Survivor: Island of the Idols, week ten

I see now why Survivor used to skip Thanksgiving week. Yesterday was the first chance I had to sit down and watch the episode! Sorry about the delay.

This week was a Karishma episode, and it highlights probably the thing that frustrates me most about Karishma as a player. When she’s up, she’s 100% certified Grade-A hot shit. She brags and preens, and puts down other players, and snaps her fingers, and cocks her neck back and forth. When she’s down, she’s depressed and mopey, always on the verge of quitting, crying and whining and blaming everyone else for her lot in life.

Spun another way, Karishma takes all the credit for her successes and none of the blame for her failures. This is noteworthy because in one of her darker moments she even admits to knowing she’s a “goat”; she knows she’s being dragged along to the end by better players who want an easy doubleyoo in the finals.

I generally hold the opinion that, by definition, the best player of Survivor is the player that wins. Losing the game means there’s some aspect of it you didn’t play well, and at the end of the day the only metric that matters is jurty votes for. In Survivor parlance, “deserve” is a dirty word.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of players get absolutely jacked by game twists they couldn’t have possibly forseen or planned for. Jamal is in that boat, for sure; his game came to an end because he touched a thing in a tree. Elizabeth probably counts too, and oh yeah by the way, spoilers.

I recall watching a man named Matt on Survivor: Redemption Island. In that season, the big twist was being voted out didn’t mean being voted off. You instead were sent to Redemption Island, where your fate in the game was linked to your ability to win challenges. Matt was sent there early, something like Day 3, and blitzed every challenge they threw at him. At the merge (so, Day 17 or so) Matt re-entered the game and was voted out immediately. He continued to blitz Redemption Island until the very last challenge (circa Day 38, maybe), where he lost unceremoniously.

Matt’s story was unique because, if he had won the one and only challenge he lost, and re-entered the game right at the finish line, and then managed to also win that final immunity challenge… he would have won the game without ever having played Survivor. At the time I was mostly bemused by Matt’s antics, but looking back I think I would have been a little upset. It turns out I-the-viewer don’t like the idea of someone who wins without playing.

(I’m still on Survivor social media blackout, but during one early sojourn through the subreddit I learned that the winner of season 38, Edge of Extinction, was a sort of Matt-lite. And yes, people were upset.)

This brings us to the conundrum of Karishma. Let me first give her some legit kudos: she’s on Survivor and she’s toughing it out, which is more than you could say about me or any other Armchair Warrior out there. However her story ends, by the end of it she’ll forever be a piece of Survivor lore and I’ll just be a guy with a blog nobody reads. But from what I can tell, this woman is a terrible player by any metric I know. I’m not upset that it honestly looks like she might make final three, and sit in the final Tribal Council. I’m upset that, if and when that happens, she will smugly think it was all her doing.

Let’s look at two boneheaded Karishma moments that had her feeling like Queen Big Shit. You’ll recall last episode, where Noura yelled at her for lazing around camp, and Karishma was CRUELLY AND UNJUSTLY BULLIED to go do the chore of picking up coconuts. Instead, she found a hidden Immunity Idol. She praised her resourcefulness without taking a moment to reflect that, holy crap, if she had continued to lounge around in the hammock all day, and Noura had gone to do the chore herself, that it’s Noura with a necklace, and not poor put-upon Karishma.

I guess when you luck into finding an idol you weren’t motivated to go look for in the first place, you don’t think too hard about how you’re going to use it. Once the Lumuwaku tribe, spearheaded by Dean and his distaste for the “Goat Army” he sees on the hirozone, decides Karishma is next to go, she resolves to play the idol and save herself.

The actual votes get a little complicated, but they strongly support my thesis that Karishma is a terrible player, and I want to give another player props before getting into the whole sordid story.

A boat arrives and tells Lumuwaku they have to send one player to the Island of the Idols. Lauren immediately speaks up. At this point in the game, enough players have gone there and come back with advantages that much of the exile stigma has been washed away. (Karishma pouts that she didn’t get to go, and blames Lauren for being loud and pushy, and thinks the reason she didn’t get picked is because her tribemates hate her. In reality, her tribemates won’t even know she wanted to go until they see this episode’s confessionals.)

Rob and Sandra describe the next Immunity Challenge to Lauren in some detail. It’s another endurance weight-balancing challenge, but this time, there’s a sit-out clause. If you’re confident in your place in the game, you can sit out and eat instead. If Lauren correctly identifies the winner of the challenge, she wins an Immunity Necklace.

Lauren wisely doesn’t bite right away, so Rob sweetens the deal by letting her pick two players. This is enough of a window for Lauren to work through the problem.

There are nine players, Lauren has to pick two. Blind chance, that’s nearly 1-in-4 odds. She knows she can sit out, and she knows her closest ally Tommy will sit out also. That’s nearly 1-in-3.

She knows Dan is complacent and comfortable, and that he’ll want to eat. And she knows Noura is a vegan, and isn’t down on some bacon and pancakes. So she’ll play. She also knows Elizabeth is worst off, from a gamestate perspective, and so will play no matter what. Her plan: peg Noura or Elizabeth to win, let Tommy in on the plan, and then work hard on getting as many other tribemates to sit out as possible.

This is already a great plan, but Lauren delivers a masterstroke: she tells the rest of the tribe that she decided the challenge would be eat-or-play. By framing the eat-or-play decision as her reward from the Island of the Idols, she makes the situation seem rarer than it actually is. And by going into details about all the yummy vittles on offer, she gets practically the whole tribe salivating.

Karishma, Elizabeth and Noura all decide to play, and Karishma couldn’t beat flabby sarcastic me in a challenge, let alone a yoga-obsessed health nut and an Olympic athlete. I took great delight in her dropping out first and having to sit the bench watching everyone else eat pancakes. I took even more delight in her little woe-is-me speech, and then even more when Probst didn’t ignore the still ongoing challenge to throw a little pity party for her.

Noura won the challenge and then displayed some actual growth as a person by trying to stay in as long as possible to give her tribemates more time to eat. (You’ll recall she stupidly stepped down from the previous endurance challenge, when further rewards were on the line.) I haven’t been Noura’s biggest cheerleader this season, but this does in fact show her eyes are open and generally pointed in the right direction.

The Karishma Vote.

Tommy wants Elizabeth gone next, because she’s a threat to sweep immunity and because she was gunning for him back when her allies were still in the game. Dean wants Karishma gone instead, because of his aversion to goats. After some hemming and hawing, and some reading of lips, the tribe settles on Karishma.

Dan tells (read: lies to) Karishma, saying the plan is to split the vote between Elizabeth and Janet. Karishma correctly intuits this isn’t true, and resolves to play her idol to protect herself. She is, in fact, one of three players to drop an idol tonight. First Dean plays a fake version of the fake legacy advantage given to him by Jamal (he’s hoping the other players will see it’s fake and assume he doesn’t still have the “real” one, then blindside them with it later, and god I hope that happens). Then Karishma plays her idol, much to everyone’s amazement. This shocks Lauren into playing her own necklace, since she knows whomever Karishma voted for is now leaving, and doesn’t want to risk it being her.

Seven votes Karishma, all thrown away. One vote Janet. One vote Elizabeth. Probst calls a re-vote, with Janet and Elizabeth sitting out, and Elizabeth goes home unanimously. (At least, I presume unanimously, as no Janet votes were shown. Usually, they show as many votes as possible to preserve tension as long as they can.)

Karishma loves that she’s still in the game, and thinks she played it beautifully. But I think she’s a bonehead, and here’s why.

First off, I wasn’t sure where where the Janet vote had come from. I usually skip the tail end of each episode, where the freshly-ejected player gives their exit interview while all the votes are shown on camera, but this week they only showed us the results of the anti-Elizabeth re-vote, so that wasn’t much help. Sometimes we get to see a vote or two against as they’re being cast, but that didn’t happen this episode. Not wanting to break my blackout oath, I checked Wikipedia, which sometimes have voting breakdowns. This revealed that the Janet vote came from Karishma.

(The only Elizabeth vote in the first draft came from Dan, which is itself interesting, but I don’t know what to make of it yet.)

So I’m working under the assumption Karishma thought it was going to be a landslide, and didn’t purposely force a tie. Here’s her position right now: she’s still in the game, she’s patting herself on the back, she’s on Cloud 9. But that’s going to come crashing back down when she gets back to camp, everyone likes her even less now, and she doesn’t have her idol anymore.

Playing an idol to squeak past one super important vote is fine — that’s sort of what Lauren did this episode. Playing an idol to squeak past one vote with no plan to follow up afterwards doesn’t actually accomplish anything. If I could ask Karishma a question, it’d be something like… what next?

If Karishma were an actually good player, she would have done a lot of legwork before Tribal Council. Just off the top of my head, she should immediately know Elizabeth and Janet are in danger, because that’s what Dan told her. Appraoch Elizabeth and Janet individually, show them the idol, and tell them, “Get on board with me, or one of you goes home tonight, and I don’t care which one.”

A really good player would go on to then slap together a makeshift alliance of four or maybe five, perhaps by swaying Dan or Noura, perhaps by selling “we need to break up Lauren and Tommy”. But we’re taking baby steps here.

In this hypothetical, Janet and Elizabeth need to start scrambling. They let the goose out about Karishma’s supposed idol. Does she have one? Who knows? Several players searched her bag but didn’t find it earlier. Maybe she doesn’t? Do we risk it? Are Elizabeth and Janet just trying to save themselves? Karishma could confirm or deny as much of this as she wants, in whatever direction she wants.

Maybe Lauren and Tommy see a united Karishma/Elizabeth/Janet vote. They still have six, but that’s not enough to split against an opposing alliance of three. They know Karishma will play an idol if she has one (or do they know that?). If they hit Karishma as planned, they lose one of their own instead — probably Noura. (Which makes Noura prime to flip! And Noura is prone to flipping! So maybe it’s 5-4 instead of 6-3?) If they hit Elizabeth instead (which Tommy wants to do, so it’s not much of a stretch), Karishma (maybe?) skates by with an idol still in her armpit.

The point is there’s lots of ways this could have gone. Karishma, when that guy whose name you can’t spell on that HBO show based on those books you didn’t read said “chaos is a ladder”, this is what he meant. You could have used your idol to punch some serious holes in the anti-you alliance. Instead, you quietly bought yourself three more days.

Which, I guess, brings us back around to that dirty word: “deserve”. Does Karishma deserve to win this season, if she wins? In this same season when stronger players were eliminated by unfair post-merge twists, or mis-application of #MeToo? I want to say yes. I have to say yes. Because saying no means this game is broken beyond recognition, and coming back to watch it again has been a mistake.

Who’s gonna win?
For all my bellyaching, I honestly think Karishma has no shot at the prize. Lasting long enough to get to the final three is just Step One; you then have to sit against the jury. And I simply don’t see this jury giving Karishma any votes. Jurors traditionally vote either based on strategy (e.g., they look at who played the best game and vote accordingly) or on spite (e.g., they vote for whichever finalist they hated the least). I think Karishma loses both of those votes against any of the seven people still in the game with her.

I’m sticking with Tommy, with a side-order of Lauren. I think Lauren might catch a little blowback from the jury regarding The Dan Situation, and everyone just watched her “waste” an idol. Also, I think an important future move for both these players is to try and make it look like the other one orchestrated an Elaine vote… which brings me to Elaine.

I’m also going to be watching Elaine very, very intensely going forward. She’s still the person everyone loves, and the time is fast approaching when all of those players need to be out of the game if you hope to win. I think Elaine wins against any of the remaining players… but I don’t think they’ll let her live that long. If I were Tommy or Lauren, I’d be having a hell of a talk with my ally about how much we’re willing to risk our long gameplan on that final four Immunity Challenge.

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