Earl takes home a million dollars.
Survivor: Fiji Blog
15th Elimination: Boo
It’s hard to believe that the 14th season of Survivor is now over. While the season finale was definitely interesting, it wasn’t the “incredible” finish that it had been hyped up to be. There was no incredible upset or great strategic move that altered the course of the game. Basically, the entire two hours revolved around Dreamz making dumb decision after dumb decision. Is anybody surprised?
Before I move on to the final entry of the Survivor: Fiji blog, I’d like to take a moment to look back at the way I ended it’s very first entry. Was I on the money or what?
“For example, when a male cheerleading coach named “Dreamz” started a middle-of-the-night screaming match with Rocky Balboa not even twenty-four hours into the show, I knew that either Fiji would either be the best season yet, or a complete disaster”
Onto the nuclear holocaust…
1. Yau Man is clutch. After being forced to use his idol in the last tribal council, Yau Man fully realizes how large the target on his back really is. Cassandra and Dreamz were desperate to eliminate him before the final four, and Boo was looking for anyone to take the heat off himself. With no protection, Yau Man desperately needed to win the immunity challenge, which he did.
This got me thinking. Is Yau Man actually good, or is everybody else so inept that he’s able to keep up with them? Sure he’s wise and good at throwing axes and spears, but Yau Man has been a little too dominant for an elderly gentlemen who’s 80 lbs. soaking wet. When you think about it, Boo has probably won the most challenges out of everyone and he doesn’t look like a huge physical threat. Rocky, Edgardo, and Alex never really seemed to be able to get it done either.
My personal thought is that the cast of Survivor: Fiji is just one of the weakest ever, both mentally and physically. You throw an Ozzy, a Yul, a Terry, or a Tom from Palau into this bunch and the game would’ve been over before it started.
2. Can somebody PLEASE do the smart thing? Now that Yau Man had immunity, either Earl, Cassandra, Dreamz, or Boo had to go. Well Earl had the hidden idol and Cassandra is Cassandra, so that brought it down to Dreamz or Boo. Figuring that the alliance would stick together, Boo was basically resigned to finishing fifth. However, he did manage to make one final attempt to stay in the game. It made perfect sense, so of course nobody took him up on it.
Boo knew that he basically had no shot of beating anybody in the final tribal council, so he appealed to Earl from that standpoint. Earl could beat him or Cassandra at the end, but would have a tough time overcoming Yau Man’s underdog status and Dreamz’s sympathy vote.
The plan was simple. Vote off Dreamz, one of his biggest threats, instead of Boo, an easy victory. As an added bonus, getting rid of Dreamz would nullify Yau Man’s deal making it that much easier to eliminate Yau Man next.
Boo basically handed Earl the million on a silver platter, with the hopes that he’d become 100K richer for it. Why Earl didn’t go for it, I’ll never know. This is how things have been the entire season.
3. Time to put your money where your truck is. Now that the final four had been determined, it was time for the immunity challenge. Jeff “shocked” them by revealing that this was the last challenge and that there would be three people in the final tribal council vying for the million.
How was this a shock? The same thing happened last season! None of them counted the number of people on the jury and realized that there would be an even 10 if it went down to only two people? Seriously? About 0.4 seconds after Jeff Probst told Rocky that he was the first member of the jury, I had figured out that the producers were going back to this dumb twist. They had two weeks to think about it and couldn’t come to that conclusion?
Anyway, this was where Dreamz was going to have to pay back Yau Man with immunity if he won it. And sure enough, he came out victorious.
Just as a side note, the last two people remaining in the challenge were Yau Man and Dreamz. At this point, Yau Man should’ve been guaranteed immunity. So when it came down to the two, my fiancé wondered why Yau Man just didn’t let go and have Dreamz give him the necklace.
My response? “Because he realizes he made a deal with an idiot and now anything can happen.” How true…
4. Just end this thing and put us out of our misery.
Now the big dilemma is whether or not Dreamz is going to follow through with his word. The big “twist” of a three person final changed things in his mind. Now Dreamz was giving up a guaranteed seat in the final tribal council and a real shot at a million bucks. Not that I see how that’s any worse than giving up a guaranteed spot in the final three where you’d be pitted against two people you can easily beat, basically guaranteeing you a spot in the final tribal council anyway – but this is Dreamz, so once again, just throw all logic out the window.
Anyway, after a huge build-up at tribal council, Jeff asks Dreamz if he’d like to keep immunity or assign it to somebody else. And in a very surprising move, that was the first time in Survivor history that I actually felt a bit nauseated, he decided to keep it. Wow. That was by far the lowest move in the history of the show, and it basically took a million dollars right out from under a nice, and fairly deserving guy like Yau Man. It was just disgusting on so many levels. So of course, I’m going to break them all down…
A. Dreamz should’ve never won immunity in the first place. He should have just appeared to actually try while intentionally tanking the challenge. This leaves him with a 33% chance that Yau Man will not win immunity. If Yau Man doesn’t win immunity, there’s a decent chance that Cassandra and Earl will vote him out since he’s actually the biggest threat. In that case, Dreamz keeps his integrity and comes off as the goofy guy with the sob story who might’ve actually won the whole thing. There’s a 66% chance that he ends up with that scenario if he tanks.
Now of course, Yau Man would’ve actually ended up winning if Dreamz had tanked, so that point is a little moot. But while it would’ve eventually backfired, it was still the strategy to go with, because…
B. If Dreamz wins immunity and gives it up, he’s out of the game anyway.
C. If Dreamz wins immunity and doesn’t give it up, he’s viewed as total scum and won’t get a single vote in the final tribal council anyway.
Dreamz’s only shot to win the game was to lose the challenge. The second he won it, he sealed his fate. Which was why it was so disgusting to watch him take Yau Man down with him. Yeah, I know it’s tough to watch a million dollars slip through you fingers, and there’s not a person watching the show who wouldn’t have struggled in that situation. But like Earl said, “I would’ve never gotten myself into that situation in the first place.”
16th Elimination: Yau Man
5. “I just won a million dollars!”
At the reunion show, Jeff Probst asked Earl what was going through his head when Dreamz decided to keep immunity, and he replied with the classic response above. With Yau Man out of the way, things were pretty much decided. Dreamz was scum, Cassandra was weak, and Earl had played, without question, the best game out of anyone.
Of course we still had the always interesting final tribal council to sit through. The producers must’ve really done something to get the jury all hot and bothered, because they were surprisingly merciless to the final three. For the most part, Earl and Cassandra hadn’t really screwed over anybody. Dreamz was well, Dreamz and got what was coming to him. But I was really surprised how Alex just ripped into Cassandra, and how Lisi started going off on everybody even though she had very little contact with any of them and none of them were responsible for her being voted off. But then again, Alex is a greasy lawyer and Lisi has no class, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I just felt like a lot of people were overly harsh in a game where an alliance held firm and there wasn’t much backstabbing except for what Dreamz did.
Anway, Earl pulled off the first sweep in Survivor history, winning 9-0!
Tied: 17th and 18th Elimination: Cassandra and Dreamz
By the way, who gets the 100K? What happened to that?
Winner of $1,000,000 and Sole Survivor: Earl
6. The “Real” Dreamz. The Reunion show was notable for two things. One is the restraint of Yau Man. Jeff asked the “knife to the heart” question of “how many of you would’ve voted for Yau Man if Dreamz gave him immunity?” He would’ve ended up with six of the votes. If I were Yau Man, that would’ve been the moment I snapped and wrapped my hands around Dreamz’s throat on national television. But Yau Man handled the situation like a true gentleman. Although the fact that Dreamz could break Yau’s frail body using only his earlobes probably helped calm the situation.
The second point of note is that no matter how hard Dreamz tries to sell that he was always pulling a fast one on Yau Man and never, ever intended to hand him immunity, nobody’s buying it. Here’s why…
1. Dreamz isn’t that calculating. The man was running around Fiji like a chicken with his head cut off. When Yau Man dangled the keys, the only thought going through Dreamz’s head was “Oooh! Shiny!” There was no way he was thinking that far ahead. If he was, he would’ve never made that awful deal in the first place.
2. If Dreamz was planning on screwing over Yau Man the whole time, then why did he go on and on about honor and being a man of his word in front of the cameras? Nobody playing the game sees that. It’s purely confidential for the people watching the show. Why would you talk about honor and make yourself out to be a huge spineless coward? If you always intended to screw Yau Man, why not admit it and laugh about how you’re playing everyone so bad?
3. If Dreamz was always intending to screw Yau Man, why was he CRYING when he decided to keep immunity for himself? How does that make any sense?
Look, let’s just be real and admit like a man that you made a selfish, cowardly, stupid, disgusting move that cost a deserving man, a man who gave you a $60,000 truck, a million dollars. But then again, if Dreamz was a man, he would’ve never made a move like that in the first place. He can talk about how Survivor is “just a game” all he wants. He’s absolutely right. But there’s no way he can honestly say that a move like that improved his shot at winning the game. He would’ve been better risking that Cassandra would’ve helped him force a tie with Earl at the end. Keeping immunity just sealed his fate. And when you’re in that type of situation, screwing over a good man is just the epitome of low.
7. A closing thought. I’ve always wanted to go on Survivor. But after this past season, I’d seriously have to give it a second thought. If they keep letting people like Dreamz into the game, this franchise is going to fall apart fast. I mean, the man couldn’t even answer a yes or no question during the Reunion show. He just babbled incoherently. How are you supposed to form a strategy with someone like that messing everything up? Without a doubt, the biggest determining factor in this season’s outcome was not the luxury camp and the poverty camp. It wasn’t the two hidden immunity idols. It was the complete unpredictability of Dreamz’s dumb decisions. I just don’t know if I’m willing to suffer for 39 days only to end up kicking myself for the rest of my life like Yau Man will. Because no matter how much I strategize or know the intricacies of the game, there’s just no overcoming a Dreamz. And so I close the Survivor: Fiji Blog with this final thought…
“With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.” – William Blum
