Kalabaw: Picking a Side

Is this the face of a man who does not
know what he's doing?

Kalabaw had the most skewed edit out of any of the tribes, with the focus being entirely on the returning player, Jonathan, and the celebrity, Jeff, the stage set for a showdown between these two.  Actually, thus far the feud is one-sided, with Jeff gunning for Jonathan and Jonathan not paying the slightest bit of attention to Jeff.  Jonathan is focused on his own game.

Jonathan is also exceedingly helpful, since he outlined his game on Twitter for our benefit: "Knew I had to 1)engender trust 2)WIN challenges 3)seek idol. Did all even if they only showed 2&3!!"  I'll cover all of those in due course, but we'll start with the idol, since that's what was being played up.

I can't really fault Jonathan for being keen to find the idol.  Ever since his first season, the winner of the game usually has the idol or is allied with the idol holder.  Even if, like One World's Kim, you don't use the idol, possessing it means that your voting target doesn't.

On the flipside, looking for it has been increasingly seen as threatening behaviour.  It's a great way to get yourself put on other players' radars.  This very episode, Russell deflected Zane by saying if he thought anybody was looking for the idol, he was going to vote them out.  Jonathan was the only person the episode showed looking for the idol, and while this is unlikely to be the actual case, it does serve to show that the other players' time was spent more effectively when building alliances.

In Jonathan's case, you can at least argue that he was already on everybody's radar.  But, honestly, looking for an idol has never worked out for Jonathan.  In Cook Islands, he mutinied in part because he thought Adam had the idol and wanted to ally with the idol holder--the irony being that his previous ally (and eventual winner), Yul, had the idol all along.  In Micronesia, Yau-Man nominated him to go to Exile Island (thus having a chance to find the idol), and in so doing lost them the majority vote.  Cirie explained in her Reality News Online interview for that season:

I went to Exile Island the first time with Kathy, she and I found all four clues. I saw Yau-Man’s season and I saw how he was with Earl sharing the idol, I saw Earl could trust him. I thought maybe if I could give him the last clue and eliminate the time he spent searching, we could share it.

I went to him with that deal and he agreed. I said the only thing we have to is that you have to be the next one to go. When it came time to send one of us, Yau-Man suggested we send Jonathan. That threw up 10,000 red flags.

The above is corroborated in Jonathan's interview, with the explanation: "He felt he needed to distract the rest of us from suspecting the alliance [with Cirie], which I never suspected."  While Jonathan was a victim of circumstance there, (and rebounded from the setback--until his injury), he seems cursed when it comes to idol-hunting.  This season, looking for it has given Jeff fuel to use against him.

The edit is bound to be misleading when it comes to just how much time he spent looking for the idol.  In episode, we saw him using a rainstorm to search while the rest of his tribe were huddled in a cave (they all knew full well why he was out there).  On the web, we see that he actually found the clue after the immunity challenge.  He suggested that everybody go down to the beach for a celebratory dip, then made an excuse of forgetting something and ran back to camp--taking a tip from Boston Rob's Redemption Island playbook.

On the other hand, he hasn't been entirely secretive.  One of Entertainment Weekly's pre-season teasers described how he'd been giving Katie tips on searching for the idol.  We don't know if that was before or after Katie's in-episode complaint about his idol-hunting, but it's a pretty friendly, ally-courting thing to do.  If nothing else, it's an open admission that everybody is wondering where the idol is to some degree.  He's tried to create a permissive climate for idol-searching, even if he made sure that nobody saw him actually find the clue.

Meanwhile, Jeff's trying to create a climate of ill-feeling towards returning players.  I'm not entirely sure why Jeff was targeting Jonathan straight out of the gate.  Maybe he feels threatened by him as a player, maybe he wants to distract everybody from his knee, maybe they butted heads while building camp (though I'd assume we'd have seen it if so).  My bet would be that he just wants to play the game, and targeted Jonathan as the biggest rival available.

It should be noted that it's not a bad move.  Putting up a name for the first vote is a great way to start taking control of the game.  Nobody's going to disagree, because they don't want to be the replacement.  Players seem to be more worried about "Not me" in the first few days rather than who actually does go, which can be a mistake (see also Tandang where a similar scenario went down).

Dawson knows something
you don't know...

If Jeff's motivations are unknown, his influence is even moreso.  In episode, everybody seemed to be anti-Jonathan, but the only person we saw pro-Jeff was Dana.  We heard so little from Katie and Carter, that we have to leave them as unknown quantities for the moment.

And then there's Dawson, who was the one player to recognise Jeff.  Dawson chose to sit on that little tidbit of information, which is good news for Jeff, since she could have used it to sabotage his game.  On the other hand, she hasn't told him she recognised him either, which does not bode well for our resident baseball MVP.  Over on Tandang, Michael let Lisa know he knew who she was because he was a big fan.  If Dawson hasn't said anything to Jeff, chances are that she is not a big fan.

Obviously, she could have other reasons.  She might be merely non-committal, or she might be afraid that telling Jeff would get him targetting her.  Or maybe she wants to save it up until she's sitting next to Jeff at Final Tribal Council.  But Jeff's been a polarising figure in baseball (so they tell me), and I am leaning towards the interpretation that Dawson doesn't fancy Jeff Kent as an ally.

In that case, how important is this information to Dawson?  Well, this is a pretty definite deception on Jeff's part.  He's earned a fortune through baseball, and he's covering that up.  Moreover, much of his argument against Jonathan "He's had his shot; this is our game!" could also be applied to celebrities: "He's had his moment; this is our turn!"  If Dawson wanted to turn the tribe against Jeff, she probably could do.

She could also use it to take his allies for herself.  We don't know of any definite alliances on Kalabaw, but Dana was eyeing Jeff up for a potential alliance, due to their shared southern bonds.  This is ironic, considering Dana's a lesbian and Jeff Kent's formerly taken a stand against gay marriage.  Even if Dana has already taken into account the possibility that her Southern homeboy has conservative political views, she's taken him to be an honest type, and won't care for the deception.

The fact that Dana was looking to Jeff, a guy twelve years older than her, for an alliance, suggests that she has not formed a connection with the younger people.  Dana's thirty-two, so she's closer in age to the younger group (Katie is the youngest of the tribe at twenty-two), but she feels more comfortable around Jeff.  Losing her image of him could hit her very hard; might she end up on the rebound, ripe for an alliance of Dawson's picking?

Perhaps the real question is how important is Dawson to her tribe?  She's confident and excited to play the game she loves; she's also zany and ready to make friends. (I've a feeling she said she wanted to get to know the girl with the tattoos--i.e. Dana--pre-game, but I can't find it in my notes, so perhaps that was somebody else).  She's almost certainly got a better social game than Jeff or Jonathan, and she's the most dynamic of the younger Kalabaws.

Because of this, I would say that if any player on Kalabaw wanted to get a majority, they should focus on Dawson first.  There's no indication that she's interested in picking a side, but right now the showdown between Jeff and Jonathan hinges on her (admittedly, there have to be a wealth of factors that we didn't see in episode).

I have already inferred that she is not interested in a Jeff alliance.  What about Jonathan?  Dawson's a big fan; she's got an opinion of him.  We just don't know what it is.  That said, even if it was a negative one, Coach has shown us that you can revise preconceptions very quickly.  Dawson was on puzzle duty with Jonathan at the challenge, so she's already had a chance to work with him--and to great success too, since they overtook Tandang's lead for a narrow victory.  That's a bonding experience, right there.

OK, so I have an element of wishful thinking here.  I've been hoping for a Dawson/Penner alliance all along, and I really really want it to happen.  But the possibility is definitely still open.

And this brings us back to Jonathan Penner, and his engendering trust agenda.  Before the game he acknowledged that being a returning player and having his game known could be a blessing or a curse, and he had to make it a blessing by making himself vital to the tribe.  He started early on, when there was one chicken remaining on the marooning boat after the deadline had passed; he grabbed it from the water (source: Dalton Ross's recap).  He helped them build camp, he passed on tips for finding an idol... for all we know, the latter was the beginning of an alliance with Katie.

I'm a little hesitant to trust Jonathan's abilities in reassuring others, considering he has a pretty mixed record with this.  However, he proved his worth in the challenge.

Kalabaw did a sterling job in the challenge.  Yes, Dana and Katie got them off to a bad start, but everybody else was right where they should have been: their strongest players on the boat and the smartest players on the puzzle.  I don't know if it was Jonathan who prepped them for the challenge, but Kalabaw knew their strengths and played to them.

Even if Jonathan had no say on who did what, he proved himself to still be a contender in puzzles.  Jonathan's taken the role of puzzle person on before, in both Cook Islands and Micronesia, and he is good at it.  So often a challenge is won or lost on the puzzle that any tribe should think twice before voting out their 'puzzle person'.

If Dawson doesn't decide the fates of Jeff and Jonathan, that puzzle-ability might.  Even without his knee injury, it's unlikely Jeff brings anything to challenges that Carter (twenty years his junior) doesn't bring more of.  Who's going to replace Jonathan in puzzles?  Dawson might be just as good or better, but he's the one who's proven himself.

Time to break out the puppy dog eyes

I should also take into account the possibility that neither Jeff nor Jonathan will be the first to go from the tribe, since the showdown might be deferred while they get rid of a more obvious weak link.  Was Dawson put on the puzzle solely to avoid having her in a physical leg? (I doubt it; Dawson looked very much involved. Still she admitted she wasn't going to be able to compete on a physical level.)  Was Dana and Katie's effort representative of their overall challenge ability?  I'm not sure that struggling to untie knots can be representative, but I did note that at one point, Katie was just sitting there watching Matsing while Dana was still working on a knot.  We do know that Dana is not confident in her swimming ability, but on the other hand, she wasted no time diving into the ocean during the marooning.

At this point, we can only be sure that Carter's not going anywhere (and this is Survivor, so we shouldn't even be sure of that).  But if I'm correct in thinking that Dana is isolated from the younger group, she could end up being an easy target while said young group procrastinate on picking a side.

Dana can at least take comfort from the knowledge that I am terrible with predictions. Since my Kalabaw speculations can only get more crazy from here, let's move onto Tandang.