A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

STRATEGERY: TWoP Survivor recapper Miss Alli, queen of most of what she surveys, asserts in her mini-recap of last night's episode, "In case you've ever wondered whether throwing challenges was a good idea? It's not."

Respectfully, I disagree.

[Obviously, if you're not a fan of the show, skip ahead to the next post. It's detail time.]

As NY Jets coach Herman Edwards said, we play to win the game. Period. And winning the game requires that you, as an individual competitor, somehow find a way to have fourteen other competitors eliminated before the final two. It does not matter one bit the order in which they are eliminated, except insofar as you need other people around to help you eliminate others and protect yourself from elimination.

So: if there are people in your tribe pre-merge who will be a danger to you post-merge, either because of their ability to win individual immunity challenges or because of the danger that they will form a voting bloc that might outnumber your own (or because they're just going to become increasingly sympathetic and unbeatable as the game wears on, see Christy), then it's better to get rid of them sooner rather than later.

The producers have long moved the game past the point where it's whichever tribe enters the merge with more members Pagongs the other tribe out of existence. You know, as a competitor, that there's goingto be some form of tribe-swapping at some point; moreover, you know that things are fluid and any bloc larger than four is going to break down at some point. There's just no need to have more people than that aligned with you, and eventually you'll have to turn on most of them anyway.

We play to win the game. To win, you've got everyone else eliminated, your tribe and theirs, and the only way to eliminate people in your own tribe is by going to Tribal Council. Q.E.D.

One final point on last night: regardless of what swapping's going to occur between the tribes, ala Rupert last night, it already seems all-but-assured that there will be more original Morgans than Drakes in the combined tribe once the merge occurs, Burton or no Burton. So cutting him off here and preventing him from making a Colby-esque individual immunity run later on seems to make a hell of a lot of sense.

Well, to me, anyway. Your mileage may vary.