(Season 17, Episode 14 – “Say Goodbye to Gabon” – Season Finale)
I’ll tell you here that things progressed about as you would have expected from last week’s elimination of Crystal … for awhile. But then, as almost always seems to happen with well orchestrated plans, someone comes along and wins an Immunity Challenge and screws it up. All in all, though, this was a satisfying ending to what turned out to be a great season of Survivor.
The follow-up Reunion show reaffirmed that Corrine is one of the most horrible people I’ve ever seen on television, made moreso by the fact that she seems to relish her nastiness. I suspect that just as Jeff can’t stand Jonny Fairplay, he doesn’t care for Corrine anymore. Perhaps she made for good television, though not as much fun as Randy, but she isn’t good people. And you could tell she was trying to parlay her “bad girl” image into further money.
Now, let’s get after this pesky jump so we can talk properly.
Poor Sugar. Don’t get me wrong, Bob was one of my favorite players throughout the game, and if you’ve followed my missives (and who wouldn’t) you’d also know that I was impressed with Susie’s strategy of never being important enough to get eliminated next. People underestimate the value of such a strategy. Sure, it’s difficult to sell to the jury as a viable reason to win a million bucks over someone else, but it can get you pretty far.
For Susie, winning the final Immunity Challenge was all she needed to get into the Final Three. It really was the only thing that saved her. While Matty, Bob and Sugar would have been a more satisfying Final Three, it would have been tougher for Bob to win that one. Sugar seemed doomed either way, but if her concerns were to try and make things more fair, she would have been up front with Matty about her plans to force a tie so he could have practiced fire building at least a little. My man Bob schooled him on that one.
I’m a little flummoxed that Susie got three jury votes and Sugar didn’t get any. I don’t think Sugar did herself any favors by basically blowing off the jury’s questions, but I didn’t think any of the three did a particularly good speaking job there. The bottom line is that Sugar outwitted and outplayed the jury.
It was even admitted by Bob that he made no strategic moves in the course of the game, and Susie’s only strategy came at the point where she switched alliances to put the underdogs on top. That was key, but it was once. Sugar orchestrated moves throughout the game, putting herself in the position she was in, and even securing Bob’s position at least in the Final Three, as well. If she’d have stuck with Kenny and Crystal, not letting her emotions get in the way, would she have won? Probably.
I think what it came down to this year was that we collectively had the most pathetic, whiny, petty and immature jury possibly in the history of Survivor. Don’t get me wrong, Sugar still should have sold her strategic skills to the jury to try and get some “respect” votes, but I’m still not sure that would have worked. Randy voted based on a cookie. Corrine is just a bitch.
I’ll go ahead and say it. For the way she played the game, I think Sugar deserved to win. I don’t think Bob is an undeserving winner, but it would have been more satisfying for me to see Sugar take the crown and Bob get the $100,000 Sprint vote-in money. I don’t think the winner should be eligible for both anyway. That way, Sugar could have at least gotten a consolation prize.
Maybe I sound bitter, but it’s hard to stomach someone who played the game so well not getting any respect from the jury for her skill. But this is Survivor, and unpredictability is the name of the game. She should have known going in this was a different kind of jury and would be hard to sway her way. I think she could have gotten enough votes to win if she’d sold herself a little better.
I am happy for Bob’s victory. It’s always satisfying to see an underdog find his way into the Final Three and take the crown, and for Bob to do so at 57 years of age is damned impressive. His run of challenge victories propelled him toward the finals when everyone wanted to get rid of him day after day. And it allowed him to endear himself to Sugar enough to get her maneuvering on his behalf.
Definitely three of the most unexpected contestants to make it to the Final Three, but three of them who stood out to me for one reason or another from Day One. Bob because he was just so awesome, Susie because she kept not getting voted for when you’d think she would, and Sugar for being in Exile constantly and still being able to sneakily shift things here and there. A great season for Survivor. I’m glad to see that not stacking the game with acting and model wannabes is proving to be the best way to get a great season. It means I still have a chance!
Clacked by Jason Hughes 
on Dec 15, 2008 @ 16:08 EST5EDT
Really, Jason? Sugar didn’t want to win, so why should someone vote for her? If her plan was to push Bob through to victory, then she really needed a therapist and not visit her Daddy issues on the rest of the game. The point is not so a “good” person wins, it’s that YOU win. Not your alliance member. And, she may have had Matty’s vote had she not said that her most regretful move was to vote out Ken. Go for the win, not second place! It was a subpar ending to a season that had finally gathered steam.
I’m also a bit irritated about your conclusions Jason. I can understand why you would want Sugar to win, but you basically covered everything that made it impossible for her to do so. She did the worst job on the final tribal council, blowing off the jury. She was emotional all the time, which was also mentioned during the reunion show. And she made fun of Randy when she had him voted off. As a small sidenote I am even more irritated that you think Sugar should’ve told Matty that there would be a tie. Really? You don’t think Matty would’ve gone to Bob and Susie then and tried to convince them to simply vote Sugar off? The tie was the best thing Sugar could’ve done and she was simply unable to tell those two because that strategy to give them both a chance without hurting either one of them directly just works if she keeps it a secret until the vote.
Anyway, I am perfectly fine with the end result. I don’t quite understand why you did expect Susie to get less votes. She did a perfect final tribal, her answers were perfect and again displayed why she was and is the most under-the-radar player in Survivor history. She simply tries not to offend people and thinks she has positive aspects that make her deserve the vote. Some of the jury members thought that this was exactly right, which is in my opinion a manipulation on Susie’s part. But that’s exactly the game of Survivor.
That the showrunners made up the fact that Randy was the deciding vote (which is nonsense since any one of the votes for Bob were “deciding” ones, he needs all of them not just one) was just to make Randy the center of attention during the Reunion. Randy is basically someone who got so hurt by life and people that he’s bitter to no end, which to me is on the one hand pretty understandable, on the other it’s totally idiotic that he thinks he as well as Corinne can make that into their behavior towards the rest of the world, basically turning what made them bitter in the first place into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which in the end is really really sad for at least Randy, because I think Corinne can still get friends through her looks. Good for her.
So again, I can’t really agree with you on the “almost perfect ending” here. Matty didn’t deserve the 100k because he behaved like a kid (or should I say brat?). I mean look at some of the later episodes, he sat there like a child who wants something and can’t understand why he didn’t get it. Sugar might’ve played the game very will but her downfall was her emotional side. Richard Hatch won because he was able to manipulate people without them knowing it. That’s the other part of playing strategic, which is also the reason why Yul won on Cook Islands. You can’t manipulate while showing your emotions about it, that’s just it. That’s just a given.
And Bob – he stuck to his strengths. To be honest I was baffled he didn’t manage to build a good enough Tower in the last challenge, but he managed to get that far in the game because of this strengths, which he stuck to. He was lucky that he was a pawn in Sugar’s game but that’s just what a strong player needs next to his strengths, the luck to be the deciding vote, the lewer in a scheme, the pawn in a tactic, and of course not letting the enginuity surface too early when the votes about who gets voted off are weakest links first and then strongest players. Bob’s advantage was his scrawnyness and his age and that later on Kenny and Crystal posed too large a threat to be left together.
Anyway, to me the end result was perfect but I have to say without you seeing it differently I couln’t have written such a nice comment about me thinking you were wrong ^^;
So thanks for that :-)
I think Sugar did purposely blow off the jury so Bob would win. That’s the only reason she screwed Matty over at the end. But I agree that if the winner of the million is also in the running for the audience award, they should be disqualified and give the prize to the second highest vote-getter. And as much as I don’t like Randy – and I’d NEVER hire him for a videography job after seeing him on Survivor even though you could tell during the reunion that it was almost all an act – Corinne is absolutely one of the worst people we’ve ever seen on the show and I hope her 15 minutes expired at the end of the live show. She is someone we definitely don’t need to see ever again.
“I think what it came down to this year was that we collectively had the most pathetic, whiny, petty and immature jury possibly in the history of Survivor.”
Personally I’d change the word “jury” in that sentence to “cast”. After China and Fans v. Faves, this was the most disappointing season they could have possibly given us. For pete’s sake, it didn’t even rain overnight to make them cold, tired and miserable. Even the climate couldn’t have been bothered to show up and spend time with these losers.
Finale conclusions aside, it was all-in-all an underwhelming season of Survivor for me and those I watch it with. Some of this can be blamed on who the producers chose to compete, and some of it has to be blamed on the editors who put the episodes together. “The cut”, as Corinne alluded to, makes all the difference in the world, in my experience.