The Box in the Living Room: Round 3

October 11th, 2005 by ironsoap

This year in Guatemala, the big twist was that last year’s loser brigade Stephanie and Bobby John got to come back and take a second shot. After the weaseling and Jeff Probst-ing that got Stephanie farther than she probably deserved last year, giving her a whole new chance to play seems like they may want to try to avoid going to that well too many times or else her whole “poor me the girl with all the bad luck” image is going to be shattered into “Hey, how ’bout you just give her a million dollars and get it over with?”

Don’t get me wrong, Stephanie is an admirable player and has a definite charisma on camera, bringing her back was an interesting move. I just don’t know I feel sorry for her anymore now that she’s gotten at least three leases on life in the game and her tribe still keeps losing.

Unfortunately with Survivor, the twists and highlights usually don’t show up or matter until later in the season. The producers rarely just overhaul the game, preferring instead of tweak and refine each year. The real interest comes later once alliances and strategy and voting conundrums present themselves.

In a recent episode the tribes were re-assigned. The tribe losing the immunity challenge had four from each original tribe and each had a fairly weak member. If no one flipped, a tie would occur and tie breakers have been known in Survivor to not favor the undecided tribes. So the interesting game situation here is, how do you extend the hand of trust, get what you want, but not put yourself in a position to have to make a shady move later that could hurt you in the long run? My solution was that I would find a second member from my original tribe I trusted and offer a proposition to an influential member of the other side: Take one of your most trusted tribemates, and the four of us will form a new alliance. As a gesture of good faith, we’ll take turns voting off one member from our previous tribes in turn, randomly decided. Once the second vote happens and our original tribes are back to even at three, the alliance is set. We pick off the unaligned people and go four strong and firm into the merge.

Of course that’s not what happened. The guy just took someone’s word on it with no guarantees and angered his own former tribe, but that’s why the show is fascinating because it introduces interesting logic problems that factor in very volatile variables like human emotion.