S:13 - Invasion of the sanity snatchers
All things taken into account, this really wasn’t the most riveting of installments. Raro was generally stupid. Aito was generally competent. The producers threw some editing curves at us, or at least tried to do so in their largely predictable fashion.
Things started out according to form on Raro, in that the guys were pissed that the girls had actually, you know, used their numerical superiority to their advantage. Surprisingly, the guys reacted smartly by working hard & playing the socio-political game. The girls, however, almost hurt themselves by abruptly getting stuck on stupid, as they began to focus on getting rid of Cristina and forgetting that Parvati was being wishy-washy about committing to the whole girl-power strategy. If it were me, I’d have either gotten rid of another guy, or gotten rid of Parvati, so as to securely lock in the girl-power alliance. As it stands, however, Parvati could now just as easily jump over to the guys & get rid of the other girls. Dumb gameplay on the part of Jenny & Rebecca! It doesn’t matter if Cristina is annoyingly bossy, or if Stephannie is mentally checking out — they’re reliable alliance-mates who can be manipulated/led relatively easily. Parvati and the guys cannot. Unless they start winning some immunities, this will come back to haunt them.
As for Stephannie’s ouster, I can only say that it’s for the best, because she seems to genuinely nice and/or naive to be playing Survivor down to the bitter end. She obviously didn’t truly learn the lesson that last week’s near elimination should’ve taught her - i.e., keep your mouth shut & your feelings/fantasies to yourself! That said, I do think that Nate read way too much into the whole “mashed potatoes & gravy” comment. I took it more to mean that Stephannie was just acknowledging that she could easily be voted off and that, if it happened, she wouldn’t mind feeding her food craving. Not that it matters, though, because Nate did a pretty good job of taking a seed of weakness & sowing it into a crop of doubt…
Over on Aito, things were pretty much uneventful. I did feel sorry for Ozzy, though, because he seems to have hitched his wagon to the crazy horses of Cao Boi & Flissica, and that’s just not a good place to be. That threesome worked hard to get someone to go with them on their little expedition, but the others were rightfully wary of getting sucked into a vortex of lunacy. Yul did a great job of working to get Sundra locked into being the 5th vote that his alliance needs to stay firmly in power, although Sundra seems to be smart enough to see that her alternatives are kind of limited at the present time. Regarding the expedition, I can only say that I’m shocked by the lack of awareness on Ozzy’s part. Cao Boi & Flissica didn’t surprise me all that much, but Ozzy should’ve known better. It was truly an uncomfortable moment, and it made for great TV!
The immunity challenge turned out to be much more difficult than it looked, and it was nice to see Raro self-destruct at the last minute. Both tribes are dysfunctional, but Aito is a more appealing blending of the dysfunctional elements than is Raro.
Hopefully, things will pick up a bit next week…
-ghp
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