Survivor: The Amazon - Why Jeanne Lost

Jeanne knew she was the next to go on her tribe. She just didn't realize that she was still the next to go after she switched to the other tribe! But either way, she is gone. So it's time to look back at What Amazonian Survivors Should Have Learned to see why it is that Jeanne was voted out.

Jeanne claimed in her final words that she just couldn't be a liar and a cheater. So that would seem to indicate a failing at the first rule - scheme and plot. But actually, that isn't entirely true. She did, for example, originate the claim that Janet had been seen with the granola bar. She also teamed up with JoAnna to push Deena into the leader's spot, which they thought would piss off the others and make Deena more vulnerable. The first instance succeeded (though Janet may have been going anyway) and the second failed miserably. But she did try. She may be a better liar than she claims, although obviously not good enough. And in this case, her scheming stopped when they hit the Tambaqui camp. She seemed to think that suddenly she could trust Heidi and therefore didn't do her own plotting with the guys. Hell, even if she could have trusted Heidi, why not poke around and see if she could find herself an alliance? Apparently, she was thinking that if they could force a tie, she'd have a 50% chance of being on the winning side. More on this logic later.

Obviously, she didn't scheme and plot too much or backstab too early. This one falls by the wayside. One that doesn't, however, is pretending to be nice. Just as with JoAnna, last week, Jeanne made her disgust for the non-working women quite obvious. It appears at least some of that disgust was deserved, but deserved or not, it put her out of the loop. It also didn't help that she was so obviously together with JoAnna, who made a habit of annoying the others. Even after JoAnna was booted, Jeanne felt it necessary to call a tribe meeting to discuss something she'd heard that night - except that she apparently didn't hear it right. And even if she had, what was the point of that? Calling the others on what they might have been saying about her was not going to suddenly take her off the chopping block - it would only annoy them more.

Which leads us into "Don't Let Your Emotions Control You." That's exactly what happened in the situation described above. She was mad that they voted out JoAnna and mad that they were apparently saying bad things about her. So out the window went strategy. It's not what did her in, but had the all-female Jaburu stayed together, it certainly wouldn't have helped matters.

She did well in the area of working hard and providing food and the like. But, of course, that didn't save JoAnna. And when she was moved to Tambaqui, there were already men there who could do the work and provide the food, so she really wasn't needed for that anymore.

Now what about the others in the tribe - did they make the right decision? Already I've seen some controversy on this point. Why, out of the three women there, would they pick Heidi to join them? I mean, she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But Dave knew from Jenna's big mouth that Heidi was planning to vote against Jeanne anyway. So this is something he could use to sway her. Plus, Heidi was in an alliance with the others who were left behind, so she doesn't really hold any loyalty to Christy, either.

Could he have asked Jeanne to join their band and vote against Heidi? Yes, but Jeanne may have held some loyalty to Christy even if not to Heidi, so she might not have gone along with it. Plus, Jeanne is probably a bit smarter than Heidi, which makes her more difficult to control. Yes, Dave already knows that Heidi is in an alliance with the other three women, but he probably figures at least one of them will get the boot before the merge, so he's fairly safe.

So, was it smart for Heidi to go along with him instead of forcing a tie and hoping for the best? Well, we have to consider a couple things. First, we still don't know how a tie works because players have steadfastly avoided one since Paschal. What if it's another "purple rock of death" situation? She doesn't want to get herself voted out by accident. Second, the guys were planning to vote out Jeanne. Heidi might have been thinking (I know, I'm giving her an awful lot of credit here) that she plans to get back together with Jenna and Shawna and maybe Deena after the merge anyway, so does it really hurt her to lose Jeanne and then Christy? In other words, she is thinking the reverse of Dave - that at least two of her three cohorts back at Jaburu will survive to the merge.

So it seems that both the guys and Heidi may have made the right decision, at least as they saw it at the time.

Jeanne was basically expendable. She was strong on the all-female team when being strong didn't matter. But on the mixed-up Tambaqui, she was just another woman who the guys knew (thanks to Jenna) was vulnerable. She picked the wrong friends and made the wrong enemies. And that is why Jeanne lost.

David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at rno@pobox.com.

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