Corrected quote: ‘I’ll push you so hard that damned leg will fly off!’
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BWHAHAHA!!! I honestly thought they were going to self-destruct at TC. They might have if Shannon hadn’t put himself up as bait.
Not much eye candy this season, and I’m not really digging either tribe. Weak. On the plus side, they didn’t vote out the hot chick first, so that’s something. That they voted out the douchey alpha male is an added plus, even though I think he was right with his points. TC is not the time to do that, though. And that other dude is so totally gay it’s ridiculous.
But Alina looks kinda cute without makeup.
I’m really hoping that the Flowers at least two more times in a row. That way they can ditch the bitch and whoever fucked up the latest Challenge. Then it will turn into a game. I’m also digging Jimmy J. stepping up and doing what he does best. He doesn’t need the money, and as long as he doesn’t alienate the other alphas, the old farts could go quite a ways with his leadership.
I wonder if a tribe has ever before evicted one of the strong members so early. Typically, they seem to hold on to the bigger guys if for no other reason than they make great mules in the challenges. Of course, most mules are smart enough to keep their mouth shut. I’d have evicted NaOnka just to get rid of her crappy attitude.
And what dude would bring a $1600 pair of alligator shoes to a damn jungle. Hell, they didn’t even float.
Well the Heroes tribe on Heroes vs. Villains shifted from teamplay to personal play way too early, and I remember their voting a lot of their good athletes out early on the dubious grounds that they were threats, and had to leave sometime so they might as well go right now.
Regarding the shoes I think it’s standard operating procedure to surprise the contestants and bring them to the island unawares now: otherwise they would all wear or hide much more useful clothes and supplies.
There have been a few seasons where various female contestants wore fancy dresses or other nice clothes and ended up having a lot of trouble until they got time to improvise something, and I remember that Rupert got in a lot of trouble during the Cook Islands season: he and the rest of the castaways were told they were taking a sailboat to a photo shoot. They dressed in nice clothes, only for the boat to stop about 2km away from shore, at which point they were all handed sneakers and told “Jump overboard, your objective is that shore over there and the game starts riiiiight now.”
Problem was, Rupert had been wearing some nice and very tight designer blue jeans that shrunk after their repeated soakings, and he was reportedly in some pretty intense discomfort at first. One of the early challenge rewards was cloth and a sewing machine to make new clothes, and I thought that seemed like an unplanned reward that the producers improvised after seeing how much trouble people were having.
Most definitely. She’s the hot chick I was talking about not getting voted out first. Though I’m confused by her magical variable-length hair. I can’t imagine she brought extensions to the island, but I can’t think of any other explanation.
I wonder what the pre-game activities are like? Are the contestants taken to ‘functions’ where they’re supposed to wear nice clothes? Might be interesting if they’re attending a black tie affair on a yacht and – oh, my! The yacht is sinking! Or what about a Halloween party, and they’re all in costumes?
Were I going to be on the show, I think I’d dress appropriately for survival all the time – just in case. (As it is, except when I’m going into the office I tend to wear practical clothing anyway.)
Regarding ‘hiding’ supplies. I know that you’re not allowed to take certain things. OTOH, ‘normal’ things are allowed to be used. For example, eyeglasses may be used as a fire-starter. Suppose a contestant plaited a belt from a long length of mil-spec 550 cord? Gotta have a belt, right? If it just happened that the material contains seven strands of internal threads that can be woven into a gill net, or if the material can be used to make tools or part of a shelter or whatever, would that me allowed?
Yes, this!
She was just about every horrible stereotype you could pick, making almost assured that she would make Fabio out to appear a racist bigot if he did anything she didn’t like…such as LOOK at her “funny” when he was about to ask her if she gripped his socks.
By her going apeshit (no racist pun intended) on him first, anything he says, no matter how reasonable, looks like a rebuttal of her comments instead of an earnest question or comment. Tell you what, Fabio seems like a genuine simple, nice guy, and I doubt he has a racist bone in his body. That said, she’s giving him every reason to hate people who act like her.
I would have love to have seen him just reply to her antics with, “You are wearing my socks.” No matter what she fired back with, because you know she would accuse him of some transgression making her actions “fair” or something, he only has to say, “I don’t know what happened to your sock, but I didn’t do anything to it. You, however, outright stole MY socks and are acting as though that is right and fair. PS, you are a bitch, please die soon.”
My position on this would be: “You want me to wear WHAT to the photocall? Sorry, can’t, I’m an extreme never-nude, and I absolutely MUST wear both swimsuits and all seventeen pairs of underpants. Religious beliefs, you understand, right?” But I suppose that’s why they’d never cast me. That, and the fact that I am not a Hot Young Thing, and nobody wants to see me in my skivvies.
I think there is a simple answer to both these questions.
Imagine you are the casting director / producer of a reality show. Would you rather cast the Omarosa-like Naonka or another somnambulant shoo-in like Sandra Diaz-Twine? Remember, your future earnings are critically dependent on the show’s ratings.
In Boston Rob’s first season he engineered the ouster of a guy named Hunter (?) very early. And then the tribe proceeded to lose challenge after challenge.
I feel bad for the one rational girl on the young team who pointed out the hypocrisy of the people who lied to everyone saying they couldn’t trust Shannon (as dopey as Shannon was being, he wasn’t lying to anyone).
If Shannon had a clue, he’d have realized that instead of gunning for hotty, who he knew Chase wasn’t going to vote for, he aim for Nay, who everyone would agree was a thorn. With Nay gone, Chases secondary alliance would be down one and then Shannon could orchestrate the pickoff of hotty without having to worry about a tie, or Chases vote.
If they hadn’t split up the tribes young and old, I would have called them idiots for voting out Shannon first. But the young tribe doesn’t really have any weak players. And really, in challenges you really only need one big guy (which they still have with Chase) and a bunch of smaller faster people.
Also, Probst blog is up:
I’m not sure about his criticism of Marty. He doesn’t seem to be gunning for Jimmy so much, as letting him take the charge so he’ll have a target on his back.
I also imagine there is a fine line between a vibrant outgoing extrovert on an audition tape that would make good casting, and switching to a raving unpredictable psycho beast when under real pressure.
I think they vary the pre-game activities a bit to keep contestants off balance, but I assume there must be at least a couple of rounds of interviews, photographs, and other publicity-related stuff before the game begins. I don’t know if it still goes on, but they used to strip-search contestants right before releasing them. They didn’t used to, but then one season a former military guy up and smuggled a book of matches in by sticking it somewhere uncomfortable. His tribe lost the first challenge and didn’t get a flint & steel (which is a huge deal, as fire is their only real way to sanitize water), so the first chance he got away from the cameras he whipped the matches out, started a small fire, brought it into the main area, and they had potable water basically from day 1, which mostly negated the other tribe’s initial win. Apparently nobody realized what happened until some on staff glanced at some footage in the editing room and realized that they got fire way, way too early.
I also know that outwitting the staff to a certain extent is acceptable and good fun, though. Bob from Survivor: Gabon was infamous for quietly stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down in “non-game” areas, like during meetings and tribal councils. Apparently there were supposed to be beaded thongs decorating part of the tribal council set, but his very first time there he casually dropped his hand down and ripped most of them off when he walked by. That’s one of the reasons his fake idol looked so freaking awesome: he had tons of beads, cord and other stuff that hadn’t been provided to the survivors.
I’m sure they have some regulations regarding dress in the contract that prevents you from dressing like a survivor at every event (me, I’d wear fatigues and hiking boots EVERYWHERE from the moment I signed the contract).
Personally though, you know what I wonder? How come people never study for the show? A lot of reality shows intentionally select people who don’t watch the show, but I know Survivor apparently actively encourages participants to watch the older seasons, in no small part because of the body of strategy that has evolved around the last 20 seasons that is now common knowledge to viewers, and would undercut anyone who wasn’t familiar with the show.
So let’s assume you were a fan of the show, or at least studied all of the previous seasons pretty intensely. Because shit dude, you’re gonna be on TV! The two biggest logistical problems seem to be that nobody knows how to make fire (which, survival aside, is usually the tie breaker when you’re down to what, the final five and under?). The other problem is that building shelters is hard, and when you’re uncomfortable it’s tough to sleep.
So why don’t people practice this stuff? The fire-starting this season was awesome because of that reason, and in Gabon they had an awesome time early on because Bob the Physics Teacher was a boy scout and general obscure knowledge buff, and he knew enough knot-tying and basic survival stuff to build a really awesome camp.
Of course they also had an awesome time because they had Randy, who has to be one of my favorite Survivor contestants of all time. 
(He really didn’t help though. He drank and swore and told everyone he hated them and by the end they actually had to post a guard around the shelters 24/7 to keep him from burning them down.)
Incidentally, I remember a pretty long time ago there was some Survivor contestant, an ad executive I believe, who got really unstable. All I remember is that he decided to quit smoking on day 1 of survivor, and that he had a thinking rock that he used to sit on and scream “this is my rock”. Did that guy ever definitively say whether that was an act, or if he was really breaking down?
That was Shane, from the Panama season. He also had a small, flat piece of wood that he pretended was his Blackberry.
Real pressure? They’ve been out there less than a week. The game’s barely started. If she’s a psycho now, I’d hate to see her 7 episode in.
That would be Shane Powers from Survivor:Panama. He also, IIRC, had a piece of wood he called his Blackberry and announced “I’m communicating with people off the island!”
Oh yea, the blackberry!! That guy was so awesome. One of my favorites was the individual immunity challenge where you were allowed to opt out of the challenge, and if you did you would get to sit at a buffet table and eat all you wanted so long as the challenge was going on.
So people who chose to eat (including Shane) are eating like crazy, those who chose to compete are competing like crazy, and Shane is displaying a pretty abhorrent (but understandable) lack of table manners. He gets more and more disheveled as the contestants get closer to finishing, until Jeff finally calls “Time, finish what’s in your mouth,” and Shane basically shoves an entire cheeseburger into his mouth and then kinda shoots Jeff this innocent look with half of the thing still sticking out of his mouth.