I'm going to spoil the end of the just concluded "Survivor" Fiji" season, so if you care and haven't watched it yet, stop reading and come back later. . . .
Okay, so in the penultimate episode, Yau-Man, the older and wily Asian guy won the reward challenge that was worth a $60,000 truck. Dreamz, who was the only Survivor left who didn't actually have a car (in fact, didn't even have a driver's license) was going on before the challenge about how much he wanted a car. So Yau-Man offered Dreamz a deal: he'd give Dreamz the truck if, in exchange, Dreamz would give Yau-Man individual immunity at the final 4 if Dreamz won. Yau-Man understood that he couldn't enforce the agreement within the game, but Dreamz swore to God that he would.
You can see what's coming next. Dreamz indeed won immunity at the final 4, and reneged. He talked about how he didn't know that this year it would be the final 3, not the final 2, who face the jury, and that changed things; he talked about how it's hard to give up a $1 million; and so on. Later, he claimed that he never intended to honor the deal and that he had been playing Yau-Man all along.
Was this clever gameplay, was it dishonest, or was it both?
From the standpoint of the game, I guess you'd say it was clever, although all it did was move Dreamz from 4th place to a tie for 2d (a difference of about $15,000 to $30,000 in prize money). Once he reneged on the deal that had been made openly in front of host Jeff Probst and the other Survivors, Dreamz had no chance of getting any jury votes, no matter how he tried to spin it. And as it turned out, we had the first ever complete sweep of votes by Earl. (The third finalist, Cassandra, had done virtually nothing all game and was therefore disdained by the jurors.)
Outside the game, though, it strikes me as quite different from other lies and deceptions that past Survivors have committed. In confessionals (the shots where contestants speak directly to the camera without others present), Dreamz repeatedly talked about how he wanted to set a good example for his son. If you're going to lie and cheat in the game, because it's a game, this is where you'd make a statement to the effect that this is different from real life. (Indeed, in a previous season, Johnny Fairplay had his friend falsely state that Fairplay's grandmother had died, in an effort to get the sympathy of his fellow contestants; however, when the cameras were focused just on Fairplay and his friend, Fairplay openly acknowledged his deception.)
So, in an odd sort of way, I think Dreamz's more damning lie wasn't the one he made to Yau-Man, but rather, the one he made to the viewers. Actually, it's two or three lies: (1) when he first said in the confessional that he wanted to be a good role model to his son and that he was going to honor the deal; and (2) when he later said in the reunion that he had always intended to backstab Yau-Man. Contestants in Survivor shouldn't be surprised when they get backstabbed; that's what happens. But the viewers can and do expect a degree of honesty in the confessional scenes, and Dreamz lied there to us.
Why do I care? Well, I don't care that much, but I do think that it breaks the unspoken promise between the contestant and the viewer in terms of how we respond to the contestant. Those Survivors who backstab effectively and yet speak honestly to the viewers earn a degree of respect for their gameplay. Dreamz, on the other hand, wanted to be respected as "honorable"; hence all that talk in the confessional. Yet, in the end, he was neither honorable nor an effective backstabber. Well, he was effective in the sense that he got to the final Tribal Council, but unlike other serial backstabbers, like season 1's Richard Hatch, he didn't get any votes from the jury.
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