| Nick, the man who wasn't there, is gone for real 04/06/2001 By Ed Bark
Television Critic No more Nick at nite, except on cable.
Not that Nick Brown registered as much more than a test pattern. His tribemates tuned him out as expected on Thursday's latest episode of Survivor: The Australian Outback, reducing their numbers to a malnourished skin-and-bones sextet.
Nick, a Harvard Law School student who turned 24 on Monday, easily had been the show's most unremarkable contestant. But he left a few lasting impressions on his last show, carping about his sore back and raw throat after commenting graphically on the importance of maintaining a scrub-a-dub posterior.
This last observation came after several competitors, notably Rodger Bingham, felt the need to run for the woods after consuming various prized edibles purchased during a "food auction." Rodger's undoing was a cheeseburger that went down and out almost instantaneously.
"I'm gonna go take a bath so the whole tent doesn't smell ... by the end of the night," Nick said.
Marked for banishment on the previous episode, Nick had stayed in the game by whipping Texan Colby Donaldson in a climactic immunity challenge. But Colby won Thursday's "talisman" after a slow start in an exhausting trial by fire and water.
Contestants were required to keep a flame burning in a bucket and then raise it to the level of an overhead fuse by pouring water into a leaky bucket at the other end of this very odd teeter-totter. First to light the fuse won. Keith Famie fell short by an eyelash before Colby finally triumphed. At tribal council, a spent Nick said, "I stood up today and felt like I was really going to pass out."
The four votes against him came from former Ogakors Colby, Keith, Tina Wesson and Amber Brkich. Ex-Kuchas Rodger and Elisabeth Filarski tried to write off Amber. Nick voted against Keith in a final fit of pique.
"Unlike everyone else, he [Keith] didn't feel the need to bring his backpack [to tribal council]," Nick explained. "That's just flat-out arrogance."
Woo-hoo, Nick would have been sorely missed had he been this frisky throughout. Now he'll join Jerri Manthey and Alicia Calaway on the eventual seven- person "jury" that will decide the grand-prize winner.
"It's been a great adventure," Nick said in his closing comments. "Had some great times and some big lows. The last few days have been really rough on me, and it's taught me a lot about not only my strengths but more importantly my weaknesses. I kinda feel invincible at times, and Survivor's been a big reality check for me ... It's definitely been a ride."
Not a wild ride of late, though. For the second straight week, respondents to the dallasnews.com Survivor Web site joined most prognosticators in correctly picking the evictee. Nick received an overwhelming 50 percent of 2,201 votes cast, with Amber finishing second with 17 percent of the tally.
The episode's other story line was the depleted food supply. Listless, sickly and weepy after squandering their allotted rations of rice and fishing hooks, the contestants succumbed to an offer from host Jeff Probst, who said, Satan-like: "My role is a giver and a taker. Nothing comes cheap."
Gimme shelter, he then said. And the remaining survivors agreed to relinquish their tent tarps and Colby's protective Texas flag in return for a three-week supply of rice and 25 more fishing hooks.
They're now living in a makeshift home made of leaves and twigs. And next week it rains hard again.
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