Survivor: Samoa post-season comments
Spoilers after the jump (sorry feed readers!)
Pride goeth before the fall.
Holy crap. I was totally blown away. When the final tribal council started, I thought that Russell would absolutely murder the rest of them. Then Erik pulled out one of the most powerful and best juror speeches ever: “Why should the ‘weak’ person deserve to lose?”
It’s a very valid argument, even though I don’t personally agree with it in the context of Survivor. However, I can see how many people could. Also, it’s different if Natalie had the “coattails” strategy as an express strategy, but I don’t think she intentionally planned it that way. She just sort of fell into it, and had to have Erik express it for her.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I can conjecture why the jury went that way. Most of the people this season weren’t really as scheming or competitive as we have seen in the past. I have never seen team “cohesion” like that before – the team lines were divided long, long, long after the merge. No one was really willing to shake things up, they for the most part just blindly stuck by their team. Russell would then draw one of them off, manipulate them into voting one of their own off, and dispense with them later. Russell’s own posse never really tried to make a move against him, or showed foresight or planning. Even Natalie and Mick at the end were all but resigned to losing to Russell.
But Russell misjudged his fellow survivors. I certainly did. Ultimately, they had a different value system to the typical survivor, and that was why they voted the way they did. (They also clearly had a different value system to the audience, who voted for Russell as player of the season.)
All in all, a brilliant season of Survivor, with some delicious moments, and some really intense, nailbiters.
Survivor 20 (Heroes vs Villains) will be an cracker. Can’t wait until February 11.
10:16pm 
