Grid Effect

We figured since there is nothing else on Sunday nights even worth mentioning that we’d get the Survivor finale out of the way. The title refers to the women supposedly being witches, thus they are stirring a cauldron that they pretend to huddle around. It’s not terribly original. but have we ever gotten an original metaphor from a contestant on this show that wasn’t from Jonathan Penner or Yul Kwon?

Anyhow, it wasn’t really a lively finale, everything that we assumed would happen, did. Meaning, one of the people that we didn’t want to see win from the beginning of the season won. Not to say that Parvati was completely undeserving, but it really felt like 90% of the time, she was just executing one of Cirie’s many blindsides. You could probably say that Parvati didn’t win it so much as Amanda lost it. Again. At the final tribal council. For the most part she just looks frightened of confrontation and when she is asked to explain herself, she attempts to be non-offensive and dances around a straight answer only to the agitation of the person asking the question. It’s sad really.

Of course, the fact that the people asking the questions are vindictive pricks have the time factors into the scenario as well. We can’t remember every jury members question, but Natalie’s stands out for her sheer weirdness, Eliza for her non-question (though we tend to agree with her scathing commentary), Erik for his bitterness and Ozzy for his self-righteousness and gut spilling display. But it was definitely a Survivor first to have two of the jury members make romantic propositions to the two finalists with their “questions”. That was…fitting.

We try to never judge a season’s success based on who we want to win and how they finish. But when someone like Parvati wins, it kind of speaks to the rest of the cast, and probably why we weren’t all that infatuated with this finale. Amanda had to have known that if she brings Parvati instead of Cirie, she is going to have Alexis and Natalie’s vote in the bad. Cirie is going to feel slighted, so count her vote towards Parvati as well. We can’t believe that Erik didn’t vote for Parvati, but he is so enamored with Ozzy he wants to sleep with the same women as him, so going into it she’s theoretically down 0-4 out the gate. It seems like a mistake to bring her instead of Cirie since Cirie just spent the last tribal council complaining about being at the bottom of every alliance she was a member of. In other words, she has no committed votes (or at least fewer than four).

Your Final four for Survivor. In case you didn’t realize, it’s all women. Natalie would be happy to tell you.

The blame for losing Jason and Eliza’s vote falls squarely on the shoulders of Amanda (though in the case of Eliza, she can’t be blamed for Eliza’s random decision making). Jason was probably on the fence, but when Amanda said she would have told Ozzy about the upcoming blindside, and considering that move saved his ass, his decision was then made for him. It’s kind of ironic, because in the one instance she wanted to give a non-committal answer, she opens the vault. In the case of Eliza, she seemed to hate and resent Parvati, but not have any respect for Amanda. I don’t know how she votes for someone who treated her with as much disrespect as anyone has ever treated anybody with on this show, but there it is. She cast the deciding vote and gave Parvati Shallow a million dollars. Without question the least likable person we’ve ever seen win a season of Survivor.

It seems to be common consensus that Cirie got screwed with the show reverting back to a final two, instead of the standard final three they’ve used for four or five seasons now. While it does seem out of the ordinary to randomly revert back to a F2, there was no guarantee it would be a F3. They’ve done an F2 more times than an F3 so it seems like fair game to us. To just assume that you are looking at an F3 seems presumptuous to us. And most people making excuses are just pissed off that they had to watch Parvati win a million dollars and not give Cirie one iota of credit. Something we can relate to, definitely, but this move by the producers isn’t nearly as egregiously unacceptable as all the challenges that took people out of the game prematurely.

Cirie’s biggest problem has been the same problem she’s had all season, and why she didn’t make the F3 in Cook Islands: she’s a liability in challenges. While we value strategy over challenge play, that aspect of the game is still integral. We were indifferent to who won, but if we were forced to choose one of the four to root for, Cirie would have been the choice in a landslide. Followed by Amanda then Parvati then Natalie, whom we’re still too freaked out by to comment on thoroughly.

We’ll still look back on this season fondly, it was just too eventful to consider otherwise (even if it was in part due to awful game-play and stupidity). But the constant harping by Probst that this is the greatest season ever seems like wishful thinking. He said the same shit about China, and that is probably the worst season they’ve had (definitely the worst we’ve seen), but you could make an actual case for this one, but the game play was so bad in some of the instances that we only give so much credit to those who pulled it off. Still, it was fun to watch.

Back with a recap on the reunion and some more commentary on the finale later.