My pick, Edgardo, gets the boot.
Survivor: Fiji Blog
11th Elimination: Edgardo
It’s time to hang the flags at half-mast as my Survivor: Fiji pick is no longer with us. Before I get onto this week’s blog entry, let’s observe a moment of silence for Edgardo…
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Thank you.
1. Where do I even begin? I really don’t know what to say about this season other than that it features, without question, the dumbest group of people to ever play the game. I mean, even the Axis of Idiots during the Exile Island season managed to put together a solid game plan and stick with it. Right now, you’ve got an Island full of people devoid of any logic running around and absolutely obliterating their chances at a million dollars. And what’s worse is that their inexplicable antics are also destroying the chances of the few people who actually know how to play the game. If this trend continues, it’s a near guarantee that somebody with an IQ of 4 is going to win a seven-figure check.
As a strategist, there were only 3 out of the 19 castaways, who I would’ve been happy to see win – Earl, Alex, and Edgardo. These are the only three people on the show who have actually formulated a solid game plan, ran the numbers, and started putting it into action. Others, like Yao Man and Cassandra, while not nincompoops, don’t qualify for this status because they’re basically riding coattails. When everything is said and done, those two are basically just pawns in Earl’s overall plan.
Today’s entry is going to be a little bit more than just the usual “Three Observations” because there were more than just three hideous errors that led to the game being tipped in Earl’s favor. And I can’t let any of them go unquestioned…
2. When Dreamz is smarter than you, you know you’re in trouble. So it turns out that Mookie was actually the knucklehead who tried to vote Stacy out last week. After tribal council, Mookie berated Dreamz for getting rid of Michelle, saying that he ruined everything by giving the power to Alex.
Let’s think this over, Mookie. Would you rather vote out Michelle and give the power to Alex, who’s in your alliance, or vote out Stacy and give the power to Earl, who wants to pick you off one by one? I hate to break it to you, but either way, you weren’t getting the power. I just don’t see what you hoped to accomplish by putting your alliance in a 4-6 hole.
3. Enron would like to congratulate Dreamz, the winner of tonight’s “Survivor Screw-up”!
“Mookie has the idol”. With those four words, Dreamz firmly cemented himself as the worst person to ever play the game.
I can’t even begin to tell you how egregious of an error this was. This just blew away Candice and Jonathan’s mutiny on Cook Islands, Ian voluntarily jumping off the pole in the final immunity challenge in Palau, Colby choosing to take Tina to the final instead of Keith in Australia, Lex keeping Amber around in All-Stars, and Danielle’s weekly bad moves in Exile Island. Nothing even comes close to this. Those moves at least involved a bit of honor or some strategy, even if it was flawed. This was just pure stupidity at its ugliest.
The members of Team Earl had no reason to suspect that any of the four horsemen had the idol. Sure, there was always the possibility. But you can’t base your strategy on a complete guess. By just blatantly spewing that information out there, it revolutionized Team Earl’s game plan. The four horsemen would have completely caught their opponents by surprise and took the upper hand in the game.
Look, I’m really not crying sour grapes because Dreamz’s betrayal got my pick kicked out of the game. If he wanted to switch alliances, even at the expense of going from a lock for the final four to a possible participant in the final six, that’s one thing. But I honestly believe that Dreamz was still planning on going with Alex, Edgardo, and Mookie at this point. The man just lacked the mental capacity to keep secret the only piece of information that could destroy his alliance. All he had to do was not say those four words, and he said them anyway.
4. Sneaky Earl. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how amazing Earl was during Dreamz’s diarrhea of the mouth. At this point, there was no way for Earl to know if Dreamz was telling the truth, or just making up some info to keep everyone happy. So what does he do? He asks Dreamz what the idol looked like. And when Dreamz gave him the correct answer, he played off his surprise beatifully. Just an overall excellent performance.
5. Slimy Stacy. Here’s a scenario for you: You’ve got somebody who you’ve been tight with for almost the entire game. You got separated from them when the teams switched, but at the merge, that person made a major play that kept you in the game. By sticking with the person, you have a decent shot at being in the final three. In the last reward challenge, it was revealed that you were universally despised by nearly everyone in the game. One of those people who hates you approaches you to join their alliance where under no circumstances would you advance farther than the final four. What do you do? Do you stick with your one friend, or do you go with the people you hate?
If you’re Stacy, you stab Alex in the back to join up with Early, Cassandra, Yao Man, and Boo.
Folks, this awful move by Stacy almost ranks right up there with Dreamz’s mistake. And in all actuality, you could probably make a case for it being worse, as the four horsemen would have still had the numbers with Stacy and could have voted off Earl anyway. Instead, she totally hung her friends out to dry and simultaneously killed any sliver of a chance she had in the game.
6. Just when I thought you couldn’t get any dumber… Dreamz let the immunity idol out of the bag. Stacy stabbed them in the back. And yet in spite of both of those mishaps, Alex, Edgardo, and Mookie still had a solid chance of pulling the game off. You see, Team Earl was all set to avoid Mookie’s idol by voting off Alex. They were completely confident, never suspecting that the Mookster would ever pass off the idol. Once the votes were cast, Alex would use the idol, deflecting the vote from himself to Earl. By eliminating the leader, the rest of Team Earl would be forced to scramble, and a whole new window of opportunity would be opened for the horsemen. Until Dreamz decided to have yet another mental meltdown…
“Mookie gave Alex the idol!”
I just can’t for the life of me figure out what Dreamz hoped to accomplish by giving out that information. Maybe you can argue that his first slip of the tongue was a momentary lapse in judgement, but this was inexcusable. He ruined his chances for a guaranteed spot in the final four for what might become a guaranteed spot in the final six. And that’s only if Team Earl is dumb enough to keep him around. Dreamz has already proven himself to be a huge liability. Now that he’s served his purpose, Earl would be very smart to cut him loose before he starts blabbing back to his old teammates.
Look, playing both sides of the fence, while a bad strategy in itself, is one thing. But Dreamz’s whole strategy, if you can even call it that, was purely self-destructive. If you’re going to leave one side completely ravaged, you’d better just hop on over to the side that’s still intact. Don’t flop back and forth and have your loyalties be questioned. Don’t continually stab people in the back to the point where you couldn’t win the final tribal council if you were sitting across from Hitler.
7. A beautiful move. I don’t care that this decision ultimately got my pick knocked out of the game, it was a good one. After Dreamz blabbed yet again, Team Earl was left to wonder if Alex actually had the idol, or if it was a set-up to get them to vote for Mookie. While they discussed this, I was really hoping that they would out-think themselves and vote for Alex anyway. Then they actually came up with the right decision that I hoped they wouldn’t realize existed – Vote out Edgardo. When you can’t decide if Choice A or Choice B will blow up in your face, come up with Choice C. That’s how you play the game!
8. “The Edgardo Face”. When you rack up the best record in the NFL and then watch your team perennially choke in the playoffs, you don “The Peyton Manning Face”. When you ruin your team’s chances in the Super Bowl with two horrendous interceptions, you wear “The Rex Grossman Face”. And when you base your million-dollar strategy around a male cheerleading coach named “Dreamz” who has a propensity to vomit secrets and end up getting blindsided in a tribal council where you thought you were doing the blindsiding, that’s when you break out “The Edgardo Face”.
Yup, even though my head was exploding, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at the complete shock on the face of Edgardo, Alex, and Mookie when the first “Edgardo” vote came out. Priceless.
9. I hate to say “I told you so, but…” Back in the Episode 8 entry I questioned Edgardo and Alex’s decision to vote off Lisi instead of Dreamz. Both were completely unstable, but Lisi was far, far more likely to be loyal to the cause. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Edgardo would still be in the game if he gone with Lisi.
10. Do me a favor, and pretend you care… With Edgardo out of the picture, here’s my stats for picking the winner based on the first episode of a season. For those of you who don’t follow the blog regularly, I didn’t watch Season 1 when it first aired, so that’s why these numbers are out of thirteen instead of fourteen.
My early picks to win who have…
Made the Merge: 13/13
Made the Jury: 12/13
Made the Final Four: 8/13
Made the Final Two: 7/13
Won the Game: 4/13
I have to say that I’m starting to feel a little bit like the New York Yankees here. After putting up a tremendous run during seasons 2-10 where I was 4/9 in picking winners, I’ve hit a nasty lull where I’ve come up short four times in a row. There have been two close calls with Steph in Guatamala and Ozzie in Cook Islands coming in second, and two solid picks who had their torch snuffed out thanks to some boneheads in Sallie in Exile Island and now Edgardo. Is the magic over?
11. It is if the producers keep this up… Survivor: Fiji has just been too far “over the top”. Between the “have and have not” camps, the two hidden idols, two eliminations that didn’t affect the numbers, and adding knuckleheads like Rocky and Dreamz to the fray, Survivor has become more of a tropical WWF than a chess match. With all these twists that completely uproot the entire fabric of the game, it’s nearly impossible to maintain a strategy. Look, I’m all for the occasional switch-up. Never knowing what will happen next is a big part of the game. But now we’ve gotten to the point where the game is so unpredictable, there’s hardly a point in even planning.
The show desperately needs a return to the basics, as I’ve mentioned before. But if the producers insist on adding new wrinkles, here’s one. Develop a Wonderlic test for Survivor to asses a potential player’s strategy. If someone is incapable of passing a certain level a.k.a. Dreamz, don’t allow him on the show. Allowing him to run around and torch every ounce of strategy with his completely random moves just isn’t good for the game.
And on that note, I’ll end this eleven observation rant.
