So far, the motto of Survivor 21 is: “He who talks a lot, goes ahead.”
There’s also famous saying from World War II that goes “loose lips sink ships.”
Short recap from TV Fanatic: During the 1940s the phrase was meant to reinforce the idea that discussing the wrong thing with the wrong person could cost American soldiers’ lives fighting over seas. While the point of the phrase is not that dramatic as it pertains to Survivor, the analogy could have been a very useful lesson for some of the castaways on last night’s episode.
Jimmy T represented the most obvious example of how his loose lips sank his own ship. I’d ask the question ‘what was he thinking?’ but I really don’t think he recognized how detrimental his yapping was to his future in the game. Despite his admission on the show that perhaps his talking was going to put his head on the chopping block, I don’t think he was all that serious about the comment. For all we know, he was responding to a producers question about if he thought his talking was upsetting the tribe and that was the first time the concept occurred to him.
Not surprisingly, despite the fact that he was a far more useful player for the tribe, Jimmy T was sent packing when it should have been Dan. We often castigate Survivor players for not thinking or voting with their head (and I’m one of the first people to do so), but a Survivor reality is that there is a threshold point of annoyance where someone’s usefulness in the game is not worth keeping around.
(Did anyone else notice how cocky Marty was a tribal council? He was saying things to and about Jimmy T that we had never heard and camp and clearly would start a war if Jimmy T was not voted out. Marty knew Jimmy T was going home and felt empowered to talk about him that way. I think Dan knew as much as well and was confident to be honest about his performance, even if normally it might have put his future in jeopardy.)
If Jimmy T had survived tribal council, I think he would have reformed his ways at camp and might have lasted longer than it seemed mere hours before. He definitely took his medicine at tribal council, but the decision had already been made and he was heading home.
NaOnka has a similar affliction that Jimmy T does, a bad case of verbal diarrhea, but I don’t think there’s any medicine in the world that could cure her ailment. Would NaOnka respect the feelings of the majority of the tribe if they told her at tribal that her mouth was giving everyone headaches? As she so boldly told us last week, her name is NaOnka, not fool. Sounds like someone who’s open to constructive criticism for me.
The arrogance that some people display when they are part of a dominant alliance is always shocking to me. It is as if they have never seen the show before. This isn’t the first two seasons anymore, they’re going to produce some sort of wrinkle that will rankle and mix up any dominant alliance. Having as positive of a relationship as possible with every tribemate is vital. There’s no way of knowing if NaOnka is going to have her tribe flipped on its head and she’ll be left with Alina and Kelly B working alongside Espada members.
Beyond NaOnka’s misplaced arrogance is her bloodlust for Kelly B. Normally I would attribute this kind of behavior to a lack of self-esteem, much like with Jimmy T. However, NaOnka does not fit that profile and instead seems like someone who has been a bully her entire life or is making up for years of being bullied by repaying the favor to someone now that’s older.
I touched on this idea last week, but her isolation of Kelly B seems far more to do with a form of bigotry than it does with being worried about a “charity case” (NaOnka’s words, not mine) on the jury. For whatever reason, NaOnka does not like the fact that Kelly B and her prosthetic limb are different from NaOnka and all of her able-bodied tribemates.
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