Survivor: Micronesia – Why Chet Lost

What we saw of Chet and what actually happened in Micronesia appear to be two different things. I won’t go into the details, as Sandy Lamparello has already done so admirably in her Missing Intelligence Award article, but suffice it to say it makes my job a bit more difficult here. You may be reading this and thinking, “How difficult can it be – he asked to be voted off?!” Well, that much is true, but we also want to look at how he got to that point. So with all that said, we’ll plug along, using information from both the show and my interview with Chet to figure out why Chet lost.

Of course, those aren’t the only things we’ll use. It almost (but not quite) goes without saying that we’ll be looking at that information in light of What Micronesia Survivors Should Have Learned. So let’s take a look.

Most importantly, Chet needed to scheme and plot. And according to what he told me, he figured he would be good at it. Specifically, he said that he, Kathy, and Tracy had a strategy to stay as a threesome so anybody who wanted to vote somebody else off on the original Fan tribe could come to them and get their votes.

It’s not the worst strategy ever – heck, Sandra won Pearl Islands with a similar strategy. But there are a couple problems with this. First, there was no guarantee somebody would need their three votes. Second, they already knew they were going to be targeted by at least some of the players. Third and most importantly, if Mikey B hadn’t been such a jerk about the way he was treating them, the threesome would likely have become a twosome and then a onesome very quickly.

The other issue here is that Chet never actually said that he was part of the brains behind this operation. While I know we can’t trust the editing here totally, we only ever saw Tracy doing the work while Chet moped around. He claimed he could outwit people, but did we ever see him do it? No.

So Chet obviously did okay with the part of the second rule saying not to scheme and plot too much. However, his open partnership with Kathy and Tracy violated the portion of the rule that says to keep your scheming secret. Still, that didn’t really play into the reason for him being voted out.

The third rule emphasizes flexibility. I’m really not sure what to say here. I suppose according to Chet’s statement regarding the group of three voting however the winds blew, that showed flexibility. But it was also just desperation to keep themselves around. And again, there is no indication that Chet really played a major role.

One strike against Chet in the flexibility area comes from his refusal to vote out Ozzy in Tribal Council and then leave due to his medical problem. Even when I asked, he never explained why he didn’t do this, except to say that he wanted to be voted out. That seems a bit inflexible to me, especially if the end result is the same for him – leaving the game. He could have helped out the ally who pulled him this far on her coattails, but chose not to. Obviously, that’s not so much a reason he lost as just a general comment (and, of course, if he had left for medical reasons, like Jonathan did, I wouldn’t have to write this column!).

The fourth rule tells players not to allow their emotions to control them. I’m not sure Chet ever had the energy to show any emotions – except maybe the despair we frequently saw on his face. It may be that his refusal to vote out Ozzy came from emotional reasons, but we just don’t know.

Fifth is to pretend to be nice. I suppose Chet seemed to be a nice enough guy. Certainly we never saw him act the way he told me he had planned to: “My strategy was truthfully to be he funniest person ever on Survivor, so that people would want me to stay around.” But you can be nice enough without being the funniest person ever. Once again, though, it would have taken energy to be mean or angry or a jerk, and Chet never showed any signs that he had that kind of energy.

The sixth rule is where we really get to the meat of things. It says not to be too much of a threat. Don’t worry – I know Chet was not a threat in the way we typically think about such things. Indeed, the biggest threat Chet seemed to pose might have been that somebody could have accidentally tripped over him while walking down the beach. But here I’m talking about a threat to cause further challenge losses.

While Tracy and Chet both pointed out that they didn’t cause all the challenge losses – sometimes they weren’t even playing – Chet also didn’t exactly help in them. Yes, he was injured. But even before that, Chet admitted to me, “I’m not an athletic person. Was I ever big in sports? Absolutely not. Did I hate gym class? Absolutely I did.” Like it or not, Survivor involves a lot of athleticism. It’s possible to scheme your way forward even if you’re not the best challenge player, but it’s a lot more difficult if you’re the worst. And let’s face it, Chet was the worst.

He did get pulled along time after time when he had been targeted because of his lack of challenge prowess. And it does appear that it could have happened one more time if only Chet had allowed it. But the reason he was targeted this week was because enough was enough – the tribe needed to get rid of the weakest link, and he was it.

Chet was also done in by the seventh rule, which says not to be lazy. Even before he injured his foot, his tribemates were commenting on the way he just sat around camp, doing nothing, while they did all the chores. Again, it could have been the editing, but we never saw Chet so much as pick up a twig for the fire. That kind of behavior can rub people the wrong way.

The eighth rule questions whether Chet’s tribemates did the right thing in voting him out. Frankly, I still think Chet himself did the wrong thing, but once he told them he wanted to go and further told Tracy and Erik he wouldn’t join their plan, the others didn’t have a choice – Chet was it. It wasn’t the best move for Tracy, Erik, or Ami, but they were stuck.

There are really two obvious storylines at work here. First, the way Chet played the game up until the point at which he asked to be voted out set him up to leave. He was weak, did poorly in challenges, didn’t do any scheming that we saw, and was pretty accurately described by Joel as “a ball of goo.” That made him a target. Still, it appeared he could have turned that around yet again, and this time actually done something himself instead of just being pulled along by Tracy.

But obviously, when Chet told the others to vote him out and refused to play the game any longer, he put the final nail in his coffin (and possibly the coffin of Tracy as well). That is why Chet lost.

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

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

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