Matsing: Control Freak Out

In a video on the CBS site this week, Tandang's Artis expressed surprise that Matsing had voted out one of their strong guys first, which handicapped them enormously during the sled-pulling portion of this week's challenge.  He's right, but he's probably also unaware that Zane had been so winded after a simple sprint last week.  I can't imagine that Zane would have fared any better than Angie with the sleds.

Unfortunately for Matsing, they were given a guy with no stamina and two girls whose strength was short-distance running.  We learned from Crystal Cox in Gabon that running skill does not cross over well in Survivor challenges, and the fiasco of last week's challenge made both Roxy and Angie reluctant to step-up this week.  And so, despite how alliances fell last week, this week's vote had to be between Roxy and Angie.

Last week, I theorised that Roxy might have joined a majority alliance with Malcolm, Denise and Angie, however, this week it quickly became clear that wasn't the case.  She and Angie were not getting on (possibly due to knowing it would be one or the other of them going), and she had formed a bond with Russell.  Her case for staying therefore hinged on Angie's closeness to Malcolm, highlighting the two of them as a showmance and a danger going forwards.

Give it another couple of weeks, and we'll
know how this guy looks with a beard.

Even without being on the chopping block, I expect Roxy would have been unhappy with the pair.  Before the game started, she was worried that she'd end up being on the same tribe as Pete, describing him as a Disney Prince Charming.  She's right--Pete is the spitting image of The Little Mermaid's Prince Eric; I'm not sure that this is a good thing, but Roxy considered him to be so handsome that she was afraid he would be able to exploit her in the game.  We'll never know what would have happened if Pete had swapped places with Malcolm (hopefully not a gender-switched version of Brandon's crusade against Mikayla in South Pacific), but it's clear that Roxy felt romance and Survivor don't mix.

Angie was blissfully ignorant of this and needed Malcolm to explain to her what Roxy was doing.  Malcolm at least retained the self-awareness to know he was making a mistake, but he still couldn't stop himself making it.  As Denise ruefully observed, he's only twenty-four and a pretty blonde makes a good distraction from the rain and misery.  He did describe it as a sister relationship at Tribal Council, which I don't think was entirely accurate.  I wonder how much of that was convincing himself, with the intention of staying focused on the game in the future?

While Malcolm's game requires keeping a clear head, Angie always intended to flirt.  However, right now she's flirting for protection and tips on playing the game, rather than to manipulate Malcolm.  It's still a huge benefit for her, but she's got a long way to go before she holds any sway over him, and I'm not sure she's got the ability to play that game.  On the other hand, if she squeaks through to the merge with Malcolm and if he gets voted off in the early jury stage and if she has learned enough of what he's taught her to slip through to the finals, she could parlay this relationship into a winning gameplan.

There were three 'if's in the above sentence, and that was a condensed list of conditions.  I am still not holding out a lot of hope for Angie.

Her immediate goal should really be to displace Denise in Malcolm's hierarchy, and this was the argument Roxy and Russell used, that whoever else Malcolm and Angie aligned with would be a third wheel at best.  True, in a final three situation, that would still be enough to get you to the end, but it's never a comfortable place to be.  On the other hand, Denise might well have figured that she was going to be the third in an alliance with Roxy and Russell, too.

Last week, I speculated that Denise might want to vote off Angie, but that was assuming Roxy to be a neutral player.  Once it was established she was closer to Russell than Denise, there was less of a gain to be made in voting off Angie.  At least if Angie stuck around, Denise had the comfort of knowing she and Malcolm had made an alliance that pre-dated Angie's relationship with him.  She does not necessarily have that with Russell.

That would not be my best guess for why Denise voted for Roxy though.  The answer to that lies in the challenge.

It's really difficult to judge which girl is the weaker link.  Roxy admitted that she was a weak swimmer when talking to Dalton Ross about her most embarrassing moment (from EW.com), but she has had military training so she must have a decent level of fitness, while we have no idea about Angie's.

Both girls tried to get out of running twice in the challenge, which is really not a good sign for either of them (neither of them were involved in the puzzle either).  However, Roxy was the one who said she couldn't do it because she hadn't drunk enough water.  In other words, she was admitting that she hadn't bothered preparing for the challenge.  Ultimately, it was Angie who did the run twice, and while she had fought against doing it and had to be encouraged by Russell to keep going through the second run, she did pull it off and gave them a fighting chance at the puzzle.

So the biggest distinction between the two girls in challenges thus far was that Angie kept going when Roxy gave up.  In Denise's pre-game confessional on the CBS site last week, she was talking about how she would use her therapist skills in the game, and mentioned supporting her allies to prevent them from quitting.  She went on to cite Na'Onka and Purple Kelly from Nicaragua who both infamously quit at the end game, leaving their allies high and dry.

She's more comfortable this way

Going even further back to Denise's first video on the CBS site, she talked about how she'd looked through the seasons, calculating the risk of getting a serious injury.  Quitting and med-evacs: two game-events that are largely (though not entirely) out of the players' control.  Denise seems like a type-A personality (as overused a phrase that is); is her focus on minimising the parts of her game that are out of her control?

We've seen this before, certainly.  Back in Samoa, on the luckless Foa Foa tribe, Liz wanted their first boot to be Mike, their oldest player, seeing him as a physical liability.  Marisa got voted off instead, only for Mike to be med-evaced during their next immunity loss, and Foa Foa still had to go to Tribal Council.  Liz promptly targeted the next oldest player, Betsy, and remained on the vote-off-the-weak tactic from then on, which resulted in her own boot right before the merge.

I can't see a situation in which Denise's fear of quitters would cause her to sabotage her own game in that manner, but it's worth bearing in mind.  It could have been her primary motivation in voting off both Zane and Roxy, and it might blind her to the long-term consequences of her actions, making it a weakness for a truly savvy player to exploit.

Was Roxy a risk to quit?  She was certainly struggling more than anybody else with the rain, and Denise was surprised when (once the sun came out) Roxy suddenly started stirring things up and scrambling to save herself.  I expect that Denise had given up on Roxy long before the immunity challenge, and one day of sunshine was not enough to shake her estimation of the younger woman--certainly not when there was no guarantee they weren't going straight into another week of rain.

The rain hit everybody hard, of course; Russell was getting flashbacks to Samoa and even our resident cocky superfan, Malcolm, looked on the verge of tears.  The clue to Roxy's particular difficulty comes in an online clip on the CBS site, where she talked about how she couldn't get a genuine moment.  Nobody's really making friends out there; they're just making connections to get to themselves to the end, and she couldn't fake the social brightness and interest for that.  She wanted something real.

I am willing to bet good money that Angie never saw it that way.  I'm sure Angie was suffering with the rain just as much as everybody else, but she was finding comfort in her relationship (platonic or romantic) with Malcolm, never considering that it was an insincere one.

The thing is, they're both right.  It's often said that you don't go on Survivor to make friends but to win the money.  On the other hand, most of us would never make it to the end if we didn't find a friend to help us along the way.  Some players can--Russell Hantz springs to mind--and it's one way in which the game is easier for returners, just due to knowing they've done it before.  Still the majority of homo sapiens are not able to get through hardships and deprivations that they've never experienced before without having some form of emotional support.

In that respect, I think Malcolm and Angie's dalliance was both genuine and necessary (if OTT) on both sides, as well as being part of their gameplan.  Russell's done this before, and probably has the edge on returners when it comes to rain experience (though Jonathan got his share in Micronesia), and Denise--well, she's more educated about this kind of thing than I am, so I'm sure she figured out her coping mechanism.  Roxy couldn't accept her tribemates' support and could not find solace in prayer as she had expected.

Players often rebound from early struggles (see Nicaragua's Holly and South Pacific's Dawn), but sometimes they don't (see Micronesia's Kathy), and with no way of knowing how hard conditions are going to get, Denise might well have not wanted to take the risk.

There are other factors--Roxy's work ethic for example.  She had her own opinions on the work issue, and why she was doing what she was doing, but ultimately, following the tribe's lead is the better policy.  Aside from anything else, Roxy played herself up as a loyal soldier who would follow orders at the first Tribal Council.  Her actions should have matched those words, if that was her strategy.

There's also the not insignificant point that Roxy was more game savvy than Angie.  Denise was choosing in whose alliance she would be third.  She already had an alliance in place with Malcolm, and while Angie might be a threat down the road, she's a known quantity.  She had no agreement that we know of with Russell, and had just realised that she had underestimated Roxy to start with.

Eliminating Roxy from the equation means that Denise can carry on scheming with Malcolm in a position of trust.  Russell's just lost the closest thing he had to an ally, so she can bring him in as her own voting-buddy, should she need to counter the Malcolm-Angie pair.  Should Matsing lose for a third time, she and Russell have a good argument for letting Angie, the last weak link, go without losing Malcolm's trust.

I would fully expect Malcolm to try and swoop in on Russell too, since they were in an alliance at one time, the one initiated by Zane.  It's not clear that they've kept that up, and Russell certainly didn't seem to be counting on it, but I think Malcolm would be smart enough to keep that relationship going.  However, Russell is wary of Angie's hold on him, and will probably feel more comfortable bonding with Denise.

There is no suggestion that anybody knows of Malcolm and Denise's alliance, plus these two are clearly the strongest in challenges (note that Malcolm was willing to abandon the dumb façade and do the puzzle this week).  I'm fairly sure that the worst case scenario voting order is Angie then Russell, leaving Malcolm and Denise to be returning players for the next available season.

To briefly detail my thoughts on Cookiegate (because RHAW's Andy Baker said I had to): storm in a teacup.  I'd give Angie the credit for knowing that she couldn't actually indicate her (or Malcolm's) actual gameplans, and she probably didn't have the courage to say "Voting Roxy off instead of me," which was probably her biggest concern.  I expect "Cookies" was just the first neutral thing to pop into her head.  Meanwhile, like most Survivors who get stroppy at Tribal Council, Roxy almost certainly knew she was going and opted to go out swinging.

The only other thing I want to touch base on with Matsing is the idol.  There's absolutely no indication that Russell is looking for it.  He might not have had a chance to, since everybody's been hanging around camp in the rain and working on improving the shelter, but similarly, he should be confident that nobody else has found it (which would be virtually impossible without the clue anyway).

He'd rather be idol hunting.  So he says.

Malcolm, on the other hand, revealed in his CBS webclip that he really wants to get away from the others and look for the idol now that the sun has come out.  Assuming it to be hidden like the idols in recent seasons, he's waiting for his chance to go away from camp and check out a few likely places.

Clearly, these efforts are doomed to failure unless he happens across Russell's clue.  Nevertheless, he revealed that 'we' don't think Russell has the idol, based on what went down the previous Tribal Council (presumably all the stress Russell was in without actually playing an idol).  He's also eliminated Roxy and Angie from the possibility of finding it and thinks Denise would tell him if she had.

It's clear that Malcolm's still very confident in his alliance with Denise and I presume that 'we' refers to the two of them--Angie might be included, but I lean towards not.  I am not so sure that he would tell Denise if he found the idol.

Still, Denise might be closer to the idol than Malcolm is.  If Russell decides to share the clue or idol with anybody on Matsing, my guess would be Denise.  Between that and her potential for allies, she has the best chance of anybody on Matsing to advance in the game.

The only problem there is that nobody on Matsing is currently in a prime spot for game advancement.  Unlike, say, Tandang.