Survivor: Tocantins, week BLEARGH

So last night’s episode of Survivor turned out to be a recap show. A recap of the first five episodes. Five episodes that contained no twists or switch-ups or any real game.

I didn’t watch it. Part of that was because of the irritation of tuning in for a “special night” episode and finding no new content, but mostly it’s because I never watch recap shows. I don’t really see the point. If the game isn’t going to advance, why should I care enough to tune in? They market these episodes as offering new insight and angles on the existing game… but is that really desirable? Let’s think about that a minute.

The fun of watching Survivor is playing along. I do this by writing blurbs on my website and making predictions based on what I saw in the episode. Of course what I saw isn’t what really happened; it’s been edited in order to manipulate my opinions and biases. That’s the polite fiction of Survivor; you have the game of Survivor, which is played by sixteen people on an island over the course of a month… then you have the show of Survivor, which is one possible interpretation of the game as told by people whose job it is to make their interpretation as marketable as possible. Which means every episode has some conflict or uncertainty as to who is going to get voted off, even if the people playing the game know it’s 100% obvious. Sometimes it’s easy to see through the cracks, and you can tell when CBS is trying to sell you on an impossible idea. But just as often you have to take what’s in the show at face value.

“How does this relate to recap shows, Brickroad?” I’m getting to that. All of your ideas and opinions about the show have been colored by the narrative the season has taken so far… you’ve been seeing everything from a particular angle. Now, suddenly, the Big Hairy Recap Episode comes along and wants to show you a new viewpoint, and asks you to consider a different narrative. Why is that guy doing something nice? He’s the villain! And how come loser background girl is actually saying and doing interesting things? What’s going on here!?

I can see how some people would enjoy that. These people enjoy the social aspect of the game, so seeing conversations and situations that got cut out of the main episode would classify as “new content” for those people. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy the social aspect of the game… it’s just that I enjoy the game aspect more. The game aspect of the society, I guess you’d say. I enjoy the rules and the maneuvering, the strategy and alliances. That’s why most of my Survivor posts are filled with descriptions of how people are playing and not so much who is being a bitch and why. I also tend to like players based on how well they play, not what their personalities are. Yes, I’m that guy who, if I’d watched the very first season, would have been rooting for Hatch.

Enough about Survivor. Let’s talk about how this blog post almost didn’t happen.

I don’t have a set time or schedule to putting new posts up, beyond my rule to get one up every day. I like to write things at least a day in advance and queue them up to go live at about 5pm. I didn’t do that yesterday because I thought it was going to be a real episode of Survivor and that I could just write a real summary. When that ended up not happening I just went to bed and forgot about it. Today kind of sucked, so I was in a bad mood all afternoon, and 4pm rolls around. “Screw it, I can miss one day.” I was really going to skip out on you guys.

But that’s how it starts, isn’t it? Miss one day, then suddenly it’s okay to miss two. Then it’s okay to just check back once a week. Then it’s okay to just make a post “once in a while”. After that it’s fine to just check in and post “Sorry I haven’t been updating lately, guys! That’ll change soon!”

How many blogs or websites do you know that have “Sorry about the lack of updates, but I’ll post something cool real soon!” as their most recent entry… dated September 2005?

Well, I really don’t want this website to be that website. Some people think it’s better to leave a blank webpage than pointless filler. I can see the value of that, from the reader’s standpoint. But from my point of view it’s definitely better to go ahead and post the filler. It helps reinforce the idea that “every day” really means every god damned day. So I buckled down and wrote this post. Was it filler? Possibly, but I’m glad I did it.

See you guys tomorrow!