Survivor I, Episode 10 in Retrospect

As we move into the episode itself, we see Gervase thinking that, gosh, there's got to be an alliance. Yes, Gervase, thanks for that brilliant insight. Sean, however, is even slower on the uptake and says he's not sure. The best response to that is Colleen's statement: "Open your eyes!" Yes, indeed – of course, if they'd have opened them sooner, they might have had a chance.

Speaking of opening your eyes sooner, Sean finally figured out that his alphabet scheme was indeed as stupid as the others had said. Yes, Sean, if you tell people who you're going to vote for, they might just use that information. You don't have to be, well, a brain surgeon to figure that one out.

Colleen, meanwhile, finally figured out the point of the game. Earlier she talked about how terrible it was that Tagi had an alliance to crush the Pagong. But now, in response to Sean's strategy to avoid hurting feelings, she goes on about how the point of the game is to vote people off. Indeed, it is. Too bad you didn't think of that sooner!

Rich is seeing all of this going on around him and says he thinks it's pretty funny that folks are just now starting to realize that they need a strategy. Gervase, meanwhile, says something that has been said about Rich by several of the ex-Pagong: he's overconfident. Looking back, though, we can see that there is nothing "over" about his confidence whatsoever.

Within the Tagi alliance, there are some small Machiavellian schemes going on. Rich wants Sue to stand by him to the final two. Sue agrees, but then goes back to Kelly to say that the two of them will burn Rich at the end. In a few statements that we can now see as incredibly ironic, Sue says, "I trust Kelly 100%" and "we're like sisters." In retrospect, we can see that the root of Sue's later intense hatred came from her equally intense trust. When that trust is later broken, her feelings swing in completely the opposite direction.

For her part, Kelly is still claiming that she never wanted to be a part of the dirty, conniving alliance business, and she made her now-famous statement about "making a deal with the Devil" as far as Rich is concerned. Of course, this is all utter B.S., as is Gervase's claim that Kelly had been forced into an alliance even though she didn't want to be in one. Lest we forget, Kelly formed the very first alliance with Stacey, and then talked to Sue about joining forces as soon as Stacey was booted. She wasn't dragged into it – she jumped in willingly. But as she goes on about how terrible it is for Gervase and Colleen, who are just waiting to be voted off, she casts a vote for Gervase!

She also said that she wished something shocking and unexpected would happen. Nope. Sorry, from here on out, it's pretty well scripted, with the only shock that Kelly herself wins challenge after challenge.

Connected to pretty much nothing, Rudy was talking about the relatively short time they have remaining, and said, "I'll probably never see these people again." If only he knew how wrong he was! What's really funny about this is that the disconnected folks on Big Brother think that they may be hugely famous, when in fact very few people care about them at all.

After the immunity challenge and Rich's resulting happy dance, the Tagi alliance unsurprisingly took out Gervase (otherwise known as "Target") and left only Colleen (otherwise known as "Sitting Duck") from Pagong. Gervase and Colleen talked about getting together with Sean and maybe bringing Kelly to their side so they could fight the horrible evil alliance, but when it came time to vote, both Gervase and Colleen ended up voting for Sean because he was so dumb and should have known the alliance was there. Hello? How does this help? It doesn't. Not to mention that it's really hard to blame Sean when Gervase himself didn't want to accept the existence of the Tagi alliance for quite a while, either. Oh, but he did say in this episode that he thinks Rich is the leader. Thanks for the brilliant insight, there, Gerv.

So, as we've seen so many times in the past, for all the ex-Pagongs' talk of countering the alliance, when it comes time to vote, they blow it. And Gervase, who thought it would be so funny if they would have voted Rich off on his birthday, ends up getting voted off just after the birth of his son.

After the episode, we got a mini-interview with Colleen, talking about whether Survivor was a microcosm of the real world, as Sue had indicated in this Tribal Council. She said she hoped it wasn't, but that every person over the age of 30 to whom she'd spoken said that, indeed, it is. So she's staying in school another year. While that was a rather humorous remark, I think it also shows the same sort of thinking that occurred in the game. What? An alliance? Better avoid that. Wrong way to think about it, and it showed.

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