Thu, March 10, 2005
Brains vs. Yawn
Koror: 3, Ulong: 0
It's early enough in the running of Survivor: Palau that the personalities haven't really had time to emerge from the (colossal!) pack yet – so I'm going to say that's the explanation (and not my illness, Oscar pool work, and general apathy) for combining the second and third episodes into one column. I always wanted these columns to be more like a survey course on Survivor – its strategies and personalities, its motifs and mores – rather than a synopsis/recap. Like any other idea I've ever had, it's been a struggle to manifest exactly that vision. Maybe a more "occasional" approach is the way to do it.
Looking at Survivor: Palau so far, a fairly familiar pattern has emerged (again!): one team dominates the other in immunity challenges, sending the losing team into a depressed funk which makes it harder for them to win immunity challenges. Interestingly, the Ulong team is kicking ass at reward challenges, but failing to win the immunity idol every time. (This most likely results from having expended all their energy in the early competition, and being too tired to eke out a victory in the later challenge; it's unlikely that there's any real distinction between a reward challenge and an immunity challenge which makes one team more suited to win one type.) It's intriguing that the winning team is once again the "motley crew" team which was expected to be the underdog. Ulong is prettier, younger, and stronger on average – and they show it in the reward challenges – but something prevents them from winning immunity. Maybe Koror feels like an underdog, and that makes them hungrier for victory. In fact, the pattern is so familiar that I'd say we have about another week, at most, before Koror starts discussing the idea of throwing an immunity challenge just to get rid of someone. Probably Katie or Caryn, based on this week's events – but I'm sure that will shift by the time the actual thrown challenge occurs. Coby is a candidate.
One fascinating byproduct of this is that the teams (especially Ulong) get restless and look for something to bitch about. Kim, for example. She's an attractive young woman, and I don't have any problem appreciating that and looking forward to her bikini scenes because it's obvious to everyone – including Kim – that's why she's on the show. She's also a graduate student, which tells us that she's intelligent – or, at the very least, tells us she's graduated college. What she's studying isn't mentioned, although I think we can be pretty sure it isn't politics or game theory. She seems friendly, and she seems to be devoted to her team. And the show has spent a large part of two episodes evaluating her crush on her teammate Jeff.
Now, I know what a Survivor editor would say if he were confronted with this: the story editors pick a story, and you cut the episode in service of telling whatever story is there. If people are gossiping about Kim and Jeff, you tell the Kim and Jeff story. But, to me, that argument is further evidence that the show is marginalizing Kim, because someone chose to tell that story, and chose to tell it from that perspective. They could just as easily have told the story from Kim's perspective, which might be more interesting, particularly if they could get her to evaluate her snuggling behavior in the context of her overall strategy, pre-merge and beyond.
Instead, we see an immunity challenge in which Kim "doesn't do her part," and then a lot of interview footage from Ulongers, describing how lazy she is. If you actually look at that reward challenge, though, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The challenge consists of three main parts: pulling the chest across the ocean floor (a cruel, sadistic prank on the part of whomever designed this challenge), releasing the mess kits, and unscrambling the code. In challenges like this, which have different parts that appeal to different strengths, the labor is usually divided up. Ulong splits up the 26 characters of Morse code right away, giving each team member a few letters to memorize. Nobody goes around saying Bobby Jon didn't memorize enough A's and B's – it's a team effort. Since Ulong never completes step one, we don't know how much Kim would have participated in steps two or three. Looking at Koror, where Tom does the overwhelming majority of the pulling (others swim down, but usually they're just tangled in the rope and slowing him down), it shows that some team members can focus on one part of a task, and others can cover another part. In order for Ulong to dive, Kim has to be touching the platform – otherwise, she might have hovered by the unscrambling board and waited to pitch in during that part of the challenge. The teams are large enough at this point that staying out of the way shouldn't call someone's work ethic into question.
I'm not saying Kim's awesome, by any stretch. She's cute, but plenty of people are cute. She's also aloof and brittle, and she has that weird obsession with knowing whether she's being voted off. I never understand why Survivor contestants get all bunched up about that. Up until they're in the jury, they have no leverage whatsoever to use against people who don't tell them when they're being voted off, so what's the point? Is it meant to remind the other contestants that they're all friends and should be nice to one another? Someone's getting voted off, even if they all love each other. I don't see any possible advantage in being told that the group has decided to eliminate you, unless they're telling you it's 4-5 and you have time to recruit a swing voter. These days, my attentions are quickly refocusing on Auxiliary Backup Hottie Jenn, whom I think I may have overlooked the first week. But I still think Kim got a raw deal on the immunity challenge charge.
What's more, I think it's telling that Kim is the source of all this drama, while the guys are just going around lifting things, building things, and killing things. Probst makes a big deal out of the relationship at Tribal Council, which bothers her. (I think she should've spat back, "Whatever, Probst! How are things with you and Julie from Vanuatu?!") After that, Kim spends a lot of her time trying to distance herself from Jeff so that people don't think they're a threat. (If AmbeRob is any indication, by the way, people don't see a couple as a threat, despite how huge a threat the couple may actually be.) Meanwhile, Jeff spends all his time talking about his ankle. It's almost as though the Jeff that's been romantically linked to Kim is a whole other Jeff.
Interestingly, at the same time, Ulong starts to feel that Kim isn't pulling her weight around camp. I attribute this to a couple of things. One is that the group now has a perceived motive for Kim's laziness, so even if there are others who aren't pulling their weight, Kim seems more suspicious since they believe she's using her relationship with Jeff to protect her from votes and avoiding work as a function of that, rather than just being lazy. The other is my Schindler's List Effect – which I first detailed in relation to For Love or Money – once one person is marked, you do well to keep heaping the blame on them, rather than spreading it around and getting other people mad at you. Besides, I sense that you're always going to have the workhorses who demand martyr status for picking up palm fronds, and you're always going to have the people who realize that Survivor is a few hours of televised competition every three days and then a lot of lying around. And you're going to have all the people in the middle, who don't break their backs sharpening the firewood and washing the flint rock, but who also aren't accused of slacking off. I think the key to staying in that middle group is to either claim a chore as yours early (like collecting fresh water) or do some amount of work every day but make sure that you're not doing the same thing as the workhorse or doing your work within sight of them. Then, they'll come back, see that you got something done, and they can't really complain as much.
What's interesting is Angie's situation. She came into the group perceived by most (though mainly herself) as an oddball. She doesn't look that strong, partly because she's a girl. (I don't want to get into Arksie's whole debate over how women, on average, are intrinsically weaker than men – the point is, she was picked last for Ulong because of the tats and piercings, but also because she's a woman and people assume she's weaker.) Despite a few early moments pouting about her outsider status, she's made the wise choice to fight back against these misperceptions, and she's kicked ass at every challenge, particularly in the area of physicality. She may be small and doughy, but she makes up for it with feisty tenacity and commitment. I don't know if she'll ever be accepted into the group enough to satisfy her, but I think she's pretty well accepted into the group at this point. Kim gave her a cute little smooch after the first reward challenge (she also, it should be noted, gave Angie a big hug right after the teams divided up). She's being included in the discussions of who to vote off. And she's taking an interesting approach. When Jeff asks for everyone to send him home after injuring his ankle, most of Ulong responds to this request the same way Morgan responded to Osten: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. We're keeping him. He may be a cripple, but he's a cripple with cut pecs!" They want to boot Kim, but Angie's a voice of reason. Not only does it make sense to get rid of a hobbled competitor (no matter how strong Jeff looks, if he's hurt he can't help them, unless it's an arm-wrestling challenge), but she points out that Kim may emerge as a more valuable contributor to the team once Jeff is removed as her provider. (I get the sense that Kim feels the same way; as long as he's around, she'll never be able to shake the initial stigma of being cuddly with him. And, from the way she snuggles with him even as she says she's tired of the rumors, it's clear that she won't be able to make herself put distance between them, either.) Angie's motivation here is probably to get read of Jeff as a physical threat, too. Even with a twisted ankle, he's still part of the young, buff elite of Ulong, and taking him out starts to adjust the curve away from the athletic superstars. At this point, she and Kim are the least physically strong of the group, so if Angie's hunch is right this could end up creating a very unusual alliance.
At some point, I'm going to quit bitching about this, because obviously they're never going to quit doing it, but why do Survivor contestants think they have to play it coy with Probst at TribCon? He asks Ibrehem how they lost the immunity challenge, and Ibrehem launches in with, "If we had one person in there who we needed..." What the fuck? Jeff's ankle was hurt; Jeff had to step out of the race. Everyone knows this. It's not even a situation where the person who's on the chopping block is unaware ("If some people would do more work around camp..."). There's no danger of stirring up emotions or betraying secret alliances. You're not even going to hurt Jeff's feelings because he knows he hurt his ankle and he asked Ulong to vote for him. Why can't Ibrehem say "It sucked that Jeff was injured and couldn't run with us; he's one of our stronger players"? I think they should regard TribCon as a venue for airing grievances – let it be known that alliances are alliances and we're going to stick with those, whatever, but while we're at TribCon, we're telling it like it is. "If Kim would do more work around camp..." – who does that hurt? Maybe it opens up a dialogue. It doesn't mean you have to vote for Kim. In fact, if people were smart, they'd use it as a feint. Complain publicly about the people you're tight with, to throw others off the scent of your alliance. Fortunately, Probst calls Ibrehem on it this time, bringing up Jeff by name immediately. But it's clear this practice is never going to stop – these people have all seen too much Survivor, and they think this is how it has to be. What a shame.
© onebee · all rights reserved