Survivor: Fiji First Episode Thoughts

Poor Jessica. So hot, and yet she was held accountable for you know, blowing the challenge. On the bright side, she now can lay claim to the title of "hottest Survivor to be the first bootee", wrestling the crown from Nicole from Pearl Islands (the woman who was only wearing a dress when stranded, and yet still got voted out).

What's interesting though is how much Jessica was hung out to dry by Rocky and Erica. They knew she was in trouble, and not only did they not tell her, but they voted for different people, thus guaranteeing her departure. If she knew she was in trouble, maybe she could have made an argument along the lines of "there were 4 of us who could have done that last puzzle, maybe we should have worked as a team to complete it". Or even "maybe putting the lightest people inside the chariot was a poor idea".

With that said, I think Tribe Hotness (official nickname of the Ravu tribe) made a mistake. As much as I think Yau Man is fantastic, if you aren't going to put the engineer in a position to solve puzzles, and he's not that strong, why keep him?

Of course, this mistake is not going to come to bite Ravu in the butt, because the have/have not theme for this season is going to destroy them. The weak are just going to get weaker, and there's just going to be a vicious circle that is only stopped when either the tribes merge, or the dreaded switch occurs.

(As a side note, this would have been an ideal time to really mix things up by having the tribes switch for each immunity challenge. This might prevent a pagonging situation and in this case, could make it fair for all participants.)

I'm going to refrain from selecting a winner right now, though I will note (much like Dalton Ross) that Earl is already getting edited like they would edit the eventual winner. His major hurdle right now is that he is on the Ravu tribe.

The question remains: Who's going this week? I'm going to have to go with Sylvia, the exiled architect. As we've seen in the past, getting exiled in the beginning of the game leaves you on the outside of any any potential bonding that goes on. And this works even more against Sylvia, as she has laready been tagged as a leader type. Given the success rate of leaders early on in a losing tribe (especially one that is under the stress that Ravu is under) and she's going to be a huge target.

I'll be back later in the week to talk about a couple of Survivor lists that have been recently published, and then back again on Thursday/Friday to talk about the second episode.