Quick question. When is a Survivor twist not a twist at all? When you can see it a mile away. While we still have an interesting season on our hands, Survivor Vanuatu is shaping up to be as forgettable as they come. Mark Burnett has us constantly looking for a twist, but the episodes play like he doesn't have any hand to play. The dual elimination was OK, but it caused much more of a small ripple through the game rather than a tidal wave of excitement they needed to make things interesting. Imagine what we would have done without Da from last week. Oh yes, I forgot. We still have all of those boobs filling the screen.
In The Usual Suspects Kevin Spacey says "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist". Mark Burnett would be pulling off a trick of equal magnitude if he was able to find any footage of something worth watching among the Lopevi tribe. I had previously decided that the strategy of voting off the most dangerous (read: youngest) members might seem like it sucks, but it was a legitimate strategy. If it was the only thing keeping all of the old and fat guys on the island, why would anybody expect them to do anything different? For the game, it is a great strategy, for the viewer it absolutely sucks. Basically five of the guys haven't had an incentive to do much at all for most of the time on Vanuatu. What's worse, they have no reason to scheme against each other. Even when personalities clashed, like Lea and Rory, nothing really came about. Instead, we get a lot of some of the most stupid conversations on the planet. The latest intriguing bit of controversy centered around the campfire. Chad said Travis always got the best sleeping spot around the campfire - I shit you not. Travis told him to "Build a bridge and get over it". Ah, the predictable colloquialisms from Travis. What would we do without them? They went back and forth for awhile until another native of Vanuatu showed up on the beach. With some minimal gesturing, Lopevi figured out they needed to pick a chief, and they picked Lea.
At the Yasur tribe, the same person paddled in, and the women picked Scout as the chief. If I had been gambling on Survivor, I would have lost so much money, because I have been waiting for the women to get rid of Scout for some time now. For some reason, she has this mafia don sort of hold over her tribe, and they always look to her before they do anything, unless it is a gospel song, then they wait for Lisa to take the lead. The women have been marginally more enjoyable, but still not that much scheming. If it wasn't for that visit from Da, I would have no insight whatsoever on most of their personalities. Before they were able to talk about it too much, the ground shook and everybody was able to experience a live earthquake, which scared some people and was a delight to others. For good effect, CBS made sure to include plenty of file footage of volcano explosions. I thought the scariest thing was the huge bats that were flying around after the trees started shaking.
It turns out that the purpose of electing chiefs was to facilitate a new set of tribes. After the debacle on Survivor: All Stars, it is probably a safe bet that we won't see too many "pull the buff out of a hat" type of things to choose teams. One of the chiefs was going to separate the women and the men into two sides, and the other was going to pick which team they would join. Lea won the rock/paper/scissors face-off, and chose to pick the final teams. Scout divided the teams up with Chad, Twila, Jules, John K, and Chris on one team, and Leann, Eliza, Rory, Travis, and Ami on the other. Lea took one look at Rory and Chris and picked the other team, leaving Scout with them instead. Lisa was an extra person, so she was allowed to decided which team she would join. Perhaps seeing the gender advantage of Lea's team, the new Lopevi, she chose to go along with the new Yasur, and the 5-2 female majority in that tribe.
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Comments (4)
not sure about everyone else, but I'd like Ami much better if she would just shut up and look pretty - the talking seems to distract from her implants...no???
1 of 4 | Posted by moneymark | Posted on October 15, 2004 1:57 PM
You left out how Jeff Probst has been desperately trying to create controversy. When Yasur lost the immunity challenge, he said "That was some of the worst paddling I've seen in my life."
Shut up Jeff.
2 of 4 | Posted by b-side | Posted on October 15, 2004 5:55 PM
Amen to both comments. Ami is all around the most physically attractive female Survivor ever, but the bitchy mouth suggests signs of serious caffeine withdrawal in our favorite 'barista.'
And while Probst's creepingly more aggressive and condescending snark was initially refreshing, he's starting to look a little like Alex Trebek when he smugly corrects some nuclear physicist's pronunciation of obscure French words.
Dig it, Jeff: You're a game show host. People who are starving don't want to hear it from a guy who's getting paid to look 'ruggedly handsome' and who gets to leave at the end of the day to go eat roasted pig with his homeboy Da and hit on the Eurotrash chicks at the local casino-resort.
3 of 4 | Posted by jack | Posted on October 16, 2004 7:58 AM
Amen to all 3 comments.
Jeff, stop trying to talk smack.
Ami, stop trying to braid people's hair.
4 of 4 | Posted by Genevieve | Posted on October 19, 2004 1:45 PM