Survivor: Palau – Why Kim Lost

By all rights, Kim should have been kicked to the curb by Palau two weeks ago; only her own teammates throwing themselves off the show stopped it. Why did she have such a huge target on her back? Why couldn’t she get it off? Why did Kim lose?

Considering the number of times I called Kim an “idiot” in my recap, these questions may be among the easiest to answer since I’ve been writing these columns, which started waaaaay back in Survivor: The Australian Outback (which, by the way, is available for pre-order as a full-season DVD – just look in the righthand column!). But just to make sure we’re catching all the important details, we will, as always, look back to What Palau Survivors Should Have Learned to help us map out Kim’s failures.

The first rule is to scheme and plot. While you might be tempted to disregard this rule considering that, as we’ll see, Kim failed miserably elsewhere, the fact is that this one can override almost any other failures. However, Kim was unable to make it work for her (probably because it involved her working).

In the first episode, she joined in the anti-Jolanda alliance, but it was only temporary. After that, she used her relationship with Jeff to keep him on a leash while several other people targeted her. It came down to her or Ashlee, but Ashlee indicated to her fellows that she was ready to go, so Kim stayed through no effort of her own.

At the third Tribal Council, Kim was again targeted. But Jeff threw himself on his sword following his ankle injury. Even so, there were still people who tried to vote off Kim! Now that is really bad – people wanting you gone even more than a guy who admits he can’t do anything!

When Kim was given the opportunity before the fourth Tribal Council, she agreed with Stephenie and Angie to be an all-female alliance. However, even though it was Kim’s head on the chopping block, it didn’t appear that Kim herself actually went in search of this alliance. She was lying on the beach when they came to her! Nor did we see Kim make an attempt to get one of the guys onto their side, which would have been necessary for the alliance to work. Nor did we even see her try to convince the other two women to go for a tiebreaker.

All of these must have been too much work for poor Kim. It was much easier to lie around and hope that somebody else took themselves out of the game.

The second rule warns against scheming and plotting too much. Ha! Like Kim would ever do anything involving work “too much.” The one part of this rule that she violated was the portion warning against openly forming couples: “In general, we have seen on reality TV that open partnerships are just begging to be split up. … Why? Because pairing up draws attention to both people and that can lead to votes.” Neither Jeff nor Kim seemed to understand this simple point. It drew excess attention to Kim, who was already in trouble due to her laziness. If Ashlee had not opted out of the game, Kim likely would have gone, in part because of her open relationship with Jeff.

And let me add that if Kim truly did not think about the problems having an open relationship with a fellow tribe member could cause, as she claimed in the second Tribal Council, well, let’s just say it only goes to support the pejorative I used to describe her in my recap.

The third rule says to pretend to be nice. Kim seemed to keep most of her attitude about fellow tribemates to the one-on-one interview cameras. However, some of it was definitely out in the open. For example, at her final Tribal Council she had the nerve to say that the guys on the team were not strong enough and didn’t have a burning passion to win. This from the woman who wasn’t even noticeably there in the challenges – or at camp, for that matter. Maybe it could be claimed that she knew she was going, so it didn’t matter what she said at that time, but it would conflict with her earlier statement that nobody knew who they were going to vote for until they picked up the pen (I don’t believe that statement to be true, but apparently Kim did). It also ignores the possibility of saving yourself at the last minute, as happened the same night Survivor aired on a different reality show.