Survivor: Gabon – Why Michelle Lost

With the new season of Survivor comes the first person to be voted off of Survivor. Actually, in this case the two-hour premiere gave us two people voted out in one night, but right now we’re just going to address the first (we’ll get to the second soon enough). Michelle was the last woman picked to be on a tribe but the first one up the hill in the initial challenge. She was certainly a better physical competitor than at least two of the other women on her tribe. Considering that the tribe was terrible in the initial two challenges, why did she go first? Why did Michelle lose?

Every week of every season, we answer these types of questions, and we always do it in the same way, by looking back at the latest aggregate of solid Survivor information. So let’s take walk through What Gabon Survivors Should Have Learned to see where Michelle went wrong.

The first and most important rule for every Survivor contestant is to scheme and plot. Before the game began, host Jeff Probst said in the TV Guide Network preview that Michelle was probably used to having people bring her into a group, but that doesn’t work on Survivor. Indeed, as the first rule says, “From the very beginning, you have to start making alliances and cementing relationships.” Michelle did neither, preferring to hang around almost solely with Ken and staying away from all the people she didn’t like (just about everybody else). Frankly, even if the group had tried to bring her in, she probably wouldn’t have joined them!

Once Ken told her that she was likely being targeted, we didn’t see Michelle do anything in terms of fighting to stay. When I interviewed Michelle, I asked her if she did anything we didn’t see to save herself. Her rather odd answer (well, most of her answers were a bit odd) was that she “talked a lot about how if anyone would be put into my shoes – if anyone was solving the puzzle was put in my shoes – they would have been even worse off.” I think she was trying to say that she told her tribemates that they needed her to help in challenges. However, if she couldn’t even explain it in an interview, I doubt she did a very good job of talking to her tribemates about it – especially given what else we saw of her communications within the tribe.

Considering she barely fought for her own game life, I think it’s safe to say she didn’t violate the second rule, which says not to scheme and plot too much. However, she certainly had a problem with the third rule, which tells players they need to be flexible. To put it bluntly, Michelle was not. She went into the game apparently expecting to be in a tribe full of people she thought were cool, and that didn’t happen. So when she determined she didn’t like them, that was it in her mind.

Indeed, when I asked her how she planned to overcome her admitted inability to pretend to like people, she said, “I guess I just didn’t expect to have a whole tribe of people I didn’t really like.” Well, there’s some planning and flexibility for you!

This leads us directly into the fourth rule, which warns against allowing yourself to be controlled by your emotions. As the rule notes, she should have treated her tribemates “as pawns in a game, not as potential friends for life.” Instead, Michelle was so focused on the fact that she didn’t like her tribemates that it ruled all of her actions.

Among those actions, I include the way she disregarded the fifth rule, which talks about pretending to be nice. The rule clearly says, “Keep your real feelings inside.” But Michelle walked around wearing them on her sleeve. As I already mentioned, she specifically told Ken that it’s difficult for her to pretend to like people. But that was something she needed to do! Indeed, on the TV Guide Network preview, she said she planned to be nice and friendly with everyone (but wouldn’t be flirting). Considering she can’t be nice to those she doesn’t like, she must have just figured she’d like everybody there – not a good plan, as we’ve already discussed.

It wasn’t just Michelle failing to pretend to be nice to people, but also her overall demeanor. When I interviewed Gillian, she said of Michelle, “I just felt that she was so, so miserable. She was cold, she was uncomfortable, she seemed to hate being there, she was extremely negative.” She added, “I just thought that her whole negative ‘I hate to be here’ demeanor needed to not be among us. I just felt really bad for her, she looked like she was having such a struggle, so I felt it would be the best thing for her if she wasn’t with us.” So not only was Michelle failing to pretend to be nice, but she couldn’t even pretend she wanted to still be in the game!

Michelle’s initial game plan was apparently to avoid violating the sixth rule, which says not to be too much of a threat. She told me her strategy coming into the game was “to hide my strengths,” including her athleticism. That would normally be a good thought, but not when your tribe is getting pummeled in competitions! It seems like she gave up on this route and brought up some information about her physical abilities, but certainly not enough to be voted out because she was considered a threat.

Well… she wasn’t a threat in that way. Michelle posed a different type of threat – her negative attitude could spread to a tribe that was already in the dumps. That’s what Gillian was talking about in the quote above. Though considering Gillian was voted off next and she was Mrs. Positive, I don’t think Michelle was really targeted because the others thought of her negative attitude as a “threat,” as such, but for the other problems that attitude caused, as already detailed.

The seventh rule talks about how the rest of the tribe should vote at various stages in the game. Did they make the right decision in getting rid of Michelle? I have to say no, they didn’t. She was an easy target, given her lack of strategizing or even an ability to make friends, but she was also far stronger than Gillian, Susie, and probably several other players when it came to the challenges. Given the way the tribe was pounded in the first two challenges, it should have been immediately clear that they needed to try to fix the situation. Instead, they got rid of Michelle first and then realized it really hadn’t helped them.

But even though I think the tribe made the wrong decision, that doesn’t absolve Michelle of her failures in playing the game. If Michelle wanted to stay, she needed to show that she wanted to stay. She needed to demonstrate that she was better for the tribe than Gillian (or somebody else, though Gillian seemed the obvious next best target). She needed to suck it up and get past her own claimed inabilities to be nice to people she didn’t like.

But Michelle was caught up in her own emotional death spiral. She was picked last, which set her mood. Instead of showing them why they were wrong to pick her last – and really showing the other tribe that they were wrong to not pick her at all – she just got pissy. She didn’t like most of her tribemates, and that made her pissier. She was cold and uncomfortable, and that just sent her further into the realm of pissiness.

Michelle was consumed by her own emotional state and her inability to pretend to be nice. And it’s really difficult to scheme and plot with people when you aren’t even willing to talk to them. She made herself an obvious target with the first vote approaching and people looking for obvious targets. That is why Michelle lost.

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

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

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