Survivor: Caramoan 1x14/1x15 "Last Push" and "Reunion"

I'm totally cheating again.  Go ahead and read Dalton Ross's thoughts, I'll wait.

I'm directing you to the Entertainment Weekly expert again because I didn't see the show last night live.  Usually I've gotten to see the finales as they air, even when I've missed huge swathes of some of the recent seasons, so that was kind of disappointing.  But reading Ross is like a different kind of entirely acceptable Survivor appreciation.

The winner was Cochran.  This was what the spoilers suggested at the start of the season (spoilers having made a big comeback recently in Survivorland), so I was only surprised that they were completely accurate.  The final vote is sealed before Probst reads it at the reunion, but sometimes it's just too obvious.  Cochran is the rare unanimous winner, joining Earl from Survivor: Fiji and J.T. from Survivor: Tocantins for the honor.  Interestingly, all three such winners have come from the Final Three era.

Ross goes on at length about how Sherri and Dawn didn't have realistic chances to win, and they really didn't.  He also waxes poetic on the irony of Brenda's behavior at the final Tribal Council that stood in stark contrast to what motivated it, being Dawn's decision to betray her, the move that cost her any shot of winning.  We should all know that Dawn probably owed her continued performance in this game to Brenda retrieving her false teeth, and to any observer it seemed Dawn owed her an eternal debt of gratitude.  Instead she chose to be that player who convinces themselves they have to sacrifice everything in order to have a shot at winning (except, apparently, anecdotal alliances with Cochran).  Brenda felt humiliated.  She was the rare person voted out who still couldn't compose themselves by the time they recorded their exit video.

So she was still going to be emotional in the final Tribal Council.  As fans, we yearn for Big Dramatic Moments in this final act of the game, ever since Sue Hawk's rats and snakes speech that helped make Survivor a thing in the first place.  It might have been vindictive to make Dawn remove those teeth she claimed would have forced herself to quit if she couldn't find them (but as Ross indicated throughout the season, she could cry and have a meltdown at the drop of a hat), but it also served her right.  Maybe it makes Brenda a bad person to have gone there, and maybe it makes me a bad person for agreeing, but in a very real sense, Dawn all but acknowledged that the teeth weren't that important to her, nor the person who helped her reclaim her dignity.  That wasn't a strategic move on Brenda's part, either time.  Dawn couldn't win.

Sherri also couldn't win, and she should have known it.  Too often people assume success in the business world actually means something.  Russell thought the same thing.  It takes a different kind of personality.  It's not the many who love that kind of success, it's the few.  The many don't enviously applaud that success.  They only want the same stability that success engenders.  In a game like Survivor, success becomes something else.  It's the ability to be rewarded by the many, not the few.  And Sherri couldn't even get the few to like her.  Ross complains that the jury members always lay into the floaters.  They deserve it.  It sucks to play the game and be voted out for it, while the people who aren't playing the game, or who aren't playing it well, technically have a shot at winning.  Except they don't.  They never do, and they never have a clue as to why that is.  So that's why jury members should be able to tell them.

You can always tell what the producers or Probst thought of someone by how much they're featured in the reunion show.  Ross says Sherri was a nonentity.  That's all you need to know.  She wasn't even acknowledged.  I long for the seasons where true competitiveness reaches all the way to the finals, where sitting besides each other in front of the jury is a matter of honor rather than strategy.  This happens so rarely.  I applaud Cochran for winning.  He absolutely deserves it.  He's the version of Todd from Survivor: China that I can actually respect.  He's the self-aware version, even if this season has been giving him an infusion of ego (or just making it more obvious, because the dude always loved to talk, and that's the reason he's so fun to watch and why his interview segments have made him immortal in Survivor with or without this win).  Todd was very much a snake, but unlike Rich Hatch before him he swallowed the rat because he was so pathetic no one realized what a jerk he was.  Cochran owned up to everything.  That's what makes him so great.  And he didn't even have much to own up to.  He was a classic opportunist.  He let his worthy foes eliminate themselves.  This was a season of attrition, but the difference between a win from Cochran and two from Sandra is that he knew what he was doing the whole time.  He did whatever he could to help, but really it was just a matter of seeing it all play out.

Was this a memorable season?  Insofar as a worthy winner like Cochran emerged, yes, but it was also kind of pathetic, in the very way that Dawn proved her ultimate character in that Brenda debacle, and people like Ross are now going to make Brenda seem like the villain, or how Shamar is still being perceived, or that Brandon's complete reversal remains intact, or that Malcolm didn't redeem himself.  A good season for fans, but I wonder if it made anyone into converts.  That's how you gage a memorable season.