Survivor I, Episode 11 in Retrospect

As the show itself began, Colleen was talking about how she missed her old team as the final Pagong member still left standing. She also commented on how each part of the alliance would promise something different to another part and things were getting all mixed up. Well, I guess they weren't mixed up enough to keep her on, as we'd later see.

Rich meanwhile comments that Kelly is really ticking off Sue by wavering on the alliance. Of course, we now know just how mad Sue got – and it wasn't just the bit about wavering, but issues of trust and friendship. For her part, Kelly said that she doesn't care what people think, she's here to play the game. So again we see her flip-flop in her beliefs and statements about what she should or should not be doing. She just can't make up her mind.

With all of this going on around them, Rich and Rudy make their "to the end" pact, which Rudy does indeed honor all the way to the final vote.

This is the episode in which Sean really pisses off Kelly by indicating that he'd take her to the yacht meal he won in the reward challenge, but then switching to pick Rich. As we've seen Sean do countless other times (usually with his alphabetical scheme), he later rationalizes it by saying it was because Rich provided so much food for the group. He was probably realizing that Rich was more likely to keep him in the group, though. Frankly, I can't blame him for picking Richard over whiny Kelly, even if Rich hadn't provided food and wasn't the key to the alliance!

Sean's father was at the yacht, and Sean said that seeing his dad was worth more than winning a million dollars. Good, because he wouldn't get the latter!

The alliance decided it was time to get rid of Kelly, who could no longer be trusted. Amusingly, Kelly confided to the camera that she couldn't admit that she was out of the alliance or else they'd vote her off. Apparently, she thinks they're pretty dense not to notice. Heck, even Colleen (who, along with her Pagong cohorts, was rather slow to react to the Tagi alliance) saw through Kelly's charade and she walked around, stabbing everybody in the back (especially Sue).

But Kelly stuck it to them by winning the first of what would end up being all of the rest of the immunity challenges. Whoops! So they talk about voting Sean off and seem like they will do just that. But then, at Tribal Council, they switch to Colleen. We, the viewing audience, are not let in on the reason they switched, and indeed this is not the first time it's happened. It's rather annoying.

So Colleen was the final Pagong voted off. Before the vote, she predicted that things would get pretty nasty as things finished off. She probably couldn't have predicted just how nasty, though! When she did leave, she indicated that she thought she could have won if she'd been with Tagi from the start. I think this is a rather interesting retrospective view, considering she had opportunities to form alliances, and blew them all. She wanted to have fun. If she'd been in Tagi, I don't see how this would have been terribly different.

A mini-interview with Kelly followed the episode. She said that she knew, deep down, that if Colleen had won the immunity challenge this episode, the alliance would have turned on her. While that's an interesting piece of 20/20 hindsight, I have my doubts. She seemed to think she was still fooling people. Well, I guess we'll never know for sure.

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