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'Survivor' sets up a new game
By SHARON FINK
© St. Petersburg Times, "The game will be changed forever" is how CBS promoted Thursday night's episode of Survivor. The first -- and possibly not the only one -- of executive producer Mark Burnett's promised shakeups for the series' third installment was unveiled in the first 15 minutes. And if it doesn't change the game forever, it at least radically changes the landscape in Africa. Each tribe found a message requesting it to pick three of its remaining six members to travel to the spot at which the contestants were dropped off in Kenya's Shaba National Reserve. Once there, host Jeff Probst made each group of three become members of the other tribe, meaning -- as the promotions also promised -- every alliance, friendship and strategy aimed at getting the $1-million top prize changed. "It just keeps the contestants on their toes," Burnett told Zap2it.com this week. "Trust me, you'll see on Survivor how they absolutely start to assume they know the game inside and out from seeing it on TV, and we absolutely did something in the game where it totally threw them for a loop. "It's just witty and interesting and made a big change." In Survivor's first two installments, as in this one, two teams of eight started the game. They stayed separate, whittling down the total number of contestants to 10, at which point the tribes merged into one. Contestants continued to be eliminated until there was a winner. In Survivor: Africa, four contestants were eliminated -- two each from the Samburu and Boran tribes -- before the tribes traded members. Silas Gaither, Teresa Cooper and Frank Garrison went from the Samburu tribe to Boran, and Kelly Goldsmith, Lex van den Berghe and Tom Buchanan went from Boran to Samburu. In the first immunity challenge for the reconstituted tribes, Samburu won, and Boran by a 5-1 vote got rid of the annoying, scheming Gaither, 23, a bartender from Germantown, Tenn. At the end of the tribal council at which the vote was held, Probst's final remarks indicated another big change could be ahead. He said he had heard a lot of assumptions from the contestants -- including that the merger would happen after one more contestant was voted out.
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From the wire |
