Three tribal councils and the final jury vote all in one episode, so I’m just going to focus on one thing from all of them. For a discussion of the strategy of the whole gigantic multi-hour extravaganza, I recommend Dalton Ross at Entertainment Weekly. I will say I was surprised that Nick and Kara didn’t…

[In retrospect, I now think this entry doesn’t make much sense. However, I don’t think I should delete my entries just because they don’t make sense. Philosophical engagement with the world occasionally has missteps.] The elephant in the room, of course, is Christian getting voted out. An interesting entry could probably be written about why…

Although the big story of this episode is Gabby turning on her ally Christian, I’m not going to write about that. (But just for the record, I think she did it too soon. There were too many Goliaths left and she hadn’t built a relationship with them to avoid their voting her out.) I have…

I’m going to focus on the first immunity challenge (though the second challenge certainly had interesting issues too). The players had to endure standing on two-inch-wide ledges attached to poles while holding horizontal beams behind their heads. The best way to picture this is to imagine the players being crucified. Did the producers ever consider…

I want to focus this week on how Kara turned against Dan, with whom she’d been in a flirtatious showmance. Kara’s feelings for Dan had been dimming as she noticed his difficulty in controlling his emotions. In Episode 7, he threw a tantrum over being targeted by Elizabeth, even though he wasn’t really at risk….

For this episode, I’d like to write about John’s mellow reaction to being voted out. He was the surprise choice after Davie used an immunity idol to save Christian, and Dan used an immunity idol to save Angelina. But when John’s name emerged from the pot, he mostly just made a smile of surprise and…

[Update after Episode 8: I wildly misread Angelina’s motives in Episode 7. Angelina just wanted Elizabeth to like her so that Elizabeth would be a friendly jury member. I’d like to chalk up my mistake to being a relatively new Survivor fan (but maybe that’s just rationalizing). However, I’m keeping this Episode 7 blog entry…

For this episode, I want to focus on the argument that Elizabeth had with Carl and Davie. To recap, Elizabeth had injured her back, so sleeping on the uneven bamboo of her tribe’s shelter was getting increasingly difficult. She didn’t tell anyone this, but her frustration secretly built up until it finally exploded. She began…

For this episode, I’m mostly interested in the jacket controversy. To summarize, the Jabeni tribe was going to tribal council. Natalie wanted to vote out Lyrsa, but Angelina wanted to first steal Lyrsa’s jacket (her personal jacket that she had brought to the island). So Angelina asked Natalie to do her “dirty work” and get…

After the new tribes formed, Nick created an alliance with Mike and again made sure to give it a name (the “Rock Stars”). I’ve briefly touched on this idea of naming alliances before, but now I’d like to dedicate a whole blog entry to it. Why do humans name things? On one level, naming has…

For this blog, I’m sorry to see Jeremy go (though as a viewer it was fun to watch a dramatic blindside). Jeremy often had interesting things to say, and he’s once again a big part of my blog entry. Mike noted that Jeremy has a lot of depth, yet would also do just about anything…

I think the most interesting conversation here from a philosophy perspective was between Natalie and Jeremy. There was a lot to unpack there. First, Natalie seemed deep in a web of rationalizations about her social status in the tribe. She told Jeremy that she was getting along with everyone, and she was extremely resistant to…

I think the key event for philosophical discussion in this episode is (probably obviously) Pat’s injury and removal from the game. Suddenly, the name “Survivor” wasn’t a gimmick. Pat wasn’t just at risk of dying metaphorically by being voted off the island – he was literally at risk of dying. (Supposedly he’s doing all right…

The theme for Season 37 is “David vs. Goliath”. Successful people who started at the bottom and clawed their way up versus successful people who started at the top and stayed there. (Apologies to anyone who’s still at the bottom. Maybe next season.) There are definitely conflicting ideas about the meaning of success, but for…