Survivor: Samoa – Why Marisa Lost

In the RealityNewsOnline pre-show roundtable prediction article for this season of Survivor, a number of us here at RNO thought Marisa would go pretty far. I made the mistake of thinking she could go all the way to the final two! I should have known better based on the information available in her bio. But there is no way I could have predicted the way in which Marisa would leave. So what happened? Why did Marisa lose?

Each week of every Survivor season, we answer this question for the contestant (or in some cases, contestants) voted out of the game. And so we begin anew, using the newly-updated What Samoan Survivors Should Have Learned as our guide. Let’s get to it.

We (almost) always begin with the first and most important rule, which discusses scheming and plotting. I do think Marisa had an idea as to the importance of this concept, because she told me in my interview with her, that she “did try to talk to the others on [her] tribe” about how shady she thought Russell was.

But let’s back up a step. First, we have to recognize that when Russell approached her to be in a “secret” alliance, she was smart enough to agree. You never want to say no when somebody offers an alliance in the early goings because that makes you an instant target. So points for her on that.

Then she gets credit for, as I said above, realizing how shady Russell was and trying to get her tribemates to rally to that same cause. The problem was that Russell had outschemed her, as she told me, “they didn’t listen to me and they didn’t want to hear me because they all thought they had a secret alliance with him. He was using a key word, “secret.” It was a secret alliance and he said not to tell anyone.” So Marisa was trying to undo what Russell had already done, which is a difficult task, especially that early in the game.

One reason Russell had that advantage, though, is that he came in with a plan and Marisa did not. She even told me, “I guess it was to my disadvantage not to have a really evil strategy. I thought it would be foolish to have an ironclad something to do because I didn’t know who I was going to be with.” But Russell didn’t know who he was going to be with either. You don’t have to plan based on the people you’re with – you can plan likely courses of action to be taken in the game. Russell had a plan – evil or not – while Marisa didn’t.

Where Marisa really messed up, though, was in the second rule. While Marisa was fine with the part that says not to scheme and plot too much, it also says to keep your scheming secret and not backstab before you need to. Marisa telling Russell that she was worried about him definitely fell into the category of not keeping her scheming secret. Indeed, it is reminiscent of an incident specifically mentioned in this rule, going back to Alex on Survivor: Amazon, when he told Rob that he would vote against Rob in the final four, telegraphing his move far ahead of time. The rule discusses this situation:

He obviously was not keeping it secret since he told the person he was planning to vote out, and he backstabbed too early – he turned Rob from a friend to a foe by taking out the knife, showing it to him, and telling him exactly where he planned to stick it in Rob’s back. Had he just kept his mouth shut, he would have been in a much better position.

Even though that seems to be the main answer here, let’s keep going – sometimes there are other contributing factors to discover.

The third rule, however, is not one of them. Marisa really didn’t have time to be flexible. I guess we could say she could have been flexible by pretending to still be aligned with Russell, but we already addressed that above and it would be a stretch to apply it here as well.

In the case of the fourth rule, though, I think we did see a contribution. It says not to allow emotions to control you. While it’s not like Marisa was overly-emotional from what we saw, I do think the voicing of her opinion to Russell was an emotional action. She appeared to be frustrated by what she saw and by the others not listening to her. Telling him was a way to get it out of her system and be honest, which would be a good thing in real life – but not in Survivor life.