Survivor: Pearl Islands – Why Nicole Lost

By now you’ve either seen the first episode or read the recap (or both), so you know that the first person voted out of Survivor: Pearl Islands was Nicole, the massage therapist. In the RNO Roundtable for Survivor predictions, I had said she would go early – but boy did I get the reason wrong! Let’s take a look at just why she was the first one voted out.

Of course, the way we do this is to look back at What Pearl Island Survivors Should Have Learned, which has been newly expanded and updated with additional sections and some great examples to help guide us through (and it was just posted yesterday, so if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, I encourage you to do so now). Before we get to that, though, one of my fellow RealityNewsOnline writers wondered in an e-mail, did Nicole ever read anything about Survivor strategy? I would have to say no.

The first rule – which will always be the first rule, no matter how many times I update the article – is to scheme and plot. Nicole made a poor attempt at this when she tried to get Lill to vote out Tijuana. The problem was that Nicole didn’t actually have a good reason for Lill to do that, so instead Lill went back to the others to talk about Nicole’s suggestion.

Yes, it’s a good idea to have early alliances if you can form them. Yes, one alliance had already formed on Morgan tribe – that of Lill and Ryan S. Yes, both Lill and Ryan S. were in danger of being voted off and therefore would have made ideal partners in trying to turn a coup. But Nicole handled it all wrong.

Which leads us into the second rule – don’t scheme and plot too much, and don’t backstab until you absolutely need to. Nicole was in zero danger of being voted off first. If she had merely kept her mouth shut, it is likely that Ryan S. would have been voted out – not because of any particular alliance, but because others, at the urging of Andrew, felt he wasn’t pulling his weight (in the case of the challenge, literally). And then after Ryan, it’s likely that Lill would have been targeted.

So all Nicole had to do was keep her mouth closed and she could have hung around for at least six more days in the absolute worst case scenario.

But Nicole didn’t. She didn’t like Tijuana and apparently did like Lill and Ryan S. So she decided to try to form something where there was nothing to be formed and no reason to do so. Even if she had been successful in getting Lill and Ryan S. to her side, that’s still only three votes. Tijuana would only have been voted out if the other tribe members split their votes, which, from what we saw, seemed unlikely. Even Nicole admitted in casting her vote for Ryan S. that he was the only one she had heard others discuss voting for. So that means Ryan S. would still have been voted out, and she would have become a target along with Lill for the future.

So she did it before she needed to. But that’s not all. She schemed and plotted with the wrong people. It may have seemed ideal to join up with the two people who were most likely to listen to her because they were on the chopping block, but at the same time, they were also the two looking for an excuse to point the finger elsewhere! Nicole gave them that target.

It’s possible that it could have worked better if Nicole had picked out somebody that she knew Lill (and Ryan S.) didn’t like. But that’s apparently not what happened. She just kind of dropped in and said they should vote out Tijuana. You could tell by the look on Lill’s face that it came somewhat out of the blue. If you don’t have a good reason to get rid of somebody, you’re not likely to get people on your side. Anybody remember Debb from Australia? Yeah, she tried something similar with Jeff. Know what happened to her? The same thing that happened to Nicole. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.