There’s an art to watching Survivor, believe it or not. Sure, you can just watch the show as a fun contest/soap opera every week, but you can also watch with a more discerning eye, trying to figure out what the editing of the show means. Who gets screentime, who gets confessionals, who gets ignored by the cameras and the other players – all of these mean something. The first episode airs after everybody has gone home, so the producers and editors know who’s going to be standing at the end, and they try to manipulate each player’s storyline based on that – whoever goes to the final three will likely fit into some kind of pre-ordained Survivor storyline, and they’ll have you rooting for somebody. It’s good drama, and audiences won’t want to tune in to the second half of the season if the players who make it that long aren’t given positive qualities through the editing.
It’s with all of this in mind that I am trying to figure out what the deal is with Chet, a man who is possibly the worst Survivor contestant in history. He’s irritating, he’s bad at challenges, and it appears like he has shit in his underwear*. Editing will do play with who these people really are, but it’s impossible to look at Chet, standing around like he doesn’t have a bone to support himself, and not be disgusted. What’s more incredible is that this guy, who is as weak as they come and seemingly playing a shit social game, keeps living while other, more powerful players, fall on their swords when they think they have it all sewn up. Mikey B and Joel both took the loss at a Tribal Council they thought they owned. As Joel says in his final confessional, that shit is humiliating.
But is Chet playing a good social game? I don’t really think so – he’s just a pawn of Cirie and Tracy, two utterly despicable women who seem to be puppet-mastering this whole season. Watching Ozzy and Amanda just fold when Cirie convinced them to vote out Joel over Chet was astonishing. I don’t really understand how these two can’t see Cirie’s blatant and obvious manipulations; only Jonathan Penner saw through her, and it looks like an injury is taking him out of the game next week.
I understand getting rid of Joel – the guy is built like a fucking superhero, and having him dominate individual challenges post-merge would be a nightmare, especially in a scenario where both Ozzy and James are around. You’re basically looking at those three guys taking home every immunity challenge. And Cirie’s desire to keep Chet around – keep the player who is weaker than you and thus a bigger target – is keeping in line with how Todd won last season. But the big problem Cirie and Tracy have is that they didn’t do the other half of Todd’s winning strategy, which was to get tight with the big guy. If Cirie and Tracy make it to the merge, they’re going to have to throw Chet to the wolves sooner rather than later, and they’re not going to have much of a buffer between themselves and the Walk of Shame. And Cirie is too high profile to do the ‘Just Tagging Along For the Ride’ strategy, and I think Tracy, who is more under the radar, is too much of a cunt to make that strategy work (her nasty message to Joel: ‘This is what you get for calling me weak too many times’ speaks to a vindictive streak that she won’t be able to keep down).
When this season began I had Chet targeted as the first to go. I can’t believe Yau-Man is off the show (what a mistake, from a purely audience standpoint. He’s one of the best players ever) and Chet is still strutting his shitty ass around the island.
If you’re as much of a Survivor junkie as I am, you should check out Alexis’ blog. She’s the cute little Southern Fan with the braided hair, and her blog reveals lots of the behind the scenes stuff that has been fascinating me about the show since I started watching it. It does seem like some aspects of the blog are contextually spoilery – you might get a feeling for who sticks around for a while from reading what she has to say – but I think it’s fascinating.
*Seriously. Last episode he was bending over and the seat of his shorts/underwear was a disconcerting brown.