Survivor: The Amazon - Why Shawna Lost

(If you missed the episode or just want to read all about it, click here for the full recap.)

Shawna asked - begged to be voted off. But that was two episodes ago, the previous time Jaburu went to Tribal Council with only women in the group. Now, she wanted to stay. She told Jeff Probst she was in it for the long haul. Well, I guess the "long haul" is only a couple minutes nowadays. So now that she wanted to stay, what happened to cause her to go? As usual, let's take a look back at What Amazonian Survivors Should Have Learned to see where she went wrong and why Shawna lost.

First, of course, is to scheme and plot. Before hitting her lowest of lows, Shawna was doing okay in this regard. She was part of the "cute" alliance, and it was her relationship with Deena that made them think of bringing Deena in as the fourth. But it went downhill from there. Very shortly after talking about how the alliance would have to be solid, she went into a tailspin and cared nothing for it. She wanted out. But the alliance wouldn't let her out! She had created a monster, and now she was trapped - TRAPPED! Oh, pity the poor soul. Gag. Anyway, all her strategy went out the window at that point.

When the tribes were shuffled, she gained new strength. But it didn't seem to help her get back into the swing of scheming. She was too busy flirting.

All that flirting made Deena worry that she was creating a new alliance. Thus we get to the rule against plotting and scheming too much. While Shawna was apparently just having fun, not plotting a new alliance, it didn't matter. It looked like a threat to Deena, and that's what mattered. To quote from the discussion of this rule: "Kelly in the third series did not necessarily try to plot with everybody, but because she was friendly and spent time with some of the others, she was seen as a potential traitor." Sound familiar? Yes, you could replace "Kelly" with "Shawna" and it would be just as true here. She wasn't backstabbing, but, as Deena said, she wasn't so much into the chick thing as the Alex thing.

Shawna generally did fine in the area of pretending to be nice. Well, except when she was busy whining about how horrible she felt, etc. Otherwise, she did a rather good job, actually, as the guys can certainly attest to.

She did, however, allow her emotions to control her. In this case, she was pretty much just a big bag of emotions. First she was depressed. Then she was elated. While depressed, she wanted out. While happy and flirty, she wanted to stick around with the boys. She seems to have totally forgotten about the alliance once her hormones started running.

Next up is one that is particularly relevant here - providing food wins allies and don't be lazy. Not only did Shawna do very little work by all accounts, even once she had the infusion of energy from the guys, but her opponent in this particular battle was the main food provider! She did things absolutely wrong as far as this one went, and Matthew was absolutely right. Several times we heard Rob talk about how Matt's fishing was a major reason to keep him around. And with Shawna acting as dead weight on the tribe, it certainly didn't help her situation any.

So did the tribe vote off the right person? Undoubtedly yes. They are still in the position of wanting to vote off the weakest member. Even in her rejuvenated state, that was still Shawna. They don't know for certain when they will merge (even though it looks from the previews like it might actually happen next week), so they are safest to try to keep the team strong for further tribal competitions. Alex wanted to get rid of a competitor, looking further ahead in the game, but if he doesn't find himself some new alliance partners, there won't be anything further in the game for him!

Shawna had a number of things going against her. She begged to be voted off earlier. She magically came back to life, showing Deena that it was all mental to begin with. She still didn't do much in the way of work - except for her work at flirting, of course. She abandoned her alliance and was getting along far too well with the guys as far as Deena was concerned. You combine all of these things and you have a roadmap to why Shawna lost.

David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at rno@pobox.com.

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