Territorial Bloggings

The king of realitytv is back for a 13th installment – Survivor: Cook Islands (aka S:13).

Yay!

Let me start out by clearly stating that the controversial “social experiment” of initially splitting folks up based on ethnicity doesn’t bother me at all. I thought that it would be an interesting spin on things, and the first episode bore that out. It’s not controversial, at least among people capable of rational thought – which is probably why the PC Police on the left got so bent out of shape. A more important thing to note is this: as a result of the need to have four equally represented ethnic groups, the producers had to recruit participants. This is interesting because (as has been reported) it has resulted in (IIRC) a majority of participants who really aren’t familiar with the game of Survivor and how it’s played. That really hasn’t happened since the first three seasons, and it’ll be very interesting to see how it will play out.

The first episode struck me as being atypically “mature” & well formed. Usually the first episode has a very disjointed & hectic feel to it. Either the producers did an exceptional job of editing, and/or this is an exceptional group/cast. I tend to think that it’s a bit of both, leaning a little more towards the editing.

That said, this does seem like an enjoyable cast. No psychos like Shane, to be sure, but Cao Boi definitely has some potential in terms of entertainment value (his riff on the “old country” & removal of Brad’s “bad wind”/migraine was priceless!). I think that Ozzy could be a formidable player, along with Nick (if he can keep the three ladies happy & survive until a merge/twist of some sort).

No one did anything that was horrifically stupid or shockingly annoying (shades of Cirie’s fear of a leaf), although I must say that Jessica (aka Flicka, aka the-new-Courtney) didn’t help herself by letting the chickens (including Jonathan’s pilfered piece of poultry) escape. Billy looks like he’s well on his way to annoying the bejeebers out of his Latino compatriots, and Sekou certainly didn’t do anything to keep a low profile among the city dweller, er black, tribe.

At this point, my least favorite tribe is the white tribe, although Jessica’s exclamation that they were the “whiteys” was a chuckle-worthy moment. Parvati is probably the early favorite of mine to emerge from that group.

Finally, it was quite obvious that Probst is more than willing to stir the pot, what with his various pointed observations, like about how the black tribe made their decision to send Jonathan to Exile Island (btw, Exile Island looks absofreakinlutely brutal this season — it makes last season’s version look like a spa resort in comparison, if you ask me…).

In the end, Sekou’s fate was sealed when the black tribe couldn’t get their puzzle boat put together quickly enough in the immunity challenge. They worked together horribly, and then paid the price by not being able to make up the deficit. Sekou had the misfortune of being in a tribe with 2 men & 3 women, and being the more bombastic of the 2 men to boot. Thus, it didn’t really surprise me that he got voted out.

Let’s hope the quality continues nest week. At the very least, though, the fact that the preview showed a tribe contemplating throwing a challenge (in episode 2!) should mean that things will be interesting to watch…

-ghp
(btw, if you or your kids are Veggie Tales fans, then you should “get” the title of this post…)