Fair warning for previous AusVivor and 2018 SA/NZ season discussion here:

In their 23 hours of marketing between the second-to-last episode and finale, the show hyped something that raised my eyebrow- the best FTC ever. Now, if anyone remembers the 2016 AusVivor FTC, you know as much as I do that this could not ever be the best FTC in this damn country, much less ever, but I won’t lie that I was intrigued to see if it was at least better than usual.

2018 has been a great year for international Survivor- though this was the weakest out of the English-speaking three, it was still pretty good overall- but the final tribals have been… decent, but could have been better. One like they were promising would have hit the spot to end a pretty inconsistent-leaning-positive season.

So, did we get the best FTC ever?

Hahahahahaha.

Yeah, not a chance, because that one- and a couple others- are flat untouchable. So let’s lower it a notch or two- was it any good? That, I can agree with- in fact, it was very good. Not A+ tier, but the tier below in my eyes. What really made it stand out was that it had its own story, one you could trace. Most FTCs are the conclusion of characters’ stories, not an act in themselves. This is a sudden final act for one of the characters that even those who suspected Shane would win did not see coming. Sharn was talked up as a threat who would use her criminal barrister skills to win FTC easily. When she won final immunity, logic would dictate that she would have it.

So… what happened?

I mean, we know what happened. Oh my, do we know. It… well, uhm… kinda left me speechless. The fact that I’m writing an article at all is a testament to how much I have underestimated the power of my neural functions.

On paper, we know what happened. Sharn blew Final Tribal. It’s just kind of crazy to think about, that someone we saw with an impressive “resume”, someone with a long and profitable stint as an underdog who overcame her own mistakes to make Final Tribal pissed away votes with a performance that started relatively strong (if aggressive) but unraveled with one simple question into a furious, pleading mess.

Not only that but Shane really capitalized on her fall. This isn’t talked about enough. Shane had a pretty mild performance herself. It was a little sassy (saying she used her idol “unlike some of you” was so essentially Shane) but overall, she did not sell herself particularly well… until Sharn bombed the question about whether or not she was really loyal to Mat. When she discovered that the conversation was about loyalty and that Sharn was failing, she smelled blood in the water and pounced, proclaiming proof of her loyalty even though- by her own admission in post-game interviews- she (as well as Jackie and Lydia) knew damn well that wasn’t the case.

Remember, out in Survivor, no one has an analyst view on the very specific minutia of the season. While Sam may have had a checklist that presumed an objective view of the finalist, it turns out that while we may see less than 1%, the players do not see 100% of the season either. It often isn’t what you actually do, but how you sell it, and somehow Shane sold that she was more loyal than Sharn, while Sharn’s little meltdown over the questions made her “betrayal” of Mat look far worse than it was.

Let’s backtrack a little to the armor-piercing question from Brian that kickstarted Sharn’s tailspin. It was a little tricksy, yeah, but I would argue that, much like Brian himself, it has been vastly overpraised. It was a rather simple pointed question: “If you had a feeling Mat was going home, why didn’t you tell him?” The real spectacle here is not how BRIAN SHAPIRO DESTROYS TOP CRIMINAL BARRISTER, but in how such a question prompted a total systems failure from Sharn.

The answer is simple: “That’s why I went to play my idol on him at that Tribal, but I fell for Benji’s trick and thought I was overexaggerating.” You can’t really pretend that mistake didn’t happen, so you may as well own it. However, this covers something about Sharn that I did not think about until later when she said at the reunion that the juries she deals with are “objective”.

First off, I side-eye anyone who actually believes, especially in the system, that criminal juries are objective. Secondably, that’s the essence of her problem- this jury was not objective. Survivor juries, like it or not, are never objective. They will snap at you or talk back to you. They have their own morals and agendas in mind. They do not have to have a points system in place to grade each player on in a Big Moves tournament. They can, and literally always have, voted based on whatever the hell they feel like.

Thus, when Sharn was tasked with swaying an independent jury with something she felt was an objective concept- she was the deserving winner. That mismatch was a failure from the word go. That’s why it was so easy to pierce her armor.

Again, let’s contrast Sharn’s inability to understand why the jury will not take her facts to Shane saying exactly what the jury wants. That’s really been Shane’s entire game. After the finale, in interviews, she has said that she deliberately managed her body language to appear as who she wanted, especially Brian- where she acted meek and subservient to him despite wanting to eviscerate him with a rusty spoon. Her whole game led to her Final Tribal performance, where she was just who the others wanted her to be.

She was loyal to Mat. She was cognizant of who Shonella were and showed care for them. She was able to explain her game to some of the stratheads. Sure, it took her a while to find her footing, but once she did, she pulled away from Sharn and didn’t look back. At the end of FTC, Sharn was fuming and stuttering like Kavanaugh at a job interview about how the others were not voting for who deserved to win because of one mistake, and Shane sat back while she calmly and succinctly explained her game.

Rarely do we get to see an actual traceable “storytelling for dummies” scenario actually play out in a natural way. Usually, it’s modern Survivor’s problem with showing and not telling, or it’s subtle and needs analysis to work out. I generally prefer the latter to anything, but in the end, I am a simple woman who needs to be handheld from time to time, and AusVivor tends to nail their stories with a sledgehammer. This, much like seeing every machination behind the Henry boot in 2017, was one of the times where their trademark lack of subtlety works in its favor.

We saw exactly why a FTC that seemed in favor of Sharn turned into a narrow victory for Shane- and more importantly, how she lost Mat’s vote after she let him believe she deliberately let him fall, rather than just failing to catch him in time.

Now that the season is over, what do I think of it? In terms of 2018, my refusal to acknowledge that Ghost Island was an actual season makes me think that it is the least of the 2018 seasons- and if David vs Goliath continues to be any good, it will stay that way. The editing was consistently trash from the way they lavished Benji with an 8.25 confessional average after his six episodes of silence to the way they treated Monika like a visibility dump stat, and they definitely favored the Champions over the Contenders.

Still, a lot of interesting things did happen. It was fascinating to see the different power shifts and the absolute self-destruction of the Mighty Ducks lead to an endgame of some really unlikely people, including two people down four-two make the FTC. Not only that, but the Contenders were a fantastic tribe from start to finish and I will hear no word to the contrary.

2018 has been a banner year for Survivor, and Australian Survivor was the weakest of the bunch that I will acknowledge (can you believe I did like ten articles over a season that didn’t exist? Where did I get the name Ghost Island from anyways?) Still, in this year, the worst is still pretty good, and I do not regret watching it.

The one thing I am left with this season, and the lesson that many of the cast has learned, is that you don’t fuck with Shane Gould.

-Cam

P.S. Your skin is gorgeous, darling.