Survivor Part II: Revenge of the Stupid
When the last post ended, the men were in dire straits after Bubba was voted off. They were down overall, 7-5, and they were still too dumb to throw the immunity challenge. They in fact won the next one, and Rory (the only black person on the show and also the most volatile -- under pressure, he said he was going to "burn this camp down", which gets the award for the craziest Survivor threat ever) felt the women's gun pointed directly at him. He was saved when the women decided to vote off Cueballs -- a little bit because she was "untrustworthy" (true), but mostly because the girls were getting sort of traditionally catty. Their claws were out, and the Cueball was scratched, if you will. So, the women were not really any smarter than the men. Nobody was thinking in this whole middle section of the season.
Going with that theme, the 4-2 male tribe actually managed to lose the next immunity challenge, which caused Manly Twila and Hot Julie to both make quick alliances with Sarge (the de facto leader of the men and a human who came off terribly on TV -- he was trying to be a miltary leader, and who wants that on an island when you're under duress? He was destined to fail), which Sarge inexplicably believes thanks to the council of his Wormtounge, Chris. I want to make it clear that Chris was dead set for voting off a guy, and that he effectively screwed the other members of his Alliance because of it. As I remember it, Chad and John K. maybe could have persuaded Sarge to vote off one of their enemies, thus equaling the male/female ratio at 5/5, but John K. wanted to vote Chad off and Chad wanted to not be voted off. So Sarge ended up trusting the women against his better judgement (in the move of the game IMO, Julie convinces Twila that Sarge also made an agreement with her (Julie) to get to the final 4, when in fact Sarge did not. This probably prevents Julie from being voted off here and probably dooms the men's alliance from sweeping when the tribes merged, because Twila does not trust Sarge and eventually double-crosses him) and they all agree to go with the guy's original plan of voting the young virile men off, and John K. goes home.
It's now 6-4 girls, and the tribes merge. Twila does her double-cross after promising both Sarge and Ami she was going to vote their way, and votes Sarge out. It is at this point that I will talk about Ami, because she is a bundle of interesting characteristics. First of all, she's a 30something woman who a) posed for Playboy; b) traveled Europe for like a year; c) works as a Coffee Barista (fancy name for clerk) at Starbucks. She also has hypnotic powers, apparently, because women stayed allied to her for no good reason in the middle of this game. Seriously, if they would have thought a little bit they would have figured out that when pyromaniac Rory was voted out, making it 6-3 women, 2 girls should have gone to the men and said, "hey, let's ally up and get to the final three." But they never did. And these are the hidden factors in each game that makes Survivor so interesting. But more on Ami: she openly despised the men (enough to get her booed on the Reunion Special, in fact); she openly seduced the women to her side of thinking; she treated people like underlings; she had her enormous chest covered with a shawl. This strategy of hers should have gotten her voted off almost immediately, but thanks to self-destucting girls and guys it didn't. To think she was even close to winning is so ridiculous I can barely conceive of it. It's like infinity or Gallagher.
So, Rory is voted off, and then Sarge drops the ball by not going to the two young women (Elisa and Julie, who had the least ties to the other women) and making a deal to get into the final four with he and Chad (not Chris, who was totally untrustworthy and a horrible alliance partner), and really to get into the final three because if Sarge or Chad wins immunity in the final four, who are they going to vote off -- the other strong guy or a weak girl? Sarge should have explained to them that their weakness was their strength, and that they needed to make this move to give them the best chance to win. But for some reason he never did, and they never approached him either. Eliza was too busy scowling at Twila, probably. The best part of this plan would be he could explain it to them and they would do it because it was in their best interest to do it. Oh, well. Sarge gets the double indignity of getting sung at by Scout (in the season's best scene, Scout and Sarge are sitting by the campfire, and Scout sings some crappy song at him while stroking her hair, and Sarge doesn't even look at her, he wants to kill her, and then Scout tries to make really stupid small talk and you can see Sarge's hand reach for the fork to put in his eye to end the pain. It was great) and betrayed by Twila once again.
Then next week Chad gets voted off, thus ensuring that a scum would win S9.
So Chris is the only guy at this point, and Twila and he are talking, and Twila is getting tired of all these women because she's somewhere in between a man and a woman anyway, and she lets bonehead Chris in on what I told you before -- that Eliza has no real ties to Ami's alliance, and is ripe for the switching. So Twila, Scout, and Eliza switch to Chris' side, enabling him to stay in the game and dooming Ami's gynotastic plan for world domination. Now, I didn't see this episode or the next one (where Ami actually gets the boot), but this was the fun part of the season, because Twila at some point swears on her son's life that she's going to vote with Ami but then betrays her. Her son lives on, though, so I don't know what swearing on one's son's life means anymore. It really was no more than a new way for Twila to lie. Ami should have known Twila was lying because of the over-the-top lunacy of the statement. but she just marched on down to her doom, taking shots at her fellow girls along the way. It was great. Again, I missed this but saw replays later. But with the editing, isn't this show all replays anyway?
After the poisonous Ami and her henchwoman LeAnn leave it's down to the four women and Chris. He makes alliances with all of them and they believe her. They decide to vote Julie off since she became allied with Ami and LeAnn at some point, which caused Julie to whine that Chris pretended he was her friend and in some sense went "over the line" in his deception. In the Reunion, she questioned whether he had feelings at all. Clearly, he doesn't.
The Gang of Four turned to a Gang of Three and voted off Eliza, and it was down to the traditional Challenge of Endurance that decides which Survivor gets to make the final two and choose who will go with him/her. Chris win the balancing/endurance challenge over disabled Scout and not-Manly-enough Twila, and Chris correctly assumes that he can beat Twila after she used her hick son's name in vain like that. So its Hick vs. Hick in the vote that nobody cares about. Despite the fact that his stupidity cost them a chance to win the game, Sarge and Chad vote for Chris, as does everyone but man-hating Ami and Twila-loving Scout, and Chris gets the easiest Million dollars earned ever in the history of man.
In the end, the 5 unlikelyest contestants went the furthest (6, if you count one-legged Chad), and nobody cared who won because they were all reprehensible bastards who only got that far because of the bad thinking of others. I guess that's what you have to do now -- forget reason or good play, vote off the strong, lie to the weak, and hope nobody notices what you're doing until its too late. Boston Rob won it for his wife doing this exact thing, and that makes it two in a row. Why anybody blindly trusts anybody else on Survivor, especially knaves like Rob and Chris, is beyond my comprehension. Maybe next time someone cool will win.
Going with that theme, the 4-2 male tribe actually managed to lose the next immunity challenge, which caused Manly Twila and Hot Julie to both make quick alliances with Sarge (the de facto leader of the men and a human who came off terribly on TV -- he was trying to be a miltary leader, and who wants that on an island when you're under duress? He was destined to fail), which Sarge inexplicably believes thanks to the council of his Wormtounge, Chris. I want to make it clear that Chris was dead set for voting off a guy, and that he effectively screwed the other members of his Alliance because of it. As I remember it, Chad and John K. maybe could have persuaded Sarge to vote off one of their enemies, thus equaling the male/female ratio at 5/5, but John K. wanted to vote Chad off and Chad wanted to not be voted off. So Sarge ended up trusting the women against his better judgement (in the move of the game IMO, Julie convinces Twila that Sarge also made an agreement with her (Julie) to get to the final 4, when in fact Sarge did not. This probably prevents Julie from being voted off here and probably dooms the men's alliance from sweeping when the tribes merged, because Twila does not trust Sarge and eventually double-crosses him) and they all agree to go with the guy's original plan of voting the young virile men off, and John K. goes home.
It's now 6-4 girls, and the tribes merge. Twila does her double-cross after promising both Sarge and Ami she was going to vote their way, and votes Sarge out. It is at this point that I will talk about Ami, because she is a bundle of interesting characteristics. First of all, she's a 30something woman who a) posed for Playboy; b) traveled Europe for like a year; c) works as a Coffee Barista (fancy name for clerk) at Starbucks. She also has hypnotic powers, apparently, because women stayed allied to her for no good reason in the middle of this game. Seriously, if they would have thought a little bit they would have figured out that when pyromaniac Rory was voted out, making it 6-3 women, 2 girls should have gone to the men and said, "hey, let's ally up and get to the final three." But they never did. And these are the hidden factors in each game that makes Survivor so interesting. But more on Ami: she openly despised the men (enough to get her booed on the Reunion Special, in fact); she openly seduced the women to her side of thinking; she treated people like underlings; she had her enormous chest covered with a shawl. This strategy of hers should have gotten her voted off almost immediately, but thanks to self-destucting girls and guys it didn't. To think she was even close to winning is so ridiculous I can barely conceive of it. It's like infinity or Gallagher.
So, Rory is voted off, and then Sarge drops the ball by not going to the two young women (Elisa and Julie, who had the least ties to the other women) and making a deal to get into the final four with he and Chad (not Chris, who was totally untrustworthy and a horrible alliance partner), and really to get into the final three because if Sarge or Chad wins immunity in the final four, who are they going to vote off -- the other strong guy or a weak girl? Sarge should have explained to them that their weakness was their strength, and that they needed to make this move to give them the best chance to win. But for some reason he never did, and they never approached him either. Eliza was too busy scowling at Twila, probably. The best part of this plan would be he could explain it to them and they would do it because it was in their best interest to do it. Oh, well. Sarge gets the double indignity of getting sung at by Scout (in the season's best scene, Scout and Sarge are sitting by the campfire, and Scout sings some crappy song at him while stroking her hair, and Sarge doesn't even look at her, he wants to kill her, and then Scout tries to make really stupid small talk and you can see Sarge's hand reach for the fork to put in his eye to end the pain. It was great) and betrayed by Twila once again.
Then next week Chad gets voted off, thus ensuring that a scum would win S9.
So Chris is the only guy at this point, and Twila and he are talking, and Twila is getting tired of all these women because she's somewhere in between a man and a woman anyway, and she lets bonehead Chris in on what I told you before -- that Eliza has no real ties to Ami's alliance, and is ripe for the switching. So Twila, Scout, and Eliza switch to Chris' side, enabling him to stay in the game and dooming Ami's gynotastic plan for world domination. Now, I didn't see this episode or the next one (where Ami actually gets the boot), but this was the fun part of the season, because Twila at some point swears on her son's life that she's going to vote with Ami but then betrays her. Her son lives on, though, so I don't know what swearing on one's son's life means anymore. It really was no more than a new way for Twila to lie. Ami should have known Twila was lying because of the over-the-top lunacy of the statement. but she just marched on down to her doom, taking shots at her fellow girls along the way. It was great. Again, I missed this but saw replays later. But with the editing, isn't this show all replays anyway?
After the poisonous Ami and her henchwoman LeAnn leave it's down to the four women and Chris. He makes alliances with all of them and they believe her. They decide to vote Julie off since she became allied with Ami and LeAnn at some point, which caused Julie to whine that Chris pretended he was her friend and in some sense went "over the line" in his deception. In the Reunion, she questioned whether he had feelings at all. Clearly, he doesn't.
The Gang of Four turned to a Gang of Three and voted off Eliza, and it was down to the traditional Challenge of Endurance that decides which Survivor gets to make the final two and choose who will go with him/her. Chris win the balancing/endurance challenge over disabled Scout and not-Manly-enough Twila, and Chris correctly assumes that he can beat Twila after she used her hick son's name in vain like that. So its Hick vs. Hick in the vote that nobody cares about. Despite the fact that his stupidity cost them a chance to win the game, Sarge and Chad vote for Chris, as does everyone but man-hating Ami and Twila-loving Scout, and Chris gets the easiest Million dollars earned ever in the history of man.
In the end, the 5 unlikelyest contestants went the furthest (6, if you count one-legged Chad), and nobody cared who won because they were all reprehensible bastards who only got that far because of the bad thinking of others. I guess that's what you have to do now -- forget reason or good play, vote off the strong, lie to the weak, and hope nobody notices what you're doing until its too late. Boston Rob won it for his wife doing this exact thing, and that makes it two in a row. Why anybody blindly trusts anybody else on Survivor, especially knaves like Rob and Chris, is beyond my comprehension. Maybe next time someone cool will win.
posted by Mike Pape @ 1:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home