The seven other game show contestants take a break from pretending to be in the Army and slumber peacefully. Coddington looks out into the tenebrous woods.

Moss drips from the trees. There is mist.

All the while, the haunting sounds of a distant Casio foreshadow the approaching horror: drill instructor (D.I.) Taylor. Leaves literally crunch beneath her feet.

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Taylor sweeps past Coddington and into the barracks. It's going to be another earsplitting day at boot camp. Soon the recruits are yelping and scurrying. Haar, the injured pig farmer, is instructed to stay in bed.

In the men's barracks, Yaney, the disoriented balloon sculptor, is told to return to bed after he fails to reach his locker in under 15 seconds.

The overly muscular Sgt. Francisco lovingly tucks him back in.

"Sit here and rest and close your eyes," he says.

But something tells us this paternal moment is insincere.

Yaney tries again and succeeds. So the sergeant lets him have it for still wearing socks.

Back in the women's barracks, Haar struggles to get her pants on.

"Are we feeling better today, Haar?"

"Pain medicine helps, sir," she yodels.

But the sergeant doesn't understand. "I don't speak Midwest, Haar."

Ah, but who does, really? The language of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and John Wayne Gacy is complex and labyrinthine -- but, oh, the honking musicality of it!

Anyway, it's just as well. Haar is from Georgia.

And so the subject turns to potty time and anal hygiene.

Recruit Wolf, the 22-year-old college student, says he refuses to "poop" because recruits are given only 10 seconds to go and, to top it off, there's no toilet paper.

This gives a whole new meaning to the term "evacuation drill."

"I don't know anybody that can poop in 10 seconds, period," Wolf continues. "It's probably not even in Guinness."

(A quick scan of the Guinness Book of Records confirms that while there is no category for speed voiding, in 1980, Mrs. Shakuntala Devi of India correctly multiplied two randomly selected 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds.)

Last week, we noticed that there was a shadowy 16th recruit named Pupo. She appeared in the intro, but in the show's theater of operations, filled with overemoting D.I.s and yelping recruits, she lost, decisively, the battle for screen time.

But this week, at a crucial juncture, she makes a memorable debut.

Somewhere in the background, a toilet flushes. Pupo -- no relation -- rises and pulls up her pants.

"If it takes me a minute and a half to make a sitting head call," she says, "and they're only giving us 45 seconds, I'm going to take a minute and a half.

"Because you know what? They're gonna yell anyway. You might as well go out there with a clean butt."

And on that note, it's chow time.

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