Survivor: Tocantins – Why J.T. Won

J.T. shared a brain with Stephen. So how was it that J.T. didn’t share any of the votes with him?! J.T. kept them all to himself. What happened? Did he really do everything right to get to that point? Why did J.T. win?

For the entire season, we have examined contestants’ losses in light of What Tocantins Survivors Should Have Learned. Now, we finally turn the tables and see what J.T. did right in order to get himself a million dollars. Of course, if he did anything wrong, we’ll look at that too. Advance warning: Since J.T. and Stephen did share a brain, they are also going to share a lot of pluses when it comes to these rules.

Like Stephen, J.T. definitely did well in terms of the first rule, scheming and plotting. He formed his alliance with Stephen on Day 2 and went all the way to the end with him (we’ll discuss later whether that last part was a good idea or not). Along the way, J.T. was part of – or at least appeared to be part of – other alliances, most notably the Warrior alliance. As we found out in the reunion, J.T. used his connection with Coach to find out everything the opposition had planned. It was a perfect situation for him – using one alliance to support the actions of the other alliance!

Along the way, he and Stephen made and implemented the right moves to deal with the obstacles and people in their way. What makes it bizarre, though, is that J.T. took the lead in being the face of the duo and yet wasn’t held responsible for their actions! He was so sweet that he could stab somebody in the back, send them out of the game, and then wink or smile at them such that all was okay again. It was almost magical.

More of the magic was that no matter how many allies he backstabbed and blindsided, the remaining players believed in him. Cut Tyson? Debbie and Coach stick with him. Cut Debbie? Coach believes wholeheartedly that J.T. was protecting him! Cut Taj? She blames Stephen even though he doesn’t get the credit for their dual strategy! How the heck did he do that?!

This plays directly into the second rule, which warns against scheming and plotting too much. Under normal circumstances, players would start to turn on somebody who belonged to as many alliances and blindsided as many people as J.T. did. Even worse, he violated a corollary to the rule that says if alliances do get out in the open, don’t let it be known that you’re the decision-maker. Everybody knew about J.T. nobody stopped him! What’s more, they gave him credit for his actions in their final votes (more about that later).

As I’ve been typing this, I’m somewhat thinking that this situation is similar to the infamous Dr. Will of Big Brother. But there are differences. Will told everybody he would lie, and then he did – yet they still believed him. J.T. told everybody he’d only tell the truth, then he didn’t, and yet they still believed him. However, both of them were con men in their own ways. After all, the most important aspect of conning somebody is to first get their trust. J.T. certainly did that, and then he played on his aw-shucks country boy role to get them to continue trusting him even as he took out a knife, sharpened the blade, and stuck it (metaphorically, of course) into their backs.

Moving on to the third rule, J.T.’s multiple alliances – where one could have been used as backup if something had happened – certainly showed flexibility. As he told me, Coach would have certainly taken him to the final two. So if, say, Stephen had been proven to be disloyal, J.T. could have simply jumped wholeheartedly over to Coach and still made a run for the million.

He also did well in terms of the fourth rule, not letting his emotions to control him… until the very last vote he made. He cut out all of his allies and friends, one by one. He got rid of Taj in going down to the final three because she was deemed to be more of a threat to him than Erinn was. But then when he needed to go down to the final two, he found himself in a quandary.