Survivor: Cook Island Finale Thoughts

Last Thursday, I thought that Aitu had made a huge mistake in choosing to keep Adam over Jonathan.

On Thursday, I said that Yul had thrown away the million dollars.

Before the finale, I had intended on editing my post to explain how Yul blew tribal council on Thursday (by overplaying the "Yes, I am playing to the jury" statement).

During the final I said that the final vote would be 8-1 Ozzy.

During the final vote, I changed that to 7-2.

As the votes were being announced, I came up with 6-3 Yul Ozzy.

Needless to say, I was surprised when Yul won 5-4.

I feel like I'm in crazy town. Voting Jonathan out did not hurt Yul, but helped him in the end. Adam lived up to his promise even though he wanted to vote for Ozzy, and that was the swing vote. Also, because of "suspense" purposes, we were not shown that Aitu had decided on Jonathan before Adam, which would have made the agreement with Adam look a lot smarter. Yul's sucking up to the jury was ignored because Yul owned up to it. And the jury got over Yul masterminding a lot of their demises by viewing that as a positive.

Meanwhile, Ozzy, who had to think he was going to win the million tonight, is left with $100,000 and a lovely new SUV. Why did he lose? Probably because his biggest weakness was more emphasized during the final tribal council. Ozzy is not the social player that Yul is. And he wasn't able to truly get across why he should win when faced with an equally deserving opponent. Plus, Adam's promise meant that Ozzy was competing to win 5 of 8 votes, which is a disadvantage under normal circumstances, but in a situation where you are facing somebody who has as impressive credentials as you? That's a very tough road. Oh, and bringing up throwing challenges to claim that you were the Yul of the Latin tribe? Not the best of moves. Yul could claim many positive moves in the game as his. Ozzy's only claim that he could make? He threw a challenge to get rid of somebody. Not the smartest of moves.

This was actually a great finale. So many little things kept everything entertaining throughout:

• Adam being a dead man walking, but still trying to stir things up as he went. When I first saw it, I was against Adam's move, as it was pointless - Adam was going no matter what. But if he had convinced Sundra and Ozzy to make Yul use the immunity idol, there were a couple of possible developments:
  
  
  • Adam could have tried to convince Yul and Becky to throw a couple of votes on Sundra for "sympathy", thus keeping him in the game. This is a long shot, but heck, if you are basically in a situation where you knwow you are on the chopping block, why not try anything and everything?
  
  
  • Adam was trying to find a way to get Ozzy the easy win. I actually think this is the case. Adam knew that Ozzy automatically wins against anybody against Yul. He also knows that Yul is going to be in the final three unless the immunity idol is taken out of the game. He also knew that he would have to vote for Yul unless Yul hit the jury. So he did his best to help that along. (And if he knew that the jury was going to be final three, I think he would have pushed even harder for the idol to come into play)
  
  
  • Adam was just trying to inject some excitement into the final 5 and final 4 votes. Obviously, Adam was going to go. But how boring is it for him to get voted out 4-1? And how boring is the final four going to be when it's only Becky and Sundra (two non-entities) on the chopping block?
  
  
  
  
• I thought that Yul was stupid for even offering the immunity idol to Becky. Don't you think that would drive Sundra to vote for Ozzy? But again, this was an example of a seemingly bad decision by Yul not working against him, as Becky was made to bear the brunt of not accepting Yul's offer.


• And quite honestly, Becky should have been punished for not taking the idol. That fire-building tiebreaker was painful to watch. As they begain to build the fire and tried to get the flint to work, we started to make jokes about the show putting a sub-title on saying "elapsed time: 30 minutes". Then they did. And we started to crack up. Then we started joking that they would keep on going and there would have to be another manner of determining who makes the final three. And up came the "Elpased Time: 1 hour" sub-title, and Jeff said "Okay, we're going to give you matches." Even that wasn't enough, as we went to 1 hour and 30 minutes, with everybody mocking the two competitors. And to top this off, Sundra announces that she has no more matches! Cure even more laughter amongst the watching crowd. Finally, and thankfully, Becky won and considered that to be an accomplishment instead of the finishing blow to whatever small chance she had of winning.


• The jury questions were fun. Nate's question to Becky of "Why do you deserve to win?" was fantastic. Not because of the question itself, but because of Nate's response to Jeff's "Satisfied with the answer" question. Nate actually said "no". After Becky tried to answer a second time, I thought Nate was going to ask Jeff if they could just cut through the BS, and announce Becky as the third place winnner right now. Sadly he didn't.


• Candice's question of Yul was loaded. I knew as soon as I heard it that he would get tripped up on the word "shamelessly", because I don't knwo if he thought that it was shameless. But to his credit, he answered as Candice asked and only really added more thoughts when Candice looked like she was going to say something else.


• Jonathan's though took the cake. He tried so hard to be Sue Hawk, and he failed. I don't know if his "entitlement and arrogance" comment played on the jury's thought process though.


• Parvati does clean up well. (Sorry, it's in my contract that I must point out the hotness of a woman in as many posts as possible.)


• As always, Jeff did a fantastic job on the reunion show.


• Seikou's Survivor song? Not so good.

I'll have some more thoughts probably on Tuesday, including where I rank Yul among the various champs and this season against the other seasons, and the best idea for another Survivor: All-Stars season.

(Edited to correct Yul/Ozzy mix up early on, along with a few typos.)