Survivor: Borneo- A Second Look Back

While I already did a look back on the first Survivor season, I am going to do another, generic one now that Rudy’s death has happened. I won’t know how long it will take for me to get to a point where I am able to see the special leading into this. Plus, I will wait until the show can be added to a new spot on the list instead of starting a new list with the next set of choices or making it the first replacement for what Survivor shows are on the list. Well, that’s the plan for now, at least. After I blog about the whole season again, I will do posts regarding Rudy’s appearance on the show. Who knows how long a wait this might be until I start posting these blog posts? This will be written long in advance.

The special was put on my Sunday movies of shows to watch. While I would put the blog posts of Survivor: Gabon on Sunday, those posts are on hiatus as I watch Survivor: Island of the Idols. There won’t be an issue unless the movie is not rolled before 2019 ends. I will see what all will happen with this blog and second season watching here and keep you updated on what will or could change. But what wound up happening is that all the lists were combined into just one at the time so I could and had the potential to see it on Saturday, which I did.

There’s not much else to say as on leap day in 2020, I rolled the special and will watch it again. I don’t know how far in advance this post will be written and can only hope that other Survivor seasons will be talked about in my blog as I have a lot of them to potentially write about. In the meantime, let’s start with the beginning of the special.

Starting the special, we begin in a tiny Malaysian fishing village before the contestants gather for their trip to the island for an adventure that is once in a lifetime. Once in a while, you may find yourself thinking, “Oh my God, what have I done?” The contestants talk to each other on the boat including B. B. and Rudy explaining the age gap.

 

Jeff does the introduction for the viewers at home as the chaos starts when the game starts. I do not know all of how the introduction worked. Maybe the cameras were off when they were officially given their buffs and Jeff explained what would happen next. Survivor started in a quick moment. Richard mentions how he plans to win the game and every challenge in the game. He is cocky and in some ways overconfident. But he did win the game in the end. He does want there to be respect in the game and lays over some ground rules for how he thinks the game should go.

 

One by one, we see the contestants of this season in order of boot. Sonja goes first. She is treated by Dr. Sean after going a bit too hard when she started out in the game. She blames herself for her tribe’s loss in the first challenge. She accepts her loss with grace and still supports her tribe as she leaves it.

 

B. B. is next. He talks about some of his accomplishments in his audition video.  He annoys others by washing his clothes in the canteen that they use to cook food in, ruining the potential rice. He doesn’t want to vote on what his tribe does. Some on his tribe feel that he wants to go so they vote him out as a result, giving him what he wants as a result. He is even happy to be voted out and feels that he might have been voted out due to his older age.

 

Being shown clips of an immunity challenge involving gross food eating, Stacey is able to win the final point for her tribe. When the tribe is talking about who should be voted out before the tribal council, she doesn’t trust Sue after Sue doesn’t say who she would vote out. She irritates people and does her exit confessional during the day, something that rarely happens, but does happen again.

 

At the Pagong tribe, the contestants eat rats in order to survive. Ramona admits that they are really good to eat. She only seemed to know about black people in some places where she grew up. She has some negative reactions to some food in the game and has emotional moments with Jenna, having related to her some, but not even to avoid getting voted out by her. Ramona was too sick in the game and she couldn’t redeem herself according to the others.

 

Richard gets a knife and starts wearing it right away. He sees a weird thing that some of them wonder if they should eat or not. After washing it in the ocean, he says that he will try it, but there is no footage that proves whether he eats it or not.

 

Dirk is shown hunting for firewood in his audition video and he points a gun at it telling it to get down on the ground. He brings a bible as his personal item, but Rudy says that despite being religious himself, he would only bring a bible to use as toilet paper. While not explained well in the special, he is voted out and talks about God in his exit confessional, having partying to do. Maybe he will do that in the lesser known original version of baby shark.

 

Joel comes off as a chauvinist to people. Considering what came off in Stacey’s tape, I wonder why they weren’t put on the same tribe to butt heads like the would be homophobe Rudy with the gay Richard. While he may not come off as bad to himself, others think that he condescending towards women and even Greg votes him out. He was an asshole on just one comment thread of mine on facebook and that is how he often came off as the show.

 

After the merge, Richard talks about the sham marriage that he was paid into doing. He also thinks that Greg might have experimented with men at some point since he wasn’t saying anything at the time. Rudy thinks that he would be court-martialed just for listening to this in the army.

 

Gretchen talks about how she feels that she has survived in a lot of ways. She shared her toothbrush with others on the tribe. She wants to help her tribe survive better in the game. Ultimately, while not talked about that much in this special, she was the victim of a voting alliance.

 

Greg talks a lot in his audition video while ultimately being the first lovable goof of Survivor. He talks into a phone that is known as the nature phone. Some feel that he thinks this coconut is a phone, but I am pretty sure that he was only pretending that it was a phone and knew full well that it wasn’t actually won. He gets upset that someone counted the chicken before it hatched since some animal got the chickens that were meant for the tribes. After getting voted out, he fake cries, much to the amusement of others like Jeff and the contestants in the game.

 

Sean talks about an idea for a calendar that I don’t think ever was created, but possibly was? The idea was for something called fat naked fag doing various things. Richard celebrates his birthday by being naked, but doesn’t stay that way the whole time since people don’t like it and want him to stop.

 

Jenna thinks that she is likable and hopes that others will feel that way about her. The reward from home that people come up with made people really hope that Jenna could see the reward in the end. She didn’t get the tape back in time so while all the other contestants got to see stuff from their loved ones, she didn’t and got emotional because of it. It was a sad moment indeed.

 

Sue trusts Kelly at first and thinks that they are sisters in the end. Sue is emotional having lost her best friend a long time ago and thinking that she finally found a replacement. Sadly, things were not meant to last in the end.

 

Gervase talks about his tough and no nonsense approach to the game in the end. He seems lazy in the end and is okay with being that way. He even makes a bit of controversy by saying that women are the stupidest things next to cows. He makes it further than some thought that he would and probably could have in the future or should have back then in the present.

 

Jeff takes the contestants to a special event on day 32 that we never see in the final edit of the game as it was a reward activity. They are to look at themselves in a mirror and guess how much weight they have lost. The person who comes closest wins a special food treat. There are only six people in the game when this happens. But there was an official reward in that episode too. So I don’t quite get when this was part of the show or know why it was edited out like the first ever reward challenge. Colleen wins this activity being off by only one pound. She gets chocolate for it which she shares with everyone else in the game at the time.

 

It isn’t known what happened to Colleen. She isn’t a missing person, but some of us want to know her current whereabouts. Kelley Wentworth promised to do that, but as far as I know, she never actually did find this person. She (Colleen) was in a movie called The Animal at one point.

 

She is known for what seemed like hook ups with Greg at night. Greg was asked earlier if they had sex. He is convinced that they would know more than he did about it. Colleen claims that their relationship was all about the sex. But this has not been seen as the case yet. Bugs also live in her sores, something she is bothered by needless to say. The edit of this special wasn’t clear to me at first as to why she was voted out. I understand it now as the fact that Kelly had immunity and was the intended target.

 

Sean is known for a fishing pole known as super pole. It looks cool but does nothing. He brought a razor to the island as his luxury or personal item. He shaves throughout the game, but might not be known as the only male contestant to lack facial hair throughout the game as a lot of them don’t seem to have much of anything related to it. Sean was voted out and as part of a folklore bit from earlier in the show that wasn’t seen on the special, his torch was already out.

 

Kelly and Sue fight due to their deteriorating relationship. Kelly didn’t want to make Pagong look like they were being targeted one by one. But Sue felt that she was trying to make herself look good in front of the Pagong members. Kelly’s strategy almost worked as only Pagong members voted for her to win the game. Sue tries to get rid of Kelly since Kelly turned on them and wants them to know that Kelly had voted for Gretchen. She does a poem and various other bits in her audition video. Perhaps part of it was a soliloquy. But I’m not entirely sure what that is right now.

 

There were a lot of recurring things that Sue did and she played the role of the dumb redneck. Some are annoyed by her accent and she was looking for tapioca a lot. She thought that she could do better than the city slickers in the game. Still, she was voted out in the end.

 

Rudy talks about in an interview with the producers before the game started how he would vote against someone just because they are gay. He still made it on the show, admitting that he changed his mind with people, Richard, the gay man, being one of them. Richard was unsure of revealing that he was gay to Richard. But Rudy admits that Richard is one of the nicest people that he ever met and that they “got to be pretty good friends, but not in a homosexual way, that’s for sure.”

 

He doesn’t want to hang with these people after the game is done. He wants to do a business deal with people and if they aren’t queer, “there might be something else ‘wrong’ with them, like they could be black of something.” Hopefully he knows that being black isn’t wrong in any way. They are just like white people outside of their skin color.

 

Rudy takes his hand off in the final immunity challenge and Kelly gets the final vote out decision as a result. He is voted out and Kelly has spoken instead of the usual tribe has spoken since only she had voted. Rudy says that if others want to play the game, they should be in an alliance.

 

Kelly wants to relax and regrets being part of the alliance that she was in. Richard was in the army for five years. I don’t know when he came out as he couldn’t be openly gay in the army at the time. He does not hide it anymore. He wants people to get to know him before he reveals that part about him as they would like him better that way feeling more relaxed that way. I honestly thought at one point that it was a joke that gays couldn’t serve in the army and not that it was a real policy. (I had only heard this on Family Guy and not many other places.)

 

Greg asks his famous pick a number question at the final tribal council. Sue lays into Richard some at the final tribal council. She feels that Kelly fails all the time. But Kelly won a lot of immunity challenges or she wouldn’t have made it as far as she did. Sue hopes that her vote costs Kelly the game and it was, in fact, the one vote that cost Kelly the game. Sue hopes that the snake will eat the rat in the end as Kelly was a rat and Richard was a snack. I do wonder if Sue’s speech partially backfired as it might have gotten others to vote for Kelly instead.

 

The jury members give their speeches about why they feel that some people had to win over others. Greg says that the number was nine, even though Richard guessed seven and Kelly guessed three. He says that everyone guesses Kelly. In an exclusive to this special, Kelly gives an exit confessional, the only runner-up in Survivor history to do this in the season that she was a runner-up in. Kelly is upset over the speech that Sue gave in the end. Richard also talks about his win in the end.

 

Jeff gives a special look at the next season of Survivor after this one as he talks about Australia and the largely uncharted land it has. The tribal council is on top of a beautiful waterfall. The first one was great and he can’t wait to do it again. We also see clips of the wrap party of the season in the credits. I wonder if all of the contestants were reunited at this point.

 

That’s it for this special and this blog post. There’s not much else to say. You won’t know just how much longer it will be until this post is published because it will be a while for me until it is, but know that I will have started watching the season in the future or at least have it on the list again. I should hopefully see you soon with the next post of this season on the very first episode. I hope you don’t have to wait too long in order to see it. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.