Survivor: All-Stars – Why Sue Lost

For the second time in this series – and only the third time in Survivor history – we have to throw out the book of What All-Star Survivors Should Have Learned because a player quit the game. There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the whole Sue/Rich incident, and it’s unlikely that my thoughts here will make everybody happy, but making people happy is not the goal – analyzing what happened is. So let’s take a look at why Sue lost.

As we all know, in Episode 5, a naked Rich rubbed up against Sue during the immunity challenge. By now we have aired many thoughts on what happened, and if you haven’t yet read the different opinions in our Roundtable discussion, I suggest you do that now. In case you don’t want to go through all of that, I’ll briefly give you my thoughts.

Rich and Sue have been verbally sparring since, well, the first Survivor and the publicity tours thereafter. That sparring was raised up a notch in All-Stars, where they would regularly say something back and forth almost whenever we saw them meet in challenges. When Rich talked about having caught some fish, Sue took that opportunity to say all the fish he’d caught back in the first series were bony. Somehow this escalated into her telling him that he had no bone to give her.

Then, in the challenge, Rich was on one beam that Sue wanted to go down. I’m still not quite clear on why she couldn’t just take another beam, but whatever the reason, she wanted to go down that one. Rich moved across the beam and, when they got to the small joining platform, he made a comment and rubbed up against her. She responded essentially by saying it was gross and Jeff Probst basically told them to get moving because nobody cared about that. She obviously wasn’t thrilled about what he did, but nor did she seem to be particularly affected by it at the time. As for Rich’s perspective, he said on The Early Show, where he sat with Sue, that indeed he saw it as part of the sparring they’d been doing and didn’t realize that under her tough exterior she would take it the way she did.

Even later in camp, as we saw in Episode 6, Sue did not seem to be upset. If anything, she seemed to be in a pretty good mood compared to what we’d seen previously (though of course, through the magic of editing, we saw mostly her low points earlier to make it seem like she might be a target to be voted off). It was not until evening, when there was some discussion about the incident, that it really seemed to affect her.

The following morning, she was a complete wreck. She said she had thought about it all night and became more and more upset. She was worried because her husband would see it, she had been humiliated, etc. Nothing that anybody else said could console her.

Then, of course, she went to the reward challenge, and we saw the results as her emotions poured out before she left the game.

So what actually happened? Well, to be honest, we may never know the full truth of it. However, let’s take a look at what we do know.

Nobody else – let me repeat that – nobody else – who was at that challenge thought it was nearly as big a deal as Sue did. Now, it could be argued that nobody else had Rich rub up against them. It could be argued that some people were not in a position to really see it. Or it could be argued that some people did see it, and saw the way Sue reacted, and didn’t really think much of it. It seems to be a combination of the three, with most of it being the third.

Even Sue herself didn’t seem to think it was too big of a deal until a day later. Her tribemates saw her being happy, doing work, joking around, etc. Then suddenly she completely turned around.

At least one of her tribemates – Rupert – said she made a comment about suing Hatch for millions of dollars. Others – who admittedly were not best of friends with her – were suspicious of her motives as well.

On the other side, we know from people who have been on Survivor that much of the time you sit around doing nothing but thinking. Amber pointed that out as well in this episode. Indeed, we’ve had an example of this already this season. Jenna M. thought she was fine to play All-Stars when she left home, but the more she sat and thought about it, the more she decided it had been a mistake. It is possible that Sue’s mind was working in a similar manner. At first, it was no big deal. But then, as she thought about it more and more, it grew into a huge issue.