Chicago Redshirt

I do wonder: Is Bhanu watching Q's self-implosion and nonsensical tactics and thinking to himself, "So that dude thought that he could give me tips on how to play Survivor and he's making these f---ed up moves?" Or is he like taking notes dutifully for if and when there's Bhanu S2: Electric Bugaloo/Bhanu:999,999 More Hearts To Go?

I'll defend Tiffany a little. Was it very likely that enough people would target her at this juncture to make playing her idol worth it? There was, with the information she had available, not much reason to think that she might get a plurality of votes. We know that Kenzie set in motion a possible blindside of her. But Tiffany did not have not much reason to think that Kenzie would vote her at this point. Q might have reason to vote her, but he also has reason to keep her (such as to make amends and to win her and other potential jury votes over) Other than Big Move Fever, nothing suggests anyone but Maria has any beef with her. By contrast: Q had begged to be voted off last time and was annoying everyone by staying. So it seemed likely he was going to get some votes. Hunter is a challenge beast who at any time could go on an immunity run and at the very least would reduce the chances of others getting immunities. So it would make sense to try to get him out now while the getting was good. Venus had already gotten some votes in the past and might have been drawn some in this one. The probability of her idol being flushed if she played it versus it actually saving her like it's far better odds of it being flushed. Whereas I would put odds in Hunter's case like 50-50. And even if it is flushed, he has a pretty good chance of winning a future immunity. Whereas nothing we've yet seen from Tiff if I'm not mistaken suggests she is likely to even be in the top 2 of an immunity challenge.

AH! Four times Q!!!!!

It is also amazing that even with these longer episodes, it's not necessarily clear what the various Survivors are trying to do and how they expect to win. Charlie and Maria are a pair and seem to be operating as such pretty openly. They seem to be the only ones who have 100 percent trust with each other, who are 100 percent working with each other. But is anybody going to think "Hey, Charlie actually has done pretty well in challenges too, and he's articulate and likeable and strategic...maybe we better get rid of him"? Kenzie and Tiff are a pair, and have been working together. But everyone's favorite Mermaid Dragon started orchestrating a blindside of Tiffany already Seems a clearcut case of Big Move Fever. Say she had succeeded as early as this episode. Where would that leave Kenzie in terms of future votes? She can't rely on Q, not only because he is generally unreliable but also because she would have been instrumental in ousting his No. 1 ally and to the extent he cares about it still, a member of the Six. She might sidle up to Charlie/Maria and Ben to give old Siga a 4-3-1 lead, and then hope she's not blindsided once she's no longer useful, or flit back and side with old Nami to get rid of one of her Siga allies. Venus and Liz are weirdos and had been on the outs. Anyway, does she think it won't get back to Tiff that Kenzie has made a move on her? What's Ben's plan besides his now-mandatory pronouncements of what does and does not rock? What's Liz's, other than desperately wanting to get credit for being a leader so badly that she isn't apparently thinking about a) why she wants that credit NOW NOW NOW instead of just being able to claim it at the end and b) thinking about where she's allegedly leading? How does she not realize that taking credit now for moves would make her a target and be more likely to get her booted? Hasn't she known that flying under the radar is a perfectly valid strategy? Does Q still think he has a shot at winning this, or is he just messing around? I unfortunately see the possibility of what has happened the last two tribals repeating: Q does crazy and annoying shiznit, the other Survivors say "now's a good time to vote off X, because we can always get to Q later" and Q surviving another round, wash/rinse/repeat until he's in the F3. Venus seems to be feverishly trying to work this, but I'm not sure what she's trying to do either.

I just don't understand how so many of these people can claim to be superfans, and in Hunter's case, have been so into Survivor that he constructed all these homemade challenges, and yet don't get the very basics. Has there ever been a situation where a challenge monster lost immunity and wasn't immediately voted off? How wasn't his Spidey-sense tingling? Was his interview about him playing his idol edited in some way? Why oh why did Hunter even tell people he had an idol? He at one point understood the power of keeping it secret. I could understand trying to trust maybe one other person in the hopes that the two of you would keep it a secret, You would potentially be a lightning rod for all the votes and then you and your ally could pick someone to vote off. In theory, that might make sense. But then, who can you trust? You can't or shouldn't trust Q, who literally is in hot water for telling others that his then-number one ally has an idol and who is playing a game bizarre. And yet, Q was apparently the first person he told. It feels so long ago since the last correct idol play. Three of the Six have been ousted pretty much in a row, so I may still live the dream of a potential majority alliance imploding. Maybe it's weird of me considering it's a silly game, but I take some minor comfort in the fact that a fourth consecutive African-American was not sent home as it would have been if Q or Tiff ended up being booted. I wonder if Nami had been told that the last of their tribe standing would be Great Value Parvati and Weirdo-who-can't-eat-anything if anybody would have believed them.

Far be it for me to try to read into the amazing strategic prowess that Q possesses /s But anyway... Q can't vote for himself, so if he did literally want to be sent home and expected to be sent home, he had to vote for someone else. Q still liked Tiffany and/or knew that there was no sense in voting Tiffany because there were not enough people who would go along with such a move. Also, Q might not want to undercut Tiffany's game any more than he inherently had by being a big ol' weirdo and outing that she has an immunity idol. Also, Q might have suspected that he wasn't going to get voted off and knew throwing Tiff's name out there would likely get traced back to him. Q could have voted for Venus, as there were at least a few people who were anti-Venus, and that would be not going against "The Six." But it seems like Q is honestly shaken up when he's not driving the vote or in the majority. So it could simply be that he just was counting votes and knew that Tevin looked to be a goner and sidled up to the majority.

It is my hope that the members of the plus-one alliance fumble and stumble so that they are eliminated one by one by one. Yes, technically Soda interrupted that streak, but now we have Tim and Tevin getting the boot. Q has for the second time asked to be a target for a boot IIRC (I think back when it was all Yanu and he couldn't bring home a challenge win, he got frustrated and started some quitting talk). I would think that people would agree that they can't play with him and his mob boss strategy doesn't seem like it would work well when people have no reason to fear or trust him. I suppose they could see him as a goat because who's going to give his condescending bipolar ass $1 million after this tribal? Hunter doesn't seem to have much of a social game and he is an obvious challenge beast. I would think people would try to boot him at the earliest opportunity. But he's got an idol, so it's going to take two tries. I like Tiffany and Maria, and they weren't all into the plus one alliance...but I'd be amused if what presumably would be a first a majority alliance self-destructed from the onset for no good reason at all.

OK, it was a bit of an exaggeration. Strictly he probably only claimed he was great at puzzles and a social game, and he was terrible at both.

In just the last season and this one, Survivors that I think are easily at least as delusional as Q, and I would say more so. Q is mainly arrogant and condescending. I am not sure that he has been actively wrong about anything such that you could call him "delusional." By contrast, people have already raised Bhanu and Jelinsky. Yes, Bhanu could be merely acting as delusional, but he's kept the act up. And Survivor 45 had: Brandon - the guy who thought he was great at everything but who was actively and objectively terrible at everything Sean - who claimed that he could have won the game despite being the only member of his old tribe after a switch, but wanted to speed up getting back to his husband Bruce - who thought that he was God's gift to Survivor and who acted like his two days of prior Survivor experience made him a wily veteran, even though he literally had no allies, bossed people around and actively alienated people.

But in part, the situations are different. Bruce had not a single real ally, and had a die-hard enemy in Katurah. Q has Tiff who seemingly is actually in his corner and the remnants of the +1 alliance. I also think he's cool with Kenzie by and large. Time will tell if his condescension causes more people to target him. I don't think Q is that delusional....on a scale that includes even people from this season like Bhanu and Jelinsky, he's like a 2.

So much for the +1 alliance. Or is it? Will it morph by replacing Tim with Charlie, and if so will that version hold? It looks like the remaining division is 4-3-3, so there's no real reason for anyone to stay ________-strong.

Charlie I believe is taller, younger, and way more articulate. He's (AFAIK) the only law student/lawyer representative this season. He's tight with Maria. Ben is the rocker dude who keeps bringing up rock bands and saying things like "this doesn't rock." and seems to be generally liked by most but does not seem to have any one person who considers him their number one, or vice versa.

Has the Angstrom threat been put to rest? It seems like once you have a multiverse, there's an infinite number of Angstroms, at least some of which are going to have the same rage boner for Invincible and thus will come to confront "our" Invincible.

Few other thoughts. Start with fewer players -- say 15. Have it be one tribe all along. For competitions, do randomized teams. Have nobody go home for the first few episodes. You could still have tribal councils if you wanted but they could be to administer some sort of penalty for the loser of the vote, Have a 12 person jury, 3 person Final Tribal Council. Problems I'd hope to solve/improve on: 1. Basically the first few weeks of Survivor don't matter much. The people who get voted off, even though they are focuses of whole episodes, have no impact on who is the winner. Now at least they would be on the jury and have relevance that way. Players would have to factor in and potentially pay for every vote-off. 2. There are people that we do not get to know because for the first few weeks because they are never wacky enough to be featured and they do not go to Tribal. By not having eliminations for a couple weeks, there would be a better chance to get to know people. 3. Too often, the two/three tribe structure limits game play and creativity. If you're lucky to be on a dominant challenge tribe, you can have a huge leg up that snowballs, as they get reward after reward and maintain their numbers. Having to scramble for votes across 15 players and to try to make alliances among that many would be more interesting than factions among three. Watching tribes that are bad at challenges suck is not entertaining.

Nobody seems to like Venus, regardless of how non-sexist they might be. I don't see Tevin as particularly sexist or unwilling to deal with smart women. I'm not saying there's not a touch of misogyny and condescension in Q's makeup. But I do think Q genuinely likes and respects Tiffany, who is smart. I think he likes and respects Kenzie, though he wisely distrusts her beyond a point. It continually surprises me how the show regularly and overtly has Survivors scheming on gender lines, but rarely has them plotting on racial ones or sexual orientation ones. Maybe it is happening but the editors are leaving it on the cutting room floor. The +1 alliance is interestingly most of the people of color in the game, with Soda traded out for Hunter. (A seeming upgrade). I find it tough to believe that the Black Survivors don't explicitly talk about their communal experiences in the game and out (racial or otherwise) as a way to bond, or even give the head-nod.

I don't know if I've witnessed a F3 where all three competitors were worthy, rather than 1 heads-and-shoulders-above the rest candidate and two also-rans, or 2 close competitors and a single also-ran. Survivor superfans, what might fall in the category of 3 competitors where all three seemed viable? I am interested to see where things go with Tim. He seems actively bad in that a) he hasn't picked up on not being Maria's No 1 or even 2 b) he didn't apparently bother to tell her about the +1 alliance in advance. But is the +1 alliance worth talking about? Does it make sense for its Nami members to allow Nami outsiders to be voted off? Despite Tevin actively trying to get her out from pretty much day one and being a loud voice at Nami, despite her being an overt Great Value Parvati-wannabe, despite her not having any allies, despite her not being of much value at challenges, despite it making sense to vote her off this time around to keep the balance of power between old Siga and old Nami, despite her "playing too hard," she's still friggin' here. So that must say something about her social game. Or producer interference. Or how badly Mo bungled things by essentially yelling as loud as she could "SIGA CAN'T TRUST ME AT ALL, AND I'MMA STAB THEM IN THE BACK AS SOON AS I CAN, WHICH COINCIDENTIALLY MEANS NO ONE CAN TRUST ME FROM THE OTHER TWO TRIBES EITHER, AND I DIDN'T THINK TO QUIETLY ARRANGE MY POTENTIAL BACKSTABBING FOR REASONS." I am actually open to a lot of people winning. Hunter seems likeable and smart and is a challenge beast. I am drawn to how much Q and Tiff tell it like it is, and seem to want to advise weaker players, and they bring the snark. Tevin is also a big sass-machine. I could even get behind a Venus win. The only ones I mildly dislike are Ben (the whole rock-and-roller thing seems a lot forced, but maybe that is just who he is) and Liz (she just seems like an odd duck who's not contributing to my entertainment while watching). Soda I could take or leave. A classic situation in Survivor is when there are two factions of about equal size/power and a smaller faction in between then become the swing vote. It can make sense for the two larger tribes to agree to wipe out the smaller faction and then settle things between them at future tribals. But generally it seems like it would be hard to pull that off because there's the risk of Tribe 1 running to people at Tribe 3 and saying "Tribe 2 is looking to vote a member of Tribe 3 off." Which would/should lead to Tribe 3 siding with Tribe 1. So as far as I can think of, it's almost always the middle tribe has a lot of power. This was even more pronounced this time because all the Yanus were safe. Which meant that the other two tribes were incentivized to try to woo the swing votes in Yanu to get rid of a member of the other tribe. Praise be to Peachy that they haven't tried resurrecting the "Turn Back Time" advantage. THAT was some bullshit.

I could see reasons why someone in a vacuum might jump to the conclusion that a civilization that has mastered space travel would be more sophisticated/enlightened than ours. or maybe even that given the way our civilization is going, we are going to wipe ourselves out in another century or so, so it's worth risking that the alien civilization might do better for us because they certainly can't do much worse. But when Ye is expressly told by an alien: Don't contact us again because my people are conquerors who will mess you up, it would have been nice to have more on Ye's decision to say "Nah, we're good. Come conquer us."

If we are to take the "We would like to speak to the Big Bad Wolf to better understand" discussion at face value, the San-Ti have a lot of data about humans but not a lot of comprehension of what makes us tick, abstract concepts, etc. They also seemingly have not interacted directly with anyone besides Wade this last episode who is less than worshipful towards them, and possibly no one directly outside of Ye, Evans and now Tatiana. A lot of their preconceptions of humans might be set not by all the data they have access to but rather the personal interactions they have yet to have. There's also the potential issue where a big enough number is a mere statistic, but a singular case can be a tragedy. The San-Ti are very focused on the concept of survival. The notion that a frozen head can be resurrected and talk about such things as his love for Jin, and that he didn't go through all the means at his disposal to survive might be utterly foreign and fascinating to them.

I wouldn't mind having backstories fleshed out for many of the characters in 3BP. The problem with Lost IMO wasn't the flashbacks/flashforwards, but rather that the powers that be didn't really have consistency in their vision and were making everything up as they went along about the multiple mysteries and nothing really made sense or mattered in the end. 3BP is based on novels so as much as the showrunners might play with things or try to stretch things out, there's at least a beginning, middle and end for them to shoot for. We were told a bunch of things about our heroes, but I don't think we were shown them. Will's character was described that he was smart but not willing to take risks professionally or romantically. I don't remember seeing that love/longing from Will in the scenes we saw with Jin, just having a character say "You should go for it." Nor do I think they helped show what Will loves about Jin. Did Jin have a clue that Will was in love with her until he basically killed himself? It was implied that Auggie and Saul had been an item, and Jin suggested that Auggie even loved Saul as much as Jin apparently loved her. But aside from Auggie trying to call Saul to support her about the winking and that other time only be disgusted that he had just been banging someone else, there didn't seem to be that sort of love there. What made Jack go from a high level physics genius to a snack entrepreneur? I know against the backdrop of alien intrigue and ongoing action, these sorts of things are relatively unimportant. But it's by fleshing out the characters IMO that the rest of the elements will get enhanced. Yes, knowing more about who Saul, Auggie and Jin really are and how they came to be that way will make them dodging the alien threats more interesting.

So I binged the season and will probably be back for S2, but there are quite a few things I am wondering about. If the books answer them, please put it behind spoiler tags. 1. Were the San-Ti actually ignorant of the concept of lies until 2024-ish? I think we are supposed to take it at face value that they were, but I am not sure how to reconcile that with having had communications with humans going back to the 80s, with supercomputers that soaked up all of what was going on since there would have been ample documentation of people lying, texts about lies, etc. Indeed, the whole 3 Body Problem VR game is effectively a lie, the whole "stop your work or bad things will happen to you" is a lie, their appearing human when that is not how they appear is a lie, etc. 2. The 3 Body Problem VR game doesn't really make much sense to me either. I can get behind the notion that it was never about trying to solve the 3 Body Problem since the problem is apparently insolvable, and since the San-Ti had already decided to come to Earth anyway. But there has to be an easier way to recruit people into the cult than to see how quickly they could realize that the 3 Body Problem can't be solved. Why does the cult need people smart enough to figure that out, rather than as many people as possible? In fact, shouldn't the cult as a long-term goal be getting rid of smart scientific types who could possibly mount a defense to the San-Ti? 3. It makes little sense to me that given all the tools at its disposal, the cult straight-up murdered Jack the way they did for refusing to join and trying to tell someone about them. Especially when they full-on revealed themselves like a week or two later. It would be relatively easy to discredit Jack's attempt to say that there are aliens among us by driving him crazy, putting whatever they want in his digital records to undermine his story, etc. If he had to be killed, there are probably a half-dozen ways that they could have done it without raising any suspicions of foul play. Other than to show that the cult was mwa-ha-ha evil, not sure why it was done. 4. One of the things I am unclear on was how and why the humans came to think of the San-Ti in religious terms. It seems odd that a daughter of Communist China and a son of a high-powered capitalist thought of things as their "Lord" and would continue to use that sort of language (and if the San-Ti are 100 percent on the truth train, that the San-Ti would have let them build up this zealotry). I think I would have enjoyed this much more if the bad guys were simply making the rational calculation that siding with the San-Ti was the best thing for not just humans but also the rest of life on Earth. 5. It seems like the anti-alien forces were fairly incompetent. I can get that they were slow at first when there's only a suspicion of alien involvement and/or do not have the full sense of what is going on. But the raid at the summit was super-ham fisted, as Ye pointed out. It would have been way smarter to have Jin see how deep she could get in the organization, generate leads that way, etc. But given that they raided the Summit and got a number of its members in custody, it should have been fairly simple to flip at least some of the hundred or so people there. And even if you couldn't turn any of those people, it should have been feasible to use standard investigative techniques to learn more about the cult and the aliens at that point. Releasing Ye (or anyone else) because she has not committed any crime is beyond ridiculous because she has committed numerous crimes under current laws (including conspiracy to murder) and more to the point, it is not as though Wade would be above using a little extraordinary rendition on someone who was a traitor to the human race. But Tatiana escaping the raid on the Summit, never getting caught, being able to fly to frigging China in time to kill Ye and back seems -- even with the help of the San-Ti, a pretty big stretch. 6. I am not sure why the pro-alien forces didn't do things differently either. Why not go down some variation of the V route and offer the upsides of welcoming their new alien overlords fairly openly? Probably more than half of the 7 billion on Earth would be excited about the sort of world that the aliens could promise: VR headsets that could put people in paradises, quantum supercomputers that could solve problems, advances in space travel, etc. Or if there was too much uncertainty about how Earth might receive the aliens, there are probably more effective ways to undermine technological progress than to make a few dozen scientists stop what they are doing or drive them mad. Especially when there are other scientists to potentially pick up the work. It seems impossible, for instance, that Auggie could be like "we're pausing this nanofber deal" and that someone would not have stepped up. Indeed, now that the conspiracy is in the open, it seems like it will backfire and that Earth will pour lots of resources into the specific scientific areas the San-Ti was targeting. It seems like the whole countdown approach would inevitably lead people to say something about it to others, which would lead to the notion that this simply couldn't happen with the current state of our technology, which would lead to suspect aliens, which would probably be counterproductive.

It makes sense to us as an audience that Saul was picked as a Wallfacer because the authorities think that Ye singling Saul out was significant, and that it was in fact significant. It makes sense that Saul was singled out for two assassination attempts because the San-Ti are concerned specifically about him and what Ye told him, since as far as we know, the San-Ti have not attempted to kill the other two Wallfacers (who apparently don't need to wear bulletproof clothes) nor did they do anything more than try to scare Wade although they apparently could have killed him had they wanted. It seems at least somewhat ambiguous to me whether Ye was indeed repentant. She tells Saul that she's failed more people than everyone ever, and seems to regret that her involvement in the alien conspiracy led Vera to kill herself. Does that mean Ye was in fact was repentant enough to betray the San-Ti? Or was she just an odd duck with an odd sense of humor? But assuming that it is true that she was repentant for her role in everything and was trying to convey a way to stop the San-Ti that they would not pick up on, I don't think it is a flaw in either the show or Saul's character that he doesn't immediately pick up on it. Saul has no reason to think she is wanting to make amends for what she has done. Saul isn't genre-savvy like we are to hear the score indicate "there's something important going on here," to have a concept of foreshadowing in his own life or to be able to conclude that there is some deeper significance to the joke. And Saul has a lot going on mentally and emotionally -- the recent deaths of two friends and the imminent death of another plus the earthshaking revelation of hostile alien life -- so it makes sense he wouldn't pick up on the subtlety of it. Plus, it does not seem like Saul has the highest level of social skills (for instance, not simply saying "Of course I know your name, Nora." or arguing points with her when he should have just dropped it). So it seems in character for him to not pick up on the clue. It could just be a weird joke being told by a weird person. Or Ye could be likening herself to Einstein as she thought she had been communicating with and doing the bidding of God, and now finds herself metaphorically kicked in the balls. I originally took her to be going back to the relationship between her and her daughter as the uniquely personal way of communicating and that Vera was effectively telling Ye that she should kill herself. At the end, she seemed to be totally fine with the San-Ti's agent Tatiana killing her.

Ben mentioned being on tour and surviving on only Taco Bell because that was all they could afford...there's an actual Taco Bell commercial about a band that similarly lived on Taco Bell, linked below Coincidence? (I always thought this is a commercial that backfires -- why would I want to eat the food that a barely successful band is forced to eat because their promoters are cheap?)

People with better Survivor memory banks can chime in, but I don't think it's generally the case that winning tribes/teams wait for people to return from their journeys to partake in their food rewards. In the specific case of Q/Kenzie/Tiff, it doesn't seem to me that Q cared that they already ate and he didn't feel any less camaraderie or more upset about them eating. At least, i presume that if he was salty about it, that would have generated a talking head about it or some body language indicator that it bothered him.. He was still on a high of not-losing that I doubt it did bother him.

I think it would take the patience of a saint after 11 days of basically no food to sit around for what presumably was an hour or so minimum, possibly as many as two, with a platter of tempting treats and say "politeness means we will wait for Q to return before partaking." All they needed to do IMO was do what they did: save Q the approximate third of the reward he was due. Sucks for Q if they saved a little less than a third, or if it meant Q was relegated to third pick of everything. (Or if they literally were touching pastries to divide them in thirds, one of which was left for Q because I don't think most players would want any other contestant's meathooks on their food. but they might be beyond caring as to that score)

It's interesting...Is Tim a sexist because he suspected that there might be a girl's alliance forming, or was he right to suspect it? There clearly had been talk that we were shown about both the women on that tribe targeting a man, as well as the "Charlie's Angels" of an alliance of Charlie and the three women. In either case, Tim would be in the line of fire as one of either two or three targets. It seems that Tim thinks he is tight with Maria, and when the two of them are relating he doesn't strike me as trying to boss her around or being misogynistic. The saddest Tim-related thing this episode was that he got the title quote, which wasn't that exciting and came in a gross conversation. I am sure that there were plenty of better choices but none are coming to mind at the mo.