I don’t think the lesson is a good one. To me it’s that, despite all the awareness and anti-bullying campaigns these days, being a bully is still rewarded behavior. It’s true on Survivor; it’s true at the office; it’s true in many aspects of life. We haven’t come all that far.
My hope is that (next week’s preview spoilers):Jason and Scot will be split up in the tribe shuffle, their respective new tribes will hate them, and they will be voted out quickly. I am, however, not optimistic.
Yeah, whoever buried the bags should get fired. Even without the medical issues, it completely ruined the challenge. What’s the point of such a huge random factor meaning one team wins while the other two are still digging? ISTR in previous challenges of this type, either they were much shallower, or there were ropes leading to the bags so you didn’t have to search, just dig.
Was Scot such a tremendous asshole when he was in the NBA? Only teammates who are “the best in the world” deserve any courtesy or respect?
I think what he was trying to say was that in the NBA, he didn’t have to deal with a wide disparity in talent. There wasn’t anyone who was relegated to the role of cheerleader. (Which is blatantly untrue…there are guys on the end of the bench who never get in.)
I was surprised that the medical team didn’t intervene until they actually had three people in serious distress. They observed the circumstances and how people were reacting towards the end, so they should have known where it was going and done something before people got to life threatening conditions. (Hell, I’m no medical professional but I was watching and knew those people were in real danger.)
I wonder if they even have any protocol in which the med team can throw the flag and interrupt a challenge, require everyone take a five minute break and hand out bottles of cold water. Maybe not.
The drama was very watchable last night, but having the medical team intervene earlier would have been pretty dramatic too.
For all we know they’ve actually done that in the past. But stopping a challenge while everyone is still OK, handing out bottles of water, then resuming the challenge isn’t really compelling TV, so we wouldn’t have seen it.
But probably not - remember the challenge where everyone was blindfolded, and they had to put items on a platform then haul it up via ropes & pulleys to another team member 15 ft above them? Someone caught a dropping platform right on the head and was bleeding profusely, and Jeff wouldn’t let anyone, including the victim, take their blindfolds off while medical was examining her. They take the competitive aspect very seriously.
I had to laugh and shake my head at Scot Pollard, of all people, claiming to be an NBA champion when he scored a grand total of 39 points the entire season and didn’t play one second of the playoffs.
I sincerely hope that one of the other survivors knows his background as well as you guys do, so they can throw his “best of the best of the best!” back in his face after the merge.
The way they showed it to us, definitely made Scot and Jason look like jerks. Especially Scot’s bit about “what team have you been on?” I understand what he was trying to get at though, along the lines of what jsc1953 said - in the NBA, even though there’s still a gap between all-stars and benchwarmers, all of those guys are still in like the top 1% of basketball ability. Even bottom barrel NBA players will wipe the floor with guys in rec leagues.
Now, Scot’s way of explaining it was terrible, but I think he basically saying that Alecia was so useless in challenges that her cheerleading just became annoying. They focused on her trying to move the sand with her foot, which the others clearly didn’t think was working. And if we think about it, really the only thing she did was make fire (after about five hours of trying)… other than that, she was dead weight in challenges. Not to mention that we don’t see every moment around camp, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all (especially based on what Jason’s confessionals) if she was completely vapid and wore on everyone. Granted, they might have been letting their perceptions of her as the weak member of the tribe color their opinions, but I think she really did just rub the wrong way with her personality as much as her (lack of) ability.
(But yeah, Scot really should have the self-awareness to not refer to himself as an NBA champion when he barely played that year, technicality or not).
I was completely expecting Alecia to go to the other girl with the strangely spelled name with the argument that brawn was going to keep losing so they should stick together rather than let the guys vote them both out one after the other.
It will be interesting to see how far they can take this losing streak, all the way, I hope.
I do wish they’d show more camp life because it’s important to know how annoying/useless everyone is.
I’m pretty sure they intended to go to two teams of seven this coming week – but now they only have 13 people. So… wait one more week? But I’m sure it’s a nuisance if they have a challenge set up for only two teams. Even if they could quickly add another ‘lane’, what if it’s a challenge that requires the combined effort of about seven people … and now you can only have 3 bodies on a team to keep it even?
So you merge at 6 & 7? Hardly seems fair to the smaller tribe.
Maybe they could leave them in the old tribes for an extra week, but sub in a challenge that was intended to be an every man for himself? And split 6-6 right after that.
Hey, that could be an interesting switch up. At a lot of ‘endurance’ challenges, it’s pretty obvious that some of the players know they have no chance of winning, and thus make very little effort to go far at all. What if the rule was the first person to fail was OUT, then and there?
Unrelated thought: how far are these camps from each other? Do the rules allow you to raid or poach from another tribe?
Perhaps you wouldn’t be allowed to steal any of the basic camp equipment – water pots, machetes, whatever they give you to start with – but raiding a fruit tree or good clam bed that was closer to the other tribe than yours could give you a double advantage: building up your tribe’s health while simultaneously sapping the other guy’s stamina.
Not to mention the idea of finding their Hidden Idol. Though looking for a different team’s idol would be equivalent of announcing you’ve already found your own tribe’s, I guess.
Still. I’d be happy to watch a season of “Out steal, out raid, out last”.
They’ve done raids as a reward in the past - win the challenge, you get 60 seconds to steal whatever you want from the other camp. Apart from that, I believe you’re not allowed to go to another tribe’s camp at all. How far apart they are, and how big the “camp” is as that rule applies, I don’t know.
I know they’ve done visits in the past, but I suspect the producers encouraged that because they couldn’t get enough footage for a good episode. I know that I’ve read somewhere that you can’t go to another camp.
Pollard is pretty much the definition of a solid NBA backup center. Excellent rebounder, good defender, more assists than you’d expect and a pretty good scorer during his prime.
He’s probably had a significantly better career than most guys chosen with the 19th pick. He played 11 years and made $40M. The NBA obviously liked him.
Yeah, I looked him up too. He was no chump, though. He was a key NBA player for a lot of teams. He won the NBA championship in a year where he was less essential, but he was hardly a lesser NBA guy. He was really good.
