Survivor: All-Stars – Why Jerri Lost

I never thought I’d see the day when I was actually sorry to see Jerri Manthey voted off of our TV sets. But then again, I never thought I’d see the day when so many good Survivor players forgot how to actually play the game. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning as we look at why Jerri lost.

That beginning would be reading my recap. Then, as always, we will use What All-Star Survivors Definitely Should Have Learned as a basis to look at Jerri’s actions – and those of her tribemates. We’ll begin with the most important rule – scheming and plotting. Here we see that Jerri didn’t do too poorly. She hooked up with Lex, who seemed to be the man with the plan. Now whether it was a good plan is debatable, but up until this episode, his plan had involved keeping her around, so from her viewpoint it was great!

However, that seemed to pretty much be the extent of her recent plotting and scheming. She hooked up with Lex and left her game life in his hands. So that meant when he felt he didn’t need her anymore, she had no backup plan. That was it. Kaput. As we can see, not really a good idea.

Well, at least she wasn’t plotting and scheming too much, but that’s small comfort, so we’ll move on.

Third we have a key point for Jerri – pretend to be nice. Now I have to admit, what we saw of Jerri showed a much different person from the one in the Outback… usually. We saw snippets of laziness, bossiness, grouchiness, whininess, etc. And, of course, we saw her go after Keith and Kel again this week. Add to this the fact that we heard others complain about her – Colby, Ethan, Kathy, Shii Ann, etc. So something was going on that we didn’t fully get to see. All in all, I think she kind of blew the whole “pretend to be nice” rule, even if she thought she was doing okay (as evidenced by some of her comments in an earlier Tribal Council about how she helped keep the tribe upbeat).

Indeed, Kathy and Shii Ann had wanted to vote out Jerri for quite some time. Colby desperately wanted her gone. Ethan couldn’t believe Lex would keep Jerri rather than him. When Rob made his desperate plea to Lex about keeping Amber, it didn’t seem like he even considered dumping Kathy or Shii Ann – despite Jerri having pledged undying loyalty to him! She was the designated target, and it seemed that her personality was the main reason.

The fourth rule is to not let your emotions control you. It’s difficult to say how Jerri did on this. She obviously let her emotions run away with her several times during her time there, but when it came to voting, it wasn’t so much an issue. Sure, she gloated about having beaten Colby this time, but Colby was the right person for her to target, emotions or not. The one area where she may have failed here was in dedicating herself to Lex because, apparently, she valued him as a friend (at least that’s my read of it). She should have seen that he was playing this as a game, not for friends. Hell, he cut Ethan loose. Had she better realized that, she might have done some other alliance-building in case Lex, well, did what he did and cut her loose.

The fifth rule is to not be too much of a threat. Jerri really didn’t have to worry about that. In fact, it’s hard to believe that nobody wanted to carry her all the way in an attempt to have her standing next to them in the Final 2. I mean, all they’d have to say is, “Look, you can give the money to me, or to Jerri. Get real.” And she certainly wasn’t a challenge threat, as evidenced by her repeated failures (for example, bow and arrow, and then the trivia challenge failure this time).

From what we heard and what little we saw, Jerri failed in the sixth rule by being lazy. We already mentioned this a bit earlier when discussing personality, so there isn’t much more to be said about it now.

Seventh is to be flexible. Jerri most certainly was not. Early in the game, she locked herself in with Jenna L. Then, when Saboga was dissolved, she locked herself in with Lex. As far as we can tell, she never really had an backup plans.

So what about the rest of her tribe? Did they make the right decision? Hell, no! Professor Sadow has already discussed a lot of this in his Strategic Overview of Survivor article, but allow me to voice my opinions as well.

The new Chapera tribe was looking at a situation where a merge is imminent. When it happens, they will be Pagonged by new Mogo Mogo. But they had an opportunity – if they won the challenge, Mogo Mogo had to get rid of one of their own. If they lost the challenge, they could get rid of one that alliance – Amber. It was a win-win situation. They had it made.

Except then Rob used his powers to cloud the mind and somehow Lex, Kathy, and Shii Ann followed like rats to the pied piper. All he had to do was say one sentence. It was truly amazing. And amazingly dumb on the parts of those three players.

If they had voted out Amber, they could have not only taken out an alliance member, but one so valuable that Rob would say what he said. They would have split a power duo. They would have made the leader of the other tribe vulnerable. Yes, they would have upset Rob. So freaking what?! What was he going to do, come at them with a knife in their sleep? And to assume that he would carry through on whatever vague promise he made is ridiculous, especially for Lex, who had a viable Final 2 partner in Jerri. I still can’t believe they did it. Maybe it was Mark Burnett’s idea of an April Fools joke and we’ll find out about it next week. Hey, I can hope.

So it comes down to Jerri’s tribemates making a horrible strategic decision to get rid of her. But, of course, that’s not the only reason. Jerri didn’t have a backup plan. She didn’t scheme and plot enough. And her behavior made it easier for her fellows to consider dumping her instead of Amber. If she had been allied with Kathy and/or Shii Ann on the side, maybe they wouldn’t have decided to go this way. If she had been more pleasant to be around, maybe they would have kept her around. But she failed in both of those and her tribe failed in Strategy 101. That is why Jerri lost.

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

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