Survivor: Palau – Why Caryn Lost

Caryn seemed like a lost cause for, well, most of the game. But in the past couple weeks she made a resurgence and at one point it even looked like she might be able to make it to the Final Two! But then all hell broke loose, and Caryn was one of the firestarters. In the end, her fire was snuffed. What happened to turn her game from bad to good to gone? Why did Caryn lose?

By now you should certainly know the drill. We will look back at What Palau Survivors Should Have Learned to see where Caryn made the right decisions and where she made the wrong ones. By the end of this discussion, we’ll have all the answers we could ever want.

The first rule is to scheme and plot. Early in the game, it didn’t seem like Caryn really did any of this. She was not in the core alliance and expected to go home early. We didn’t see her active in anything game-related until Coby’s departure. Even then, she didn’t quite seem to know what to do.

Caryn had several opportunities to help change the course of the game. She had a pseudo-agreement with Tom, but could have traded that for a women’s alliance. Instead, she ran back to Tom to spill everything, even without an actual promise or alliance or any real hope of getting something in return. She was lucky she wasn’t voted out right then, because nobody trusted her.

She was useful as a pawn to get rid of Gregg, but after that she started trying to figure out every angle. Should she go with Tom and Ian? Should she go with the women? Back and forth she went, failing to pick a side and making it obvious that she was failing to pick a side. Admittedly, there was a lot of that going around, as Katie and Ian were playing similar games. But Caryn needed to simply tell Tom she was with him and go from there.

However, she didn’t. Why not? Because she was scheming and plotting too much, in violation of the second rule. Not only that, but she absolutely failed to keep her scheming secret – advertising it to the whole Survivor world. Everybody knew that she was vacillating, and that means nobody knew if they could trust her. Remember Christy from Survivor: The Amazon? How about Dolly from Vanuatu? Both of them refused to tell the two sides who they were voting for, so in both cases the two sides joined together to rid themselves of a common threat. In this case, that common threat was Caryn.

Ian and Tom could not take the chance that Caryn would side with the women. Katie and Jenn could not take the chance that Caryn would side with the men. Caryn gave both duos good reason to doubt her loyalty when she should have given both groups good reason to believe her. If she had told them both that she was solidly with them, she would have been much better off than telling both she had no idea.

Worse still, Caryn not only did her own scheming out in the open, but she brought everybody else’s out too. She might have thought she was stirring the pot in Tribal Council, but she was really just signing her own death warrant. I think she pissed off everybody except maybe Jenn (and perhaps we just didn’t see that part!) by revealing their secrets, some of which were true and some of which didn’t seem to be. She was upset that they shot the messenger, but this messenger deserved her fate! She was not just delivering somebody else’s message, she was creating her own. That message said, “Don’t tell me anything or I’ll spill it to the whole damned tribe.”

The third rule tells contestants to pretend to be nice. In general, it seemed Caryn did fine with this. However, as the end of her game approached, she became more and more irritating to some of the others. Much of this was related to the way she told everybody everything, as I already mentioned. But I think there had to be more than that for Ian to be so happy to cast his vote against her. I think she got to the point of just plain irritating him, and perhaps the others as well.

Fourth we have a rule that was certainly broken by at least two other people this week – don’t let your emotions control you. Since this isn’t “Why Ian Lost” or “Why Katie Lost,” we won’t discuss them now – though it might come up on Sunday.

However, I believe Caryn was affected by this rule as well. In her final words, she spoke with contempt about how everybody else was scheming and lying, etc. So she had to expose it all. Well, no, she didn’t. Maybe she was upset at the way things were going and the things people were saying. Fine. Swallow it and move on. Instead, she became so caught up in it that she put everything she had on the table when she should have been a lot more careful about it.

One thing Caryn didn’t have to worry about was the fifth rule, against being too much of a threat. She was about as threatening in challenges as I was – and I don’t mean me as if I were in the game, I mean me sitting here at home! She would have been a perfect person to take to the Final Two because either Tom or Ian would have had the perfect story to tell about how they pulled the team through the tribal stages of the game and then they worked their way to the end while Caryn did nothing but ride on their coattails. But she had too many negatives to make it worth their while.

The sixth rule says not to be lazy – I don’t think it was an issue here. Seventh is to be flexible. Well, Caryn was certainly flexible – too flexible, in fact. Or at least she was too openly flexible. But we’ve already gone over that.

So, did the rest of the tribe do the right thing in voting Caryn off? I would have to say yes. While personally I would have liked to see Katie leave, it seems that Ian has some sort of weird bond with her that may keep them as a solid alliance. More importantly, though, we’ve already seen nobody could actually trust Caryn because she wouldn’t say she was standing firmly in any one camp and because she was airing everybody’s dirty laundry.

That is really the heart of the matter. Survivor is a game about trust. Sometimes you trust your alliance-mates. Sometimes you trust that your alliance-mates will act in your best interests because it also serves their best interests (this is what Tom was trying to explain to Katie in what she called his “strong-arm tactics”). In general you trust that when you talk about making a secret alliance, the person to whom you’re talking won’t go blabbing it all over camp.

But Caryn had used up any amount of trust people might have had in her. She plotted and schemed too much and too openly. By doing so, she ensured that everybody was against her while nobody was with her. That is why Caryn lost.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our Survivor: Palau Episode 13 recap:

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

Be sure to sign up for our e-mail update so you can stay informed about new articles on the site! And take a look at the rest of the site. You can find all of our recaps and other info on this show at the Survivor: Palau page, and take a look at our The Simple Life page and our Average Joe page. You can even buy reality show stuff at our Reality TV Store!

For more news about Survivor, be sure to check out SirLinksALot: Survivor and Survivor Fever!