Survivor: Vanuatu – Why Chad Lost

Chad started off the game, like just over half the men, in a good position. By the end of it, not so much. What happened to send Chad to the jury box? Why did Chad lose?

As always, it’s time to address these questions by looking back at What Vanuatu Survivors Should Have Learned. But if you didn’t already read it last week, you might also want to look back at Why Sarge Lost, because there are an awful lot of similar reasons.

Within the very first day, Chad found himself in the enviable position of having a solid alliance – with Sarge, Chris, Rory, and Bubba. That alliance held sway until it was time for a tribal swap, putting two of their members – Bubba and Rory – on the other team.

There were two possible ways to handle that situation. The guys remaining on Lopevi could have thrown the next two immunity challenges to get rid of Twila and Julie; or they could have tried to bring Twila and Julie to their side. They went with the latter, and I can’t disagree.

Despite a few readers who thought new Lopevi should have thrown the challenges to keep their members around, it is rarely a good idea to throw a challenge. There are simply too many unknowns. For example, how many challenges would there be before a merge? You can’t assume anything, because the merge times have changed in various seasons. If there had been more, that would have meant Lopevi could have been put in the position of losing one of their own men! It’s all too easy to look back now and say, “Well, it certainly couldn’t have ended up any worse,” but hindsight is 20/20. At the time, I think it was the right decision.

In any case, getting back to Chad in particular, he apparently felt that the women were trustworthy enough. He was half-right. If Julie had not pulled the wool over Twila’s eyes, it is likely that Twila would have stayed with them. Unfortunately, none of the guys saw it coming.

While it might seem that Chad got into one alliance and then coasted, Chad did do some scheming. For example, when John K. was fighting to stay, he wanted to target Chad. Chad had to make sure Chris was still solid with the original alliance, and indeed he was. More recently, Chad tried to keep Scout and Twila onboard with the plan to oust Eliza. Unfortunately, Ami’s magic spell is more difficult to break than he thought. He simply could not outdo her.

Obviously, therefore, we can say that Chad did not scheme and plot too much. His alliance was no secret, but that was not the cause of his downfall – this season, it seems, almost nobody has a working secret alliance.

Chad also had no problem pretending to be nice – in fact, he seems like a genuinely nice, down to earth kind of guy. The only problem anybody had related to that was that John K. thought Chad was too nice to bring to the finals!

Continuing in the vein of “things that didn’t matter,” Chad had no problems with his emotions controlling him. He couldn’t hold his kava, and lost a bit of motor control, but not emotional control.

Fifth was to not be too much of a threat. I suspect that one thing was on everybody’s mind, but only one person actually gave voice to it: Chad’s leg. If he had made it to the finals, Chad would have definitely had a “look what I overcame” point in his favor, even if he never voiced it (and I don’t think he would have). John pointed this out, but he did so waaaaaay too early. It’s impossible to say for certain, since we didn’t see anything in particular relating to it, but I do have to wonder if this is one reason the women voted Chad out before Chris. If Chris were to win all the remaining immunities, he might be fairly easy to beat in the end. If Chad were to do so, he would be more difficult.

Also, Chad seems like he did better overall in challenges. So keeping him around added to the risk of a string of immunity wins. These two factors made Chad a bigger threat than Chris.