Surviving the Early Show: Alex’s Interview

Alex was voted out Thursday night, so that means he must face an even worse fate than having his torch snuffed: Being questioned by an Early Show host who probably hasn’t even bothered to watch the show (as Harry Smith admitted last week). This week, Hannah Storm introduces the segment by saying that Alex knew his days were likely numbered, so he made a last-ditch effort to save his own skin and put Yau-Man on the chopping block instead. We are treated to clips from Alex’s discussion with Earl, Cassandra, and Dreamz, and Earl’s thoughts on the matter. Interestingly, it’s apparently okay for Earl to say “ass” in prime time, but not early in the morning, because it’s blanked out here.

Alex’s torch is snuffed and then he’s magically transported, clean-shaven, to the Early Show studio with Storm. She says he was really trying hard, and he agrees – he was trying anything. He knew they wanted him gone and his odds were so low, but he couldn’t quit then after all he had done to get to that point.

Storm says she was seeing the Harvard law school background and Alex says the logic he gave them was true. He felt that a lot of times people were not thinking more than one step ahead, so trying to convince people of things that were going to happen two or three steps down the road just went right over their heads. “It just wasn’t happening.”

Switching topics, Storm talks about the pole-climbing on the immunity challenge. She says she understands he was pretty significantly injured, though we didn’t get a sense of it on the show. He says he knew Boo and Dreamz were physically stronger than him and had just eaten, so he had to do something different to win. But the poles have the metal pieces where the steps were supposed to go in, and he scraped his knees up and down on them, and subsequently developed a staph infection in his knee. He had to go to the hospital, was on antibiotics for a month and a half, was on crutches – the works. His girlfriend was squeezing pus out of his knee for a week. Storm figures that’s way too much information, and I am forced to agree! She says this is a morning show and people are eating breakfast!

Given everything he went through, did he ever wonder what he was doing out there? He’s a lawyer, he could make that much money anyway! He says there were definitely times when he did the math in his head, figuring a million dollars is $600,000 after taxes (presuming you pay them, unlike Rich Hatch), so if he worked extra hard, was it really necessary?

But for him it wasn’t about the money as much as it was about testing himself. When you get into that type of environment, you can’t really replicate that in real life. There is no way to test yourself like that, especially with the hunger and the mean people around you. For him, he felt like it was his opportunity and couldn’t be about the money. The money, unless you’re an extremely greedy person, which he’s not, is not enough of a motivator.

Time for the secret scene, which has to do with Alex’s fishing skills. Alex tells us in the scene that he caught six fish in one day on Ravu and figured he was a fisherman. In the merged tribe, he is swimming around and making something of a ruckus. Stacy and Cassandra are in the water with him commenting how he’s scaring all the fish away and laughing. Cassandra describes to us how he was splashing and it was obvious that he is a beginner at this sort of thing.

Cutting back to the studio, Alex says admittedly, looking at it now, he did look pretty awkward. His future might not be in fishing.

Going back to something he said earlier, referring to mean people, Storm says he said some things that may be… (she never finishes her thought). Does he regret going through Yau-Man’s things? My immediate thought is that if she watched the show, she’d know he didn’t go through Yau-Man’s things, Mookie did. Alex emphasizes that very point, though he admits he didn’t stop Mookie from doing it.

He says that earlier in the game, while there are no “rules” as such, he felt there were certain standards. But after Dreamz double-crossed him, they both realized the others were playing dirty, so they had to decide whether to sink to their level.

She also suggests he through Mookie under the bus – which is a stupid thing to say, since one of them was going home either way last week! Alex says Mookie had expressed wanting to go, so he didn’t feel particularly bad about it. (I heard this from a number of players, though Mookie himself, in his interview with me, described things a little differently.)

Hannah Storm wishes Alex good luck and they’re done!

As far as Early Show interviews go, this one was not actually horrible. Alex was able to get around the usual interruptions and say what he wanted to say. Of course, some important things were left out, including what Alex is doing now that Survivor is over. You can read about those in my interview with Alex.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out these other recent Survivor: Fiji articles here on RealityNewsOnline:

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

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