Cirie-fest. But I guess everyone else liked her as much as I did. She looked great, too. Slimmed down, made over--all ready for her closeup as short-term Queen of the YouGoGirl media nation.
• Bruce: Who knew he had such a thing for Danielle?
• Tina: God, that poor woman. I wonder if Probst felt cheap milking her grief like that. He should.