Survivor: Samoa – Why Ashley Lost

There was no plotting! There was no scheming! There was just rain, rain, and more rain. So how was the vote unanimous?! Why did Ashley lose?

This rather wet episode of Survivor left us in quite a position. Normally, we have somewhat more to work with than what we were given here. However, that will not stop us in our goal to answer the all-important question! We will still follow through What Samoan Survivors Should Have Learned to see what we can find out.

The first rule is the item we already noted players were mostly unable to do in this episode – scheming and plotting. But let’s not worry about the others just yet – let’s only look at Ashley for the moment. Based on what she told me in my interview with her, we need to give her some credit for knowing that she needed to make an alliance. Specifically, she said, “My strategy was to try to make the strongest alliance I possibly could.” That’s a hell of a lot better than most of the previous people voted out this season, who just talked about working hard at camp and/or challenges.

Ashley thought that she could make that strong alliance and “make sure I knew what was going on at all time.” She knew she needed to do that because, “I watched people and they made these alliances and everyone’s lying and backstabbing.” OK, more positive points for paying attention. Unfortunately, what she failed to recognize was that when you’re in the game, you don’t always know who is doing the “lying and backstabbing” until it’s too late – unless, of course, you’re the one doing it (and even then, you still sometimes don’t know about the others!).

So Ashley put her trust and faith almost completely in the hands of Russell (and to some extent, Natalie, but I feel like Natalie was really just a passenger while Russell is doing the driving). That’s where she failed in this rule, because she didn’t seem to scheme beyond making that supposedly-solid alliance. When I asked her what other scheming she did besides with Russell, she gave a couple examples that both led back to Russell again! The fact is that he had her bamboozled.

Mind you, this alliance could have worked to her advantage. We saw earlier this season that Russell wanted to take Ashley along with him to the end. So that means something else went wrong to make Russell change his mind.

We know it wasn’t the second rule, plotting and scheming too much! What about the third, which addresses flexibility? Well, one important point in that rule is that you can’t just latch on to one alliance and hope it holds for the whole game – which pretty much describes exactly what Ashley did. We’ve already beat up on her for that, though, so there is no need to whip a dead horse.

However, it does seem like Ashley might have been inflexible in another way. We saw her blow (and blow chunks during) the Samoa Smoothies challenge. She was the only participant who couldn’t swallow her drink – and she really wasn’t that far from doing so. Her failure there seemed indicative of the way she dealt with food in general, as Liz had suggested earlier that Ashley wouldn’t even eat coconut. When you’re starving on Survivor, you need to eat pretty much anything you can get your hands on. Flexibility was definitely called for there.

I think Ashley did fine in terms of the fourth rule, which warns against allowing your emotions to control you. As one example, she told me that she and Ben “did not get along,” but unlike others who fought Ben toe to toe, she wisely played a behind-the-scenes role in turning the tables on him. In doing so, she also followed the fifth rule by pretending to be nice.

When we arrive at the sixth rule, though, we see all sorts of problems for Ashley. That rule discusses how threats need to be removed. In this episode, we saw Russell recognize another threat to his superiority in the game – Liz. So why wasn’t Liz voted out?

Because there was a bigger threat to the well-being of the entire tribe – Ashley. Ashley couldn’t stomach her smoothie for reward and then couldn’t sink a coconut/basketball to save her life in the immunity challenge. While the first one wouldn’t seem to be terribly indicative of anything – it’s not like there will be another gross food challenge out there – the second one was. Ashley just was not cut out for the physical challenges of this game.

We could presume that everybody on Ashley’s tribe saw this and just came to independent decisions to vote her out. I don’t believe that for a second. Instead, I think the tribe followed the seventh rule and realized they needed to drop the weakest link, and that was Ashley. It probably happened when she left the shelter for a bathroom break or (more likely) when she was being interviewed one-on-one about how horrible the conditions were. It didn’t need to be a long discussion, and I’m sure her great protector, Russell, realized he wasn’t going to win this one, so he probably didn’t even bother to try too hard. Maybe if he had a full day of normal weather, he could have done his usual scheming to change opinions. But there was no way that was going to happen in the confines of the shelter during the massive storm.

So we could blame it on the rain, rain, rain, but that was just one small factor. Ashley failed to put herself in a good position. She relied too heavily on Russell and didn’t make any other real allies. Then she fell apart in at least the last two challenges we saw, standing out for how poorly she did. Foa Foa simply could not risk keeping her around and continuing to have to vote out more people. That is why Ashley lost.

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