WELL, YES, I DID CALL YOU A DISGUSTING RAT, BUT IN MY DEFENSE, I MEANT IT: I'm going to spoil in this Survivor post, but I'll vamp a bit so you have some time to quit reading.
We haven't blogged Survivor in a while, and I'm not sure why. I think it's been a great season with really compelling characters and thought-provoking subtext. In particular, race. I thought it was a little annoying at the beginning of the season when so many people -- frankly, mostly (but not completely) white people, which I found amusing -- thought that the segregation idea was the most offensive thing since Marge Schott. What has been interesting, though, is how that played out after they junked the segregated tribes. As it turned out, the tribe that was the most focused on racial identity and unity was the white tribe, with two separated groups of contestants from that tribe openly worrying that the other races were going to stick together, then two of them making a bold (risky, stupid) split from their mixed-race tribe to get back together with their old friends. The question of how much of this was driven by personality, friendship, or strategy rather than race seems to me beyond the point -- the insoluble conundrum is how much race affected those other calculations. In the long run, I think that the experiment has been fascinating, and the fact that it is also discomfiting is part of what makes it good TV.
Second, the racial angle opened the show up to some characters we wouldn't otherwise get to see. For example, any other season, a smart but nerdy guy who can't stop himself from talking about mass vs. surface area or the idea of rational self-interest would be marked as an outsider and dismissed quickly, but because of the way that the tribes were fractured and forced into alliances, he emerged as a dominant and unusual reality player.
Third, and here's the spoiler, I think Candice was fundamentally a good person who made two huge errors in judgment. The first was falling for that jackass, and the second was letting the first error lead her to the idiotic move of jumping from one tribe to another. I don't think she really deserved the exiles, which after the first week seemed unjustifiedly mean-spirited (as opposed to strategic), and which probably got to her emotionally more than they would have to any other player. I was glad to see she was positive when leaving, because I really thought she could have been more damaged by the process than anybody since Deb.
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