Survivor: Samoa – Why John Lost

The blindside was back last week as John, who thought he was safe and had a deal with Russell, was sent packing just a week after he thought he had saved himself from a possible random elimination by switching sides to vote out Laura. Whoops! I guess he should have taken that random draw after all. Not really, of course – he just should have handled things differently afterwards. What did he need to do? Why did John lose?

We will answer these questions, of course, by taking our (almost) weekly walk through What Samoan Survivors Should Have Learned. John is a smart guy, but being smart doesn’t always equate to playing well, as we’ll soon see.

The first rule is that players need to know how to scheme and plot – and they need to do it correctly. I think John knew how, in theory, but he had some problems putting it into practice. For example, in my interview with John, he bemoaned the fact that his tribe wasn’t as smart or easy to work with as the Foa Foans. However, a wise reader commented to me on this, noting that Foa Foa didn’t have a rocket scientist and John should have been using his own smarts! I agree! Instead of being annoyed at Monica and Laura for not living up to the intellectual standards he expected, John should have made use of the fact that he was (in his mind, at least) smarter than them and found a way to outwit them. After all, most people don’t want to have smarter tribemates because the point of the game is to outwit (and outplay and outlast, of course) the competition!

Yet when I asked John about his strategy, he based it not on intellect and scheming, but on challenges. I agree with his rather obvious statement that, “you can’t go home unless you go to Tribal Council,” but if you’re smart and you play the game well, you won’t go home even if you go to Tribal Council – witness the remaining four Foa Foans, who have managed to completely erase their earlier numbers deficit!

Still, John did attempt some plotting – it just didn’t work very well. He helped form the Galu men into an alliance – though one that had more leaks than a sieve (Brett was aligned with at least two of the women, Dave was obviously aligned with at least some of them as well). He tried to turn the tables on Laura at the merge but had that backfire on him (really, more on Erik). And he formed an alliance with Russell that helped lead to his ouster after he unnecessarily (by his own admission now) pushed too hard for Russell to vote out a Foa Foan right away.

With all of this in mind, I think we can pretty easily say John did not have a problem with the part of the second rule that says to avoid scheming and plotting too much. But what about the portion that discusses not backstabbing too soon? I think we have to knock him a bit for that. After all, it was John’s original idea, from what we saw, to target Monica immediately post-merge so he could weaken Laura’s position. I understand where he was coming from, but that action led to the turnaround vote against Erik, which turned into events knocking off Galu after Galu – and ultimately John himself. If they had just sat back and voted off the Foa Foans first, John would still be there. Yes, he would have had to worry about an alliance of men who it doesn’t look like would have stayed together, but he would also have had more time to worry about that.

Moving to the third rule, John knew he had to be flexible. Indeed, he even used that very term when talking to me and describing his strategy for the endgame: “The last part of that is the endgame and how to be flexible to eliminate who you want to see go so you change the power dynamic and become more and more powerful as the game goes on.” Plus, we saw other instances of John being flexible. For example, when his plan to oust Monica turned into one against Erik, he wisely shut up and went along with it. When it was time to either draw rocks or flip to save himself the risk, he wisely flipped. (I know there are some who, with 20/20 hindsight, say his decision to avoid the tie was a poor one, but I disagree – he obviously made some bad decisions, but that was not one of them.)

But John needed to be flexible in other areas as well. We’ve already discussed how he shouldn’t have pushed Russell to vote out a Foa Foan. Similarly, he shouldn’t have pushed Russell about the immunity idol. He should have shown Russell that he would be a loyal follower who would be flexible enough to do exactly as Russell said. At the same time, he should have been looking at his other options, including how best to use Shambo and her emotional/irrational voting pattern. Heck, we can even look back to what I said earlier about John’s complaints regarding his tribemates and note that instead of being upset at who he had to work with, he just needed to figure out how to best manipulate them.