Pirate Master is losing interest, even among Doper pirates, so it seems to me that there’s no longer a purpose for a separate thread for each episode.
If they spent more time doing piratey stuff and less time in tribal council – oops, Pirate Court – then the show would be far more fun to watch. It would also help if a few people occasionally slipped into the piratey (Penzance-Cornwall) dialect.
The main reason I’m watching this week is to see if Joe Don walks the plank, as he cannot retain immunity. Actually, the rule is that he has to sell the Royal Pardon to the highest bidder; I don’t know if he would be able to game the system in any of a number of ways to reclaim it immediately.
I watched one of the extra videos on the CBS website. It was just Joy and some of the other contestants learning how to set some of the sails. It was great! I’ve read complaints on other messages boards that the people on the show are faking it. That’s not it at all, it’s just the situations they’re put in that are so contrived. When I saw them doing something real, it was much more interesting.
My perspective may be unique, but damn I wish there was more of that in the show.
Camera pans from two people (sorry, but no idea about names) talking about the chick on top of the deck to the chick (Nana? Anna? Lola?) on top of the deck and back to the people below deck. Camera pans back and forth, back and forth, and nobody seems to notice? Right.
They don’t even use real black powder guns when they fire a gun. Just use a prop gun and dub the gunfire sound in later.
What these guys need are real swords!
(and that’s not a dagger they put the votes on, it’s a Bowie knife)
I abandoned ship about halfway though today. There just isn’t enough exciting stuff going on. Don’t expect I’ll come back next week or ever, for that matter.
I wish when they do the challenge thingies, each team had to follow a separate path to a separate treasure. The paths could cross at one or two points, which is where the ambushes would be. The winning team could shoot a pistol to announce to the losing team they’ve found the treasure. However, I really wish the challenges were more like those on Survivor.
On the local front, Azmyth has a commercial plugging his mom’s furniture store. He says the only thing more fun than being a pirate is shopping there. If that’s pirating they do on that show then I can think of a gazillion things more fun than that.
Mehness increases. I agree with the bulk of the posts here. Show us more piratey moments. Make the challenges more complex than foot races. Tribal Council is painfull to watch.
Azmyth transform into a total poser when he wears that hat.
One of the people plotting was Jupiter. The eavesdropper was Nessa (who, I think, was doing a very piratey thing by eavesdropping).
I think you’re right about the flintlocks; I don’t recall seeing any smoke – and black powder releases a lot of smoke when it burns.
Last night was the first time I recall the show making it clear that men and women draw shot for the teams from separate bags. I don’t see why that’s useful.
A “well done” to Laurel talking her way out of the hot seat, by getting Cap’n Azymuth to withdraw his reason for giving her a black spot.
I really wish I’d kept track of the money each person got from the start. Not just the original splits, but the revised splits, and the ‘extras’ handed out by Joe Don the second week (?) and the money spent on the pardons, and the loans and bribes and what all.
It’d be interesting to see how it shakes out. For example, the woman-who-was-Joe-Don’s mate – she got mate’s money twice, I don’t know if she was on any other winning teams, but she likely went out with a decent amount of money. OTOH, I think they said in yesterday’s show that it was the first time another women was on the winning side. Possibly someone could be cut adrift and have NO money.
Instead of footraces all the time, how about a sailing challenge? Give each team a small sail boat and have them have to do a course that requires going up, down, and cross wind around three buoys – now THERE’S a chance that will separate out the landlubbers fast.
Really? I think the point is to keep the teams from ending up so unbalanced you know which team is going to win. Next week there will be five men and six women playing. Azymth (or however that’s spelled) and his two mates (Sean and Jay, is it?) will automatically be on the black team. If you did what would be the ‘fairest’ in the sense of most random, the others would pick from a bag holding 3 black and 6 red balls. And then if the two remaing men happened to pick black balls, AND a woman picked a black ball, you’d have the Black team being 6 (5 men + 1 woman) vs. 5 women. What odds on the Red team winning?
So instead (my guess) the other two men will ‘pick’ from a bag with only red balls, while the women’s bag will have 2 black and 4 red balls. Automatic result: Black team = 3 men/2 women and Red = 2 men/4 women. So the only real chance is which two women end up on Black.
I’m not sure if Azymuth is a) unable to make his own decisions or b) unwilling to make them. He’s basically allowed his mates to choose the nominees and then he just parrots the reasons the mate used. Which makes his look really foolish when the reason is nonsensical (except from the mates POV: I want her gone because she’s not on MY side.)
It looks to me like Azymuts is simple tring to fly under the radar even though he’s captain: see? I got no more money than the rest of you. See? It’s OTHERS who make the choices, I just went along.
Actually, I’m enjoying it a lot from a “Gamey-ness” perspective. The ever-shifting teams and captain/black spot dynamic is way more interesting than a fixed team Survivor-inspired vote-out with immunity, like almost every other reality show has. And actually encouraging bribery and deal making makes it much more of a gamers game than a popularity contest. (Although as Joe Don is seeing, hoarding the lion’s share of the loot and not using it to make friends is a good way to turn it back into one.) The addition of the sell-able pardon adds another layer of bidding in the mix, and I would definitely love to play this game, even sitting around a table and not on a pirate ship. I agree that the challenges could use some variety, but that’s the least interesting part for me.
So, in short. I think I like it. Way more than I thought I would.
Now that’s an interesting idea, gonzoron. How would we design a comparable game of money - blackspots - vote 'em out to play at a table or on the Dope?
The problem I have with it as a game is that the treasure-hunting and pirate’s-court bits are completely disconnected. Why vote out a weak hunter (although, Kendra cleans up okay) if they’re just as likely to be on the other team tomorrow?
I’m the exact opposite. I’d love to be on the ship without all the made-up piratey stuff.
I think the show would be better if it was more a reality show and less a competition – more like “here’s a bunch of landlubber Gen X’ers / Gen Y’ers that we’ve turned into pirate swabbies, let’s watch them 24/7 until the producers get tired of it.”
I get an extremely “phony” vibe from this show - the debilitating injuries that heal themselves overnight, the oblivious charging into obvious booby traps, the aforementioned camerawork that gives away secret plot twists, and the hamfisted acting of the crew, especially when they become captain. The whole thing seems scripted to me.
The camera work is what bugs me the most. The aforementioned spying, with nobody in the kitchen noticing the cameraman panning up all the time. The boobytrap last night, with the camera focused in on the tripwire. All in all, sloppily done. But the machinations among the contastants are interesting. I like the “no set teams” idea, whic makes for more sneakiness. What is going to happen when we get down to three crew and three officers is we’re going to see our first mutiny. Then it gets interesting. Final 3 - all officers? How do they plan on dealing with really small teams? I’ll keep Tivoing it, just on the off chance that Nessa pops out of her top again.
We don’t know how large or obtrusive the cameras are. It’s likely that the camera set at the tripwire was a lipstick cam that would be nigh impossible to spot as one is running through the forest, and the panning camera could have been stationary with the pan and scan added in post-production.
This was a pretty so-so episode. Sean was getting kind of annoying, so I didn’t mind seeing him booted out. I think Jay’s strategy is pretty good-- staying out of the #1 spot (did you notice how quick his hand went up to nominate Azmyth as captain), and retaining a good secondary spot so he still gets some control over the situation.
Not me. I find the ever shifting teams and the short time between drawing lots and the competition mean that I can’t keep track of which team I want to win the competition–or even decide which team I want to see win the competition. And I don’t mind the footrace part (too much) but I don’t really like the “dig randomly around a target till someone gets lucky” part.
Plus, the fact that those who are put up for elimination are chosen by the captain and his mates, and then voted on by everyone else . . and the three candidates rather than two . . . I don’t know who is pairing up with whom or for how long, which isn’t a big deal, but doesn’t increase my enjoyment of the episode.
hah! I had forgotten about azmyth making an assmith of himself at Pirate Council. That was very funny.
I agree with Eureka about the random digging. All missions have ended with the whole bunch crowded at the X searching almost randomly (Except for the scientist/exotic dancer, who gave it some thought)
Count me in for the SDMB game if you are serious about it. I have always championed the idea of a Survivor sans the island.
The voters at Tribal Court are already just six. This has to change soon. There is already more people not voting than voting.
That might be the element that is missing from this show. They need to show how much each pirate has, and maybe even make the low earner up for elimination and the richest pirate a target for theft.
Anyone else (of the three of us still watching) thinking that tonight we might see a mutiny? They’re not showing us anyone talking about mutiny, and everyone is so conflicted.