I said last time I really thought Savage/Tasha should bring in Woo as their third and dump Abi, so I got excited when Tasha spoke to him alone. But alas, it was not to be. Instead everyone starts fighting over Abi’s vote. “WAH WOO VOTED FOR ME TWICE” goddamn what a single track mind. I really thought Varner had figured out how to use her, but in the end she voted him out… so maybe she’s not a complete moron?
Hero challenge was pretty cool. The immunity challenge looked incredibly taxing… risk of injury, carrying around heavy pieces, and a difficult puzzle. Did not look fun…
I was cheering when yellow tribe won reward. They needed something, anything so badly!
The level of exhaustion on the faces of yellow tribe was incredible. You could really feel it.
Sadly, Abi is the perfect sort of player to have sitting next to you at the end. She’ll be universally hated so I feel we’ll be seeing her for a long time.
So none of the teams chose their best physical person for the hero challenge - Woo, Joe, and Spencer all sat it out. Saving them for the immunity challenge the next day?
I get that Abi is great to have next to you at the end, but I can’t believe Woo, Tash and the others didn’t take the opportunity to get her out last night. The way she kept oohing and awwing when someone would say how they like her was annoying.
And now if I’m Woo - I spend the rest of the game saying “Jeff was loyal to Abi and look where that got him. Abi has no ties to loyalty at all - she has to go…”
I am sure they know Abi can’t be trusted once the merge comes. She’ll be the next vote if they lose immunity one more time before then. Can’t expect to carry her all the way to the end.
You would think so, but we’ve seen some some stupid decisions on this show over the years!
That IC looked seriously dangerous. I’m surprised they allowed it. Have a bunch of blind-folded people carry around super-heavy objects and then drop them. What could possibly go wrong?
It was better than this challenge in Worlds Apart when they had to lift stuff 15 ft in the air, using a rope platform, while blindfolded. Kelly probably came within an inch or two of a fractured skull.
I said before the season started that this looked like a boring cast chosen by the fans, and so far it is. If it wasn’t for Abi’s lunacy, nothing would be happening. They’d just be showing challenges and shots of wildlife and sunsets.
Maybe it’s because two tribes haven’t been involved in Tribal Council yet, but I’d imagine if there was any drama there, they’d be showing it.
I imagine the producers are desperately trying to keep Abi from being voted off, or there’d be nothing to show.
Yeah, that really was unfair, giving them such a ratfuck camp. That sent them up to lose.
How many times must it be said- until the merge, you keep the strongest. You can’t win if your tribe keep going to Tribal Council and gets voted off. After the merge, get rid of threats, and keep a loser to be #2.
I suppose you mean it’s boring in terms of there’s nothing crazy going on at camp, no interesting slices of life, etc… which is true. But that’s because they’re veteran players who know how to play the game. I’d wager they all took time to study up on their mistakes and better strategies - hell, even Abi said she did (though I don’t think she’s doing a good job of actually following through). So yeah, you’ll see a lot of stuff like Kass being nice instead of people flying off the handle.
But the flip side of that is that the gameplay and strategy has been top notch. In the typical game of Survivor, there’s one or two alpha players who emerge pretty quickly, get their alliance in line and start picking everyone off else one by one while the rest of the players sit around like dodos and await their execution with varying amounts of grumbling. In this game, we’ve already seen a number of surprising flips and alliance re-alignments.
I suppose it depends on what you watch for. If you want to just see people on TV be entertaining, you won’t like this season. If you really like Survivor as a game/sport and enjoy the strategy, you should be loving it. Me, personally, I’d be totally fine if the show was nothing but challenges, tribal councils and the camp moments which effected those.
I think we saw the after-effects at the last immunity challenge. The other two tribes were in the same conditions and were able to continue. The only Survivors who appeared to be too tired to finished the challenge were the members of the tribe who: 1) were forced leave a camp they had already built, 2) were forced to build a new camp, and 3) were forced to to this without food.
While they were able to pull out the Reward Challenge, the cumulative effects, even following a BBQ, were apparent.
I like the strategic aspect of Survivor, but I’m just not seeing it. All I’m seeing is people scrambling around due to Abi’s craziness. Strategy implies coming up with a plan, long or short term, and sticking with it. All I’m seeing is desperate self-preservation.
I agree on both counts. Your first goal should be to make it to the merger. That means keeping your team strong and voting off the weakest. Voting off the strongest just tips the scales in favor of you going back to tribal.
Even if you argue that it’s best to cut out the strong early, that only works if everyone plays that way. If one tribe cuts out the weaker players and your tribe cuts out the stronger players, after the merge you’ll still have a strong player around who has zero loyalty to you. No, my strategy would be to keep the stronger player around and try to build an alliance with him/her.
Not giving the new tribe even basic provisions was actually cruel, let alone unfair.
I think at least last episode was edited to make Abi look more important/central than she really is. She clearly wanted to keep Varner but in the end sided with everyone else and voted him out. To me that indicates she’s not running things anymore and realizes it.