Survivor I, Episode 3 in Retrospect

Indeed, episode 3 was a study in whining from Stacey. It began with her whining and ended with it. She started by saying that Rudy should go because he was ruining morale. He was? In retrospect, this is a completely ridiculous statement – he ended up being possibly the most well-liked contestant of the whole bunch! Even at the time, it was an ironic thing to say, because she was the one doing all of the complaining, and nothing hurts morale more than bitching and moaning.

Later in the episode, Stacey went on to say that they'd pull together better as a team without Rudy. Again, she had it exactly backwards.

She did make one intuitive statement – she said she didn't trust Susan. As we learned later when Susan was asked by Jeff Probst if there was an alliance, she's a terrible liar. The same thing happened when Stacey brought up voting and Susan tried to get out of talking about it; Stacey figured out that Susan was probably planning to vote for her.

Meanwhile, the reward challenge may have been one of the most important of the whole stay on the island. Tagi won and got the spear-fishing gear. This set the stage for a great deal of Richard's planning later, as he used it to provide fish for the tribe and help cement his place in the tribe. The later alliance was certainly more important overall, but the fish helped him stand out as a leader and a provider, and made him more valuable than perhaps any other member.

There wasn't much of interest from the Pagong tribe in this episode. They played in the mud and had some fun, and Colleen noted that after B.B. left people didn't have as much get-up-and-go (she blamed it on lack of food rather than lack of a guy yelling at them, which was probably the real reason). While it's nice that they had some fun, it again shows, in retrospect, that they were all more interested in playing, which would eventually spell their doom. Oh, and they ate rat, which was an amusing segment but not terribly relevant to the overall game, looking back.

As noted above, the episode ended with Stacey whining to the camera about being thrown off. Here she was more arrogant than anybody. She claimed that she was much more productive than any of the guys, apparently ignoring the fish that Richard provided, among other things. Her arrogance was one of the reasons she got the boot. Later, many viewers would call Richard arrogant and dislike him for this reason. But he put his money where his mouth was. He claimed he could catch fish, and he did. He claimed he could bring the tribe through the game, and he did (at least, those in his alliance). He claimed he would win, and he did. Stacey was arrogant and had nothing to back her up except whining. She went out early.

In retrospect, this was the most important lesson of episode 3.

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