Survivor: Samoa, week three

Once again, nothing much interesting happened over on Galu. Some of the kids got together and decided doing yoga. The old woman scoffed at it. One of the girls (Laura? Lauren?) made a comment to the effect of “it’s nice we don’t have to spend all our time in Game Mode. They won immunity, and the cameras turned away from them.

It did get me thinking about a couple of things though. For one, I don’t think it’s ever safe to come out of Game Mode in Survivor. You can be working your ass off at camp and challenges, or you can be laying around doing nothing, and still do well in the game as long as you’re playing intelligently. Assuming you can ever let your guard down is a sign of not playing intelligently. I know a lot of these players are scouted by the producers rather than taken from a pool of applicants, and that they likely have never seen the show before in their lives, but this is a pretty common error that people make EVERY. SINGLE. SEASON. Laura/en is going to find that comment haunting her, some day.

Secondly… how much work actually goes into maintaining the camp? You need to keep your fire going, maintain your shelter and have enough water and food for ten people. Obviously there’s enough work to keep everyone busy on a daily basis, but the days must be long. Being in the wilderness, though, I have no doubt that you can find as much work for yourself as you want. When you’re out busting up logs or harvesting termites for soup, or whatever, it’s easy to look back at all the layabouts in camp with scorn.

That’s where we get disconnects with players like Shambo. She might look at all her hard work and see herself as indespensible. In some seasons she’d be right. This season, she’s not. She might look at Laura/en and decide “she’s not working, therefore she’s not playing the game” without realizing that she’s working her ass off but not really playing the game either. If she really wanted to win, she’d have put the goddamned logs down and gone and done some yoga.

Back on Foa Foa, Jaison played the race card on Ben. I usually hate when this happens, but in this case I think it was justified. If there’s one thing I know from my 27 years as a white boy, it’s then when someone not-white looks at you and says “Dude, not cool,” you apologize and back off. Race, religion, nationality: these are subjects you simply do not screw with if you want to lead a peaceable existence with people. Especially when some of those people might have to make the decision to give you a million bucks. There has never been anyone on Survivor as white as I am, and even I cringed when Ben came out with his “How is calling the black girl ‘ghetto trash’ racist? She’s from the ghetto and she’s trash!”

More interesting, though, was that Russell allowed it to happen. He could have changed the tribe’s mind and got his way, but he saw the outcome of that and wisely stepped aside. A good Survivor player knows how to always get his way, but a great Survivor players knows when not to. Does that mean Russell is great?  It’s still kinda too early to tell, but I’m definitely leading in that direction.

Who’s gonna win? I really hope we spend some time next week getting to know Galu a little better. Speculating on a winner this far from the conclusion is always going to be a fool’s errand, but it’s downright impossible when you’re only being exposed to half the players. The editors are doing as badly this season as they were last season, and last season was the worst I’d seen it in a long time. So rather than base my opinion on anything objective, I’ll just go with my favorite player: Russell. Of course, now that I’ve said that, look for him to be voted off next week.