THAT'S HOW MUCH GAME I'VE GOT: Survivor results! After the fold.
Sandra wins! Sandra wins! And, okay, I'd have probably voted for Parvati just because of the strategic boldness and brilliance of the double-Idol maneuver, as well as her challenge dominance, but I'm guessing the jury rewarded Sandra for her being right about Russell all along (despite having never won a challenge, ever) and that's understandable. (I do wonder if Russell was disadvantaged from having not participated in an earlier season and having not done the social circuit with these competitors, on top of not knowing that he lost the first time around.)
I was a bit frustrated with this episode because I didn't think the final challenges -- plate-balancing and a blind maze -- were worthy of an all-star finale. Hands-on-a-hardbody was warranted here, even though Parvati surely would have won another endurance test.
[Am loving Russell getting busted in the post-game show now, complaining that the game is flawed because he didn't win either time.]
This was a great season -- up there with the first season, Pearl Islands, Palau and Guatemala as among the best, and any future season is going to pale in terms of the strategery. So glad I gave Survivor another chance after a few years off.
added: One of the noteworthy aspects of the season was how little it relied on purely physical challenges, especially once the game turned to individual immunity, making this a more fair fight for female competitors. (And even without doing the old "Jeff is going to tell you a story, and then you have to run around and gather the answers to the questions" challenge.) And it wasn't really until the last two episodes that any of the contestant's real-life identities/affiliations came into play -- engendering more sympathy for Sandra's win -- but if you didn't know Russell's or Parvati's occupations coming into this season, would you have learned anything about them here?
I'll say this: Russell has a strategy, and he plays it as close to perfect as anyone does.
ReplyDeleteThat strategy is "get to the FTC, then point out to the jury how well you've played the game and hope they respect that."
But, he completely misses the fact that that strategy is beaten by "take the guy no one likes or trusts to the FTC with you."
He was lacking the knowledge that this didn't work before.
ReplyDeleteLoved it. Thrilled that Sandra won (I remain dumbfounded by her presence on the villains tribe in the first place)... and I'm glad that Russell got screwed in the final jury (again). But best of all: Parvati had one of the all-time great Survivor final jury quotes, about Russell. "I decided not to slay the dragon. I decided to make him my pet." AWESOME. And so, so true.
ReplyDeleteAlso... now that I'm watching the reunion, I'm glad to see Probst use his douchebaggery for good instead of evil for once, constantly calling out Russell for *fundamentally* misunderstanding what it takes to win.
ReplyDeleteEvery single episode I complained how Russell didn't understand jury mechanics. I'm sure my husband is happy not hearing that rant anymore. Maybe the best player to ever inevitably make it to the jury and be completely unable to win. I can't believe he doesn't understand the ultimate nature of the game. It's so weird.
ReplyDeleteA few thoughts:
ReplyDelete1) I liked the way Boston Rob put it at the Reunion: Russell plays the game to get to the end, but he doesn't play the game to win. (He's not saying Russell doesn't WANT to win, just that the strategy Russell has used will not win because it ignores the need for jury votes at FTC).
2) Russell has played the game like he still thinks that the Hatch approach works, when we've seen for the past 10-15 seasons that it really doesn't anymore. The only thing that could have saved him would have been a Final Two with him and Parv where it's a true lesser of two evils choice for some of the jury members...but I still think Parv would have won going away. Note that the three votes we saw for Parv came from Villains. Russell got zero votes -- all the Heroes appeared to vote for Sandra, who didn't alienate them.
3) Are we sure Russell lacked the knowledge that it didn't work before? I accept that he didn't know the final vote tally from last season, but he had a talking head last night before FTC that -- and I'll have to go back and rewatch to be sure -- I thought suggested that he believed his strategy did NOT work last season, but he was doing it again anyway.
4) the Luck Factor (and/or the game play of 3rd parties) really did play a much bigger part in Russell making it to the end than he was willing to admit. Were it not for Tyson's boner (yeah, I said boner), Russell's not there. Were it not for Parv's double HII play, Russell's not there. Most stunningly, were it not for the Heroes utter post-merge idiocy in the face of Sandra's attempts to swing the power, Russell's not there. I'm sure we could all think of a few more examples.
After all his talk of dragging the "bitches" along, I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed the "i kept him as a pet" comment. Obviously it did not help her get votes, but it at least got a few laughs in our house.
ReplyDeleteRe: #3, I heard that too - he said something about how taking two weak players to FTC backfired last time, indicating that he knew about the Samoa results. My reaction was that the talking head must have been filmed after that reunion show, though the more I think about it, the less likely that seems.
ReplyDeleteIt was weird that Probst never asked Russell during this reunion, "had you known that it didn't work the first time, would you have done it again?"
ReplyDeleteI had the same fleeting thought as J. Bowman about that Russell talking head, but I can't figure out how that could have worked from a timing standpoint. Does anyone out there know, even in a rough sense, what the filming schedules were for these two Russell seasons and how the S19 live vote-reading/reunion fit in?
ReplyDeleteAll they had to do was green-screen something after the season was over.
ReplyDeleteGreen screen? But...that wouldn't be real!
ReplyDeleteHow long had it been since "where will we get food/I'm hungry!" was the focus on an episode?
ReplyDeleteThis season was shot over the summer, and Samoa finale was in December. When I saw the clip I thought they edited "that didn't work for me" in from another part of the interview.
ReplyDeleteThe group I watched with rewound that talking head a few times and we decided it was definitely the magic of green screen. Background looks fake and has no motion whereas Parvati's talking head right after has trees waving in the wind, etc.
ReplyDeleteI was disappointed that neither Russell nor Parvati seemed to make any attempt (that we saw) to actually own their actions (as in "Yes, I lied. Yes, I voted you out. It was part of the game and I played the game well." If nothing else, he could have pointed out that all his scheming showed that he was actively trying to play the game. ).
ReplyDeleteRussell in particular seemed resigned to the fact that they wouldn't vote for him. I suppose there was more that we didn't see, but it felt like the real downside of all those "My question is: you suck" statements from the jury is that Russell wasn't given any chance at all to respond.
I also thought that "I know I lost" comment at the end contradicted things he said (and the way he acted) during this season. I wondered if he didn't find out the results of the first season right before the final jury meeting of the last one. (He could have demanded to know, or maybe the producers were trying to give him a not-so-subtle nudge to alter his performance before the last jury.)
Having watched the sequence again at CBS.com, I'm going to disagree with the green-screen theory. The sequence that includes Russell's talking head runs from about 65:12 to 65:41 on the CBS.com video of last night's episode -- it looks contemporaneously shot to me (looks like Russell's got the same beard as the other Day 39 scenes, for one thing), and I do see movement in the background (leaves, waves) behind Russell. I don't see obvious greenscreening artifacts (as opposed to, say, the in-car scenes in "Justified").
ReplyDeleteNow, the sequence at the above time codes starts with a voiceover from Russell - he's talking about his strategy in Samoa to take weak people to FTC because he thought he could beat them. Cut to on-camera Russell, saying "and I didn't." Then cut back to Russell voiceover about Parv having a lot of enemies and Sandra not doing anything, and then back to an on-camera comment about (presumably) Sandra being easy to beat.
Based on that, I agree with smm above -- it looks most like they spliced "and I didn't" into the sequence that aired, divorced from whatever its original context was, and that Russell was clueless at the time of the HvV FTC about the results of Samoa.
Had I been on either jury that decided Russell's fate, I would have voted for him to win $1,000,000. Interestingly, I believe that the final 3 on this season of Survivor may be (are) the top 3 players ever to play the game. I would rank them Russell, Parvati, Sandra. Yes, naysayers, I know Russell was misogynistic, and, I know he didn't win. And, Yes, I know that Sandra won twice, that's why she's in the final 3.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I rate Sandra 3rd even after her two wins because after all these hours of watching her, I just don't comprehend her game or why she wins. Maybe that's an argument that she really is the best player ever
ReplyDelete