Survivor: Gabon – Why Paloma Lost

The Kota tribe finally had to vote off a member, and it came down to a choice between somebody who did well in challenges and somebody the others could actually get along with. The one who did well in challenges stuck around. But was challenge prowess the only reason Paloma was sent packing? Why did Paloma lose?

We can answer such questions by looking back at What Gabon Survivors Should Have Learned, as we do every week. Even though doing well in challenges is not a specific rule, we can still address how that plays into an overall strategy. Let’s take a look.

The first rule, of course, talks about the importance of scheming and plotting. While Paloma came into the game with a strategy, she described it to me when I interviewed her as simply being “to basically lay low, hang out, be an asset to the team around camp, and do my best at challenges.” No mention of real strategy there. Indeed, when I asked her the follow-up question of how her strategy changed when she got into the game, she said, in part, “It’s pretty crazy once you get in the game, you don’t really think about strategy so much.”

I think we’ve found part of our problem!

Survivor is a game where you have to constantly think about strategy. You can’t let mundane tasks like gathering wood or boiling water overcome the whole point of the game. And yet that is what Paloma seemed to do. She wanted to show that even as a non-physical person, she could still be useful. But what she should have been doing was forming alliances to ensure that her non-physicality wouldn’t be an issue – that is how physically weaker players before her have survived.

I understand that Paloma didn’t like Ace – I can’t say I blame her. But she should have been doing something about that from day one. I mean, she was so strategically out of it that she had no idea there was even a core alliance in the tribe! As she told me, “I had no idea about” that group. Perhaps if she had been actually playing Survivor, she might have had an idea and been able to use that to her advantage, rather than just going to Corinne, Bob, and maybe Charlie at the last minute.

I guess I should mention that Paloma obviously had an alliance with Kelly, but I don’t think it was so much for strategy as it was that they were friends. And given how outspoken Kelly was against Ace at Tribal Council and the fact that she was obviously the second vote against him, I think we can figure out who he will be targeting next. An alliance of two in that situation is pretty much worthless, as Paloma found out.

So considering how little she did in the way of scheming and plotting, we can easily conclude that she did okay by the second rule and didn’t do too much of it. Kelly, however, may fall prey to this rule because of her failure to keep her scheming secret. But we’ll address that if and when the time comes.

The third rule says to be flexible. Paloma certainly needed to heed this advice, but didn’t. And no, I’m not talking about the flexibility acquired by doing the yoga that she avoided. I’m talking about game flexibility – as the rule says, “Players have to look at what’s going on around them and judge the proper way to proceed.” Given what we saw, it seems pretty obvious that Paloma really didn’t know what was going on around her. As such, she couldn’t make the right decisions.

Paloma also failed to follow the fourth and fifth rules. The fourth warns against allowing emotions to control you while the fifth encourages people to pretend to be nice. Paloma quickly determined that Ace annoyed her and she wasn’t going to deal with him, thus violating both rules at the same time. That split became obvious and Ace certainly felt like he didn’t want her around.

How could she have done better here? She needed to overcome her dislike for Ace and put on a fake smile, as the majority of the rest of the tribe has done. She admitted to me, “Kota didn’t vote for people because they didn’t like them, they voted for them out of strategy.” If she knew that was the way it was heading, she needed to figure out a strategy that would work for her – but we already discussed her problems there. Obviously, focusing on her dislike for Ace wasn’t working. But that didn’t stop her from continuing down that path.

The sixth rule deals with being too much of a threat. At first, it might seem like Paloma had nothing to fear here, given that she was the opposite of a physical threat. But this rule doesn’t only deal with that realm.

Paloma was a threat to Ace because he wanted to keep Sugar. Given that the two young ladies were similar in physical challenge ability, obviously Ace was going to target Paloma. And Paloma was a threat to the rest of the tribe because they wanted to keep Ace happy. As she told me, “They basically got rid of me to keep Ace under control. They knew if they would have voted Sugar or anybody else, he would not have trusted them and it would have created drama and they might not have done so well in coming challenges.”

So did the rest of the tribe make the right decision in getting rid of her? Honestly, I’m not 100% sure. I questioned, in my recap, why they didn’t target Sugar. I think Paloma answered that question for me, though I do think they could have still delivered a blow to Ace and kept him onboard by essentially threatening his future there. We’ll never know.

There is no doubt that Paloma was one of the weakest players, physically. So from that standpoint, it helped the tribe. More than that, though, the core alliance was able to maintain control by getting rid of the strategyless Paloma and keeping Ace, who thinks he’s the one in command.

Paloma came into the game having to overcome her size. But she went about trying to do so in totally the wrong way. She focused on trying to make herself useful in camp or intellectually in challenges. She should have instead worried about making alliances and planning her strategy – something she said she didn’t even have time to think about!

Look at Sugar. She was no better than Paloma at challenges, as far as we saw; but she’s still there because she bonded with Ace. She might end up getting tossed eventually because of that bond, but she still has a lot of life in the game. Paloma bonded with Kelly, and that was a friendship, not a real alliance. And Kelly was just as much on the outs as Paloma, so it didn’t even help.

Paloma needed to focus on the game of Survivor. Instead, she worried about all the wrong things and completely missed what was going on around her. To make matters worse, she decided that she was unable to get along with one of her strongest tribemates and made it obvious that they were like oil and water. Paloma was probably right when she told me, “They didn’t want to send me home.” But she put them in a position where they didn’t have much of a choice. That is why Paloma 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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