Liar, Liar, Sand on Fire, or Why Gina Should Not Have Been Voted Out

It's 10 PM Central time on Thursday night. According to the ratings, week after week most people have been tuning into Survivor (or Friends and then Survivor), watching CSI after Survivor, and then jumping over to NBC to watch ER.

I do that too, (minus the Friends part)

This means that, as I write this, most of us just finished watching one of the best ER episodes ever, featuring the last "shift" of Cure Autism Now spokesman (hence the dozen or so shots of the poster in the background) Anthony Edwards. Our favorite nerd, Dr. Greene, is dying of a brain tumor and is leaving the show in May.

What, you are probably asking, does this have to do with Survivor?

Well, I think what Survivor producer Mark Burnett is looking for in his well rated show is drama that we have consistently seen in the writing on ER. Unfortunately it simply cannot exist in the game of Survivor as we know it.

This week’s episode of Survivor: Marquesas was predictable and, except for about 30 seconds in the come-from-behind Maraamu Reward Challenge victory, fairly dull television. No wonder Rob gets so much air time. He is the only one who really adds drama with his controversial comments.

In some episodes (like this one) it looks like the formula is beginning to wear thin. Obviously Burnett can't put a bunch of terminal patients on his show and let them duke it out (or can he? hmmmmm). Seriously though, after Gina, who I admit was my pre-game pick to go far, was voted out and the credits rolled I felt like something was missing. I am a lover of underdogs and so this game is a little hard to take sometimes. In Hollywood, Gina would have had a come from behind victory and somehow remained in the game for a little while. But she didn't; she was booted.

Should Gina have been voted out?

No.

It is really getting close to merge and Gina is not an individual threat compared to the likes of Tammy and Zoe and the Rotu men.

She has let her disdain for her former tribemates be known loud and clear and even if she went back into their fold, she still would not have the numbers necessary to create a majority by herself so she was not a threat their either.

Gina was smart and easy to get along with (and for the record, as a person who has lit campfires on beached every summer while vacationing in Cape Cod; the Coast Guard has always told us to cover the fire with plenty of sand to make sure it is put out) she would have been a good person to take along to merge if it looked like Rotu had forgotten about the original members.

Even though the former Maraamu had distanced themselves from Gina, they would have been kissing her feet to get her to rejoin with her new "family" once the merge happened.

It may have looked like Kathy was trying to talk to Gina about getting into some sort of an alliance and when Gina refused to talk about it, she blew her chance, but I think Kathy was trying to pull a Lex to Clarence here. I think Kathy just wanted Gina to know upfront that she was a goner. It was part "family discussion" and part reasserting her control. Gina chose to live in denial a little while longer. I think she knew it was coming. No matter what the former Rotu members told her and each other and Jeff, they lied. They all were liars. The voting was along tribal lines and was only along tribal lines. There was nothing familial about it.

Gina, I am glad you got something out of this, and hope your "friendship" with Hunter leads to something substantial. But you should not have been voted out, yet.

So then who should have gone?

KATHY!

Without a doubt Miss Kathy will cause more problems after the merge than anyone else. She will not be able to handle John's power trip, or the alliance they have built up. She is going to go in there like nothing has happened and all those original Rotus are going to remember why she was supposed to be the first Rotu voted out if they had lost a challenge before the switch. She has been reinforcing that view repeatedly with her whining and demanding (fire now, better shelter now, leaking roof fixed now) and will continue to expect to get her way.

Kathy has enough determination to win immunity over anyone else in an endurance contest (not that she necessarily will, but she could) and she has enough balls to be confrontational to her other tribe members. She is most likely going to piss off a lot of people and Pappy and Sweet Pea are going to go down with her.

Booting Kathy out pre-merge would have been the smart thing to do. There is no way the Maraamu can fly under the radar with Kathy piloting them.

She also nearly lost the reward challenge by forgetting the flag and I don't know what they were doing in that maze, but I guess it was more suitable for a rodent like Rob.

Paschal is harmless and he made it very obvious that he is unlikely to win any physical contests and so he can go at any time (insert Gilbert Grape joke here).

Neleh looks as if she was so hollow you could suck soda through the girl.

Kathy was the one to go tonight. Not that I don't like ya Kathy, just, it was your time.

I am still a huge Survivor fan, but I wish there was a way that Burnett could give us a few more weeks of each season to really get to know the tribe members better. I could handle four weeks of not voting anyone off in the beginning and no talk of alliances until after thirty days. Then the games could begin and alliances would form more on the basis of interests and wants than pure immediate needs.

After watching ER tonight, I felt emotionally exhausted and totally caught up in the story. That is what I want from Survivor.

Peggy Keller is Mother and Behavior Therapist to her two autistic sons and teenage daughter. Click here to e-mail her.

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