Survivor 39.13 “Mama, Look At Me Now”

Well, that’s the end of that.

Listen, sometimes Survivor ends with a bang and sometimes it ends with a fizzle and this season, it ended with a “Thank God it’s over!”  After a rather icky season that saw all of the strong player voted out early, Survivor ended last night with an unlikable final four and an even less likable final three.  Once Dean used his idol nullifier to take Janet out of the competition, I knew that this was not going to be satisfying finale.

Because Lauren apparently never learned how to start a fire, she was denied a place in the final three.  Tommy, Dean, and Noura were the players who faced the jury and none of them were particularly impressive.  You had Noura, who apparently thought she could filibuster her way to victory.  You had Dean, who couldn’t keep track of the amount of lie he had told.  And then you had the boring and relatively inoffensive Tommy.  Tommy made one big movie in the game — he convinced Noura to bring him to the final three.  Apparently, that was a big enough move for him to win a $1,000,000.

For the record, every member of the jury voted for Tommy, except for Elizabeth and Aaron.  They voted for Dean.  If you’re like me  and you think that the idol should go to whoever played the best game, regardless of how obnoxious that may be personally, then Dean should have won.  But, as of late, Survivor juries have been bitter and they’ve been more interested in punishing the players who got them out than rewarding the best player.  So, for that reason, Tommy won.

It was a disappointing season, to be honest.  The whole Boston Rob/Sandra thing was never as much fun as it could have been and the castaways were a forgettable bunch.  Toss pervy Dan into that mix and you’ve got a season that I think almost all of us would rather forget.  During the reunion show, Jeff talked to Kellee and formally apologized.  Kellee handled herself well but the interview still felt more like a PR move than a sincere act of contrition on the part of the show’s producers.

So, this season was disappointing and the previous season was disappointing.  Fortunately, Survivor 40 might be better!  It’s winners vs. winners as a bunch of former final survivors go against each other for $2,000,000.  Unfortunately, Exile Island is making a comeback but …. well, things have to get better at some point, right?

Here’s the cast list of Survivor 40:

1. Natalie Anderson
2. Tyson Apostol
3. Danni Boatwright
4. Sophie Clarke
5. Jeremy Collins
6. Sandra Diaz-Twine
7. Ben Driebergen
8. Michele Fitzgerland
9. Wendell Holland
10. Adam Klein
11. Yul Kwon
12. Sarah Lacina
13. Amber Mariano
14. Rob Mariano
15. Parvati Shallow
16. Kim Spradlin
17. Denise Shapely
18. Tony Vlachos
19. Nick Wilson
20. Ethan Zohn

I’m excited about some of those people, like Yul, Ethan, Adam, and Nick.  Others — like Tony, Sophie,and Sandra — I’ve been bored with for a while.  (If I remember correctly, Sophie was one of those who won because the jury was angry with everyone else in the final three.)  But they’re all veterans and hopefully, they’ll be a little bit more entertaining than the group we got stuck with this season.

Well, that’s it for now!  We’ll be back for Big Brother, The Amazing Race, or Survivor 40, depending on which one premieres first!

See you in 2020!

Lisa Marie

Survivor 39.12 “Just Go For It” (UPDATED)

(There’s an update at the end of this post with new information that I learned after posting.)

I’m still trying to put together my thoughts concerning last night’s episode of Survivor.

Am I glad that Dan is gone?  Yes, I am.

Do I wish he had been taken out of the game earlier?  I do.  In between the initial complaints about Dan and his expulsion from the game, Kellee, Jamal, Aaron, Missy, Elizabeth, Karishma, and Elaine were all voted out.  Some of these people I liked and quite a few, I didn’t.  However, regardless of how I feel about them, it still seems like all of them deserved to be in the game longer than Dan.

After Jeff Probst showed up on the beach and announced that Dan has been expelled from the game, I found myself thinking back to that tribal council where Dan argued that he would “never” do anything inappropriate.  When Jeff continued to challenge him on on it, Dan said, “You’re just not going to let this go, are you?”  Dan got quite worked up and emotional about it.  He said that he would watch his behavior and he would be more mindful of his actions.  And some people — like Janet — seemed to actually believe him.  I feel bad for Dan’s son, who got dragged onto national TV and who, for a while at least, will now be known as the son of the first player to ever get kicked off of Survivor.

We don’t know the exact details of the “other incident” that occurred off-camera.  After last night’s show aired, Jeff Probst announced that he would not be sharing the exact details because of “privacy concerns.”  I imagine that everyone involved with the show signs of nondisclosure agreement before each season begins so it’ll probably be a while before we get any definite answers as to what specifically happened.

What we do know is that Dan is gone and, for the first time in 39 seasons, the reunion show will not be aired live.  Because of “security concerns,” they’re taping the reunion show four hours before the airing of next week’s finale.  So, if anyone says anything about Dan’s behavior during the show, I imagine it will be edited out.

Dan is gone and so is Elaine.  In fact, Dan’s expulsion only took up the last 3 minutes or so of the show.  Before that, last night’s episode was all about Dean going to the Island of the Idols and winning an “Idol Nullifier” and Elaine getting voted out of the game.  To be honest, there was no real shock to Elaine getting voted out.  She was the obvious target and, when she didn’t win immunity, it was pretty obvious that the rest of the tribe would go after the player most likely to win the game.  The show tried to create some suspense by making it look like Noura might go instead but Noura is so crazy and disliked that you just know she’s going to get dragged to the final three.  In the end, only Elaine and Dan voted for Noura.  Everyone else voted for Elaine.  Elaine handled it with class and, while I never liked Elaine as much as the rest of the fandom did, I’m sorry to see her go.  Certainly, I wouldn’t complain if they brought her back for a future season.

So, next week is the finale and the final five players in the game are not particularly deserving.  I guess I’m hoping that Janet wins, though I wish she hadn’t been so quick to ally herself with Dan after Kellee and Jamal were voted out of the game.

Here’s your final five:

Lauren — Lauren has made some good moves but, for the most part, it seems like a lot of her success has been due to luck.

Janet — Janet has an idol.

Dean — Dean has an idol nullifier and a totally worthless, fake Legacy advantage.

Tommy — Tommy has spent most of the game just doing what everyone else wants.

Noura — Noura is the wild card, in more ways than one.  I have a feeling that she gets taken to the end because everyone will feel that they can beat her.

Anyway, my final three prediction is:

Dean, Tommy, and Noura with Dean winning.

We’ll see if I’m right next week!

Lisa Marie

UPDATE: According to People Magazine, Dan was climbing aboard the boat after an immunity challenge and he grabbed a member of production’s leg.  Dan said that he was trying to balance himself but the show’s producers felt that the incident was not an accident.

 

Survivor 39.11 “A Very Simple Plan”

The lesson of last night’s episode of Survivor?

Don’t work with Noura.

Seriously.

Noura, with her outbursts and her unpredictable personality, can be hard to take and I have to admit that, last night, she got on my last nerve.  But seriously, this season would be so boring without her.  I mean, if we didn’t have Noura constantly going off, this entire season would just be Dan acting creepy, Elaine being annoying, Karishma crying, and Jeff Probst talking about “society.”  For better or worse, Noura keeps things interesting.

Noura came close to getting voted out last night and she really had no one to blame but herself.  She went into tribal council with no one plotting against her and then, as a result of her own paranoia and delusional nature, she managed to convince three people to try to vote her out.  Noura also freaked out Elaine to the extent that Elaine wasted the immunity idol that she had just found.  In the end, it was Karishma who went home on a vote of 5-3, which would seem to indicate that Noura’s going to be around for a while, just because she’s now seen as the one everyone can beat in the final three.

Originally, it looked like Tommy was going to be blindsided at Tribal.  It all went back to the reward challenge, in which the castaways won the chance to spend some time with their “loved ones.”  Janet and Tommy won the challenge and then selected Dan and Lauren (and their loved ones) to join them.  Dean, Karishma, Elaine, and Noura returned to camp.

At camp, Noura went on a tirade about how she should have been selected for reward and how she was ready to turn on Tommy and Lauren.  She led the group in searching for an immunity idol, which was ultimately found by Elaine.  The four of them decided that they would use the idol to blindside Lauren.  However, when Lauren won immunity, the target switched to Tommy because Tommy is Lauren’s closest ally.  Meanwhile, Dan, Tommy, Lauren, and Janet approached Noura and said the plan was to split their votes between Elaine and Karishma.

So, the plan was to use Elaine’s immunity idol to blindside Tommy but that didn’t last because Noura got paranoid.  She started to worry that Tommy might have an idol and then she worried that Elaine might not use her idol and Noura convinced herself that there was a chance that maybe this was all just an elaborate scheme to get her out of the game.  As Dean put it, the plan was a “very simple plan,” but nothing’s simple with Noura.

It all led to an absolutely insane tribal council.  Realizing that something was going to happen, Tommy asked Dean if he was the target.  Noura saw Tommy whispering to Dean and totally lost it.  (Noura wasn’t totally unjustified because Dean did tell Tommy that he was going to be getting votes.  Dean also told Tommy he wouldn’t vote for him, which may have been a lie.)  Noura announced that Elaine had an immunity idol and that the entire plan was to blindside Tommy and that she was mad about being left out of the reward but that she wasn’t going to betray her original alliance after all.  After a lot of rambling and accusations, the tribe finally voted and …. oddly, Tommy got no votes.  In the confusion, it looks like everyone abandoned the plan to vote for Tommy and Dan and Lauren — instead of voting for Elaine — voted for Noura instead.  Karishma also voted for Noura.  Meanwhile, everyone else voted for Karishma.  Elaine wasted her idol, playing it for herself.  By a vote of 5-3, Karishma joined the jury and everyone else returned to camp where they’ll probably spent the rest of the night listening to Noura yell.

It was an interesting episode.  I’m still not sure how thins got so crazy at tribal council but it was certainly entertaining to watch!

Lisa Marie