Doughty recruit Yaney, the goofy balloon sculptor who had a mouth full of stainless steel and a heart full of tapioca pudding, is gone, snared in a sudden conflagration at the end of last week's "Boot Camp" episode.

Recruit Coddington was summarily ousted by the other seven recruits remaining. It is one of "Boot Camp's" delectable twists that the ousted recruit each week is allowed, willy-nilly, to drag another recruit off the show with him or her.

And last week, unexpectedly, instead of taking down with her one of the bickering alpha males left -- recruits Wolf, Moretti-with-an-i or Jackson -- Coddington picked on the melancholy Yaney, before he even had a chance to sculpt a big farewell puppy balloon with a tear coming out of one eye.

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"Boot Camp" is by far the most physically exhausting and mentally knotty TV show we've ever watched. We suppose that's the point; it's just like real boot camp. But we don't want to actually be there.

We're in it for the vicarious pleasure of seeing people be abused by the show's bristling phalanx of psycho drill instructors, fervently praying all the while that MM McSweeney, Rosenbaum and Francisco will be part of the mix in "Big Brother II," should that demonic plan come to fruition.

Still, when we watch people doing too many push-ups, we get tired. Watching the show, we feel our biceps throbbing; our abs are cramped with the thought of having to do more sit-ups, even though we haven't done one in, uh, a while.

And then to make things worse, there's the setup of the show. Allowing each bootee to make a "mercy kill," as one of the D.I.s termed it, makes handicapping the game very difficult, if not impossible.

And things aren't going to get clearer. The announcer at the start of tonight's episode, the series' sixth, describes what the final show, two weeks hence, will consist of: a complicated slate of physical challenges and a voting process reminiscent of the Rube Goldberg contraptions that caused so much trouble in Florida last November.

It takes a while but we finally discern how the endgame on "Boot Camp" is going to play out. The last two players are going to have to go through a series of tough physical contests, with the discharged recruits (as opposed to the mercy kills and those medically discharged) coming back to vote to whom to award the $500,000 "Boot Camp" grand prize, "Survivor"-style.

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Tonight is another study in how women handle the "Boot Camp" process differently from the men. The first order of business is deciding who this week's squad leader is going to be.

The squad leader, you will recall, leads the group on the weekly faux-commando mission. If the squad completes the chore in the requisite amount of time, the squad as a whole gets some little reward, generally involving food or fun, and the squad leader that week gets immunity from booting.

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