I'm all for mixing it up a little, but this week's twist was colossally ill-considered. Tribes have gotten shuffled in all sorts of ways in the past, most commonly by random draw or a draft. The former, being random, is by definition completely fair. The outcome may wind up favoring some and disadvantaging others, but nobody is predisposed to wind up in either group. The draft is weighted toward the people doing the draft, but so much can change afterward that the advantage is relatively weak. Taking the two strongest members from each tribe and sending them over to the other side, on the other hand, is virtually guaranteed to punish the players who have arguably been the best players thus far.
At that stage of the game, the defectors are going to be outnumbered by the old guard in their new tribe. If that tribe loses an immunity challenge, it's a no-brainer to decide to pick off the defectors instead of eating their own-- especially because it happened late enough in the game that players can reasonably expect a merge to come before too long. Peigee's decision to throw the challenge and dump a strong competitor, as loathesome as it was, was spot-on correct. Assuming a merge is coming, it's downright brilliant. She's killing two birds with one stone, knocking out the strongest individual competitors while preserving the numbers on her original tribe. If that tribe holds together post-merge, it puts them in a position of great advantage. If her theory is wrong and the merge doesn't happen, it could be trouble-- but the merge has always happened in the 8-10 player range (and most often at the high end), so it's a reasonable gamble.
The problem is that the producers should have seen this coming. This shuffle was GUARANTEED to screw the players deemed the strongest. As a viewer I find it abhorrent. As a player, I might even find it actionable. I detest twists like this that arbitrarily screw a player's game. I'd rather players be allowed to pursue their strategies and play them out to their natural conclusions. But this twist is even worse-- it seems calculated to undermine or eliminate the players who are most dominant and threatening to the rest. And since those players didn't know it was coming, they had no chance to consider changing their play style beforehand to adapt to it. A strong player always runs the risk of being voted out prematurely, but they compensate for it by building alliances and winning immunities. This twist nullified those options and left the strong players to hang in the wind.
Mark Burnett, let the contestants play the game. Don't play them.
Posted by Peter at October 21, 2007 10:54 AMThanks for starting the thread... this twist really made me mad. All but the four who swapped were basically safe. I can only hope that was a real hint during tribal council to Peigee about it maybe not being as she expects. If they swapped back and only got 1 back for James I would feel a lot better. In the meantime, if I was James, I would totally trash their camp thinking I'm going home anyways. I was having a little trouble connecting to this seasons contestants, but was trying - but if the producers don't make up for this week I may be going home myself!
Posted by: Danielle on October 21, 2007 05:31 PMOne thought we had was that is that the producers knew exactly what was going to happen and that this is what they wanted, because it would balance the teams numerically for the merge, assuming Aaron and James go 1-2 and the tribes are then at 5-5 for the merge, making the rest of the show more exciting. They sacrificed individuals for the sake of the game. Think Rollerball, but still a bad call.
The other line of thought is that the producers did not see throwing the challenge coming and perhaps even looked at the two tribes and used the swap to try to balance them out pre-merge - strengthwise, so that Courtney and some other weaker player of the group of 7 would go home pre-merge. Had they not done this, 7-5 would likely have become 7-4 and they might have been worried about the predictability of the midsection of the show when Eric, Peigee, Frosti, Shiree(?) and Jamie were picked off by failing challenges given the strength of James & Aaron's original team. This would have led to a post-merge pickoff of the remnants, making three or four shows anticlimactic.
I'm not sure about this, but if they mess over Peigee, she will just be another victim of the producers as deus ex machina, which really does start to destroy the formula of the show (at least after the first season where everything was novel).
We just watched the show this evening (a quaint VCR recording), so we are still reeling a bit while admiring Peigee and hoping the wrath of Burnett does not come down on her, as she truly did outwit perhaps even the producers.
Posted by: Jonathan on October 21, 2007 09:27 PMThe producers map everything out well before the season even begins. They know that episode X will feature challenge Y, the merge comes at episode Z, and so forth. They have to, to avoid any allegations of manipulating the outcome. As fun as it is to entertain conspiracy theories, the Swap Two twist was always in the plan and not tossed into the mix in response to the way the season was progressing. It was just a really bad plan.
Oh, interesting. I never thought that it was that cast in stone. I imagined a war room in a posh hotel with a bunch of guys talking about what might happen if they flip the ball challenge with the pole challenge, assuming that all it would mean is the boats going to a different island for that challenge.
I never thought of reality TV in the context of the quiz show scandals.
The odd thing is that even without what Peigee did, it was likely that one of two swappers would get the boot, regardless of who lost the challenge.
Do they have enough lead time to change a bad twist between the time they saw this evolve and when they had to lock in the twists for the next season? or were they already filming that one, which means it takes two seasons to get rid of 'bad twists'?
Posted by: Jonathan on October 22, 2007 07:59 AMJonathan, you were more on the nose that you may have thought when you said this:
> I never thought of reality TV in the
> context of the quiz show scandals.
It is exactly because of the quiz shows scandals that Survivor must be fully mapped out in advance. Because Survivor is not, in legal TV terms, a reality show. It is, in fact, a game show.
And it's classified as a game show not just because they award money/prizes, but also so that they do not have to pay anyone who appears on it as a "contestant," nor get their approval for any footage. You waive all that on a "game show."
The trade off, of course, is that you cannot tweak the show on the fly, something Survivor could have really made good use of on previous episodes.
This is, however, a real testament to how well this show's put together, that despite some bad "twists" like this recent one, the show, for the most part, really rocks.
Posted by: Dave Arnott on October 22, 2007 05:23 PMPeter,
Couldn't agree with you more. That move was the absolute pits. It's hard for me to applaud Peigee's throwing of the immunity challenge, but it's even harder for me to find fault with it. Nasty, but brilliant.
I do think she might have been better served by *not* confessing to having thrown the challenge. Her ditzy pal, Jaime, however, made that nigh impossible -- what with her incessant giggling after the fact. Truly horrid sportsmanship, especially when James and Aaron really did nothing wrong to arrive at such a fate.
Posted by: Stephen Glenn on October 24, 2007 08:27 PMPhew... I can keep watching. Thanks again for the thread.
Posted by: Danielle on October 27, 2007 07:44 PMI thought Burnett's defense to the lawsuits arising from the first season (where a player claimed producers had interfered with the game) was specifically that this was not a game show, so game show "fairness" laws would not apply to them.
I think the case was settled out of court, so the point was not definitively settled. The producers of Big Brother (also on CBS, though not by Burnett, FWIW) were pretty clearly manipulating their players as recently as this past season. It doesn't mean anything untoward is going on in Survivor, but I wouldn't assume they are legally constrained from getting the outcome they want if it comes to that.
Posted by: alexsim on November 10, 2007 01:40 PM