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Avia wrote:

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See, this is the thing, for me, about Crystal's unexpected lack of challenge prowess -- it has created what I consider to be the best, most coherent, and most narratively satisfying personal plot arc of the season.

Look, this is a woman who came into this game fully expecting to coast on her brawn. "I will win this game with blazing speed." She apparently simply didn't realize just how much toll time and motherhood had taken on her body, nor that her skills as a sprinter might not translate into overall "athletic intuition," as someone put it earlier. She genuinely thought that her athleticism was her ticket to the end game.

At first this looked like it was simply going to be a typical hubris/nemesis plotline, the kind of "yay schadenfreude!" storyline that Survivor does so well. The Olympian who was so arrogant about her athletic promise turns out to suck at challenges! Isn't that ironic. Let's all laugh at her.

But then they went someplace far more interesting with it. Over time, the Nelson Muntz "hah-hah!" reaction, which Survivor tends to try to inspire in its audience, instead was displaced onto Randy, a character who in turn was gradually morphing from audience spokesman to season villain. Meanwhile, Crystal herself was receiving increasingly sympathetic editing.

The big turning point, both for Crystal's arc and, I would argue, for Randy's comes at the end of the challenge for the pastries, where Crystal finally breaks down in frustration and shame, and Randy mocks her for it. That's the turning point for both their plot arcs. From that point onward, Randy increasingly takes on the role of a season villain, while Crystal begins to undergo her own metamorphosis from failed athlete to surprisingly successful strategist.

As it turns out, Crystal's strength isn't brawn at all. Her strength, even more unexpectedly for someone so abrasive, so outspoken, so emotionally uncontrolled, and so, well...so jocky in her demeanor ("EAT YO RICE!"), turns out to be instead her social game. The strategic turning point of the entire season -- Marcus's ouster -- is something that Crystal is able to effect not due to her brawn, but instead due to her social skills and her talent for deception.

Even more deliciously, her social bond with Susie, which is a large part of what encourages Susie to agree to flip on the Kotas, is based on the very factor that is likely responsible for Crystal's severe degeneration as an athlete: Motherhood.

Motherhood was the reason Crystal gave for her unexpected selection of Susie in the opening playground pick 'em, and it was the choice which we then immediately saw Charlie mocking as an example of playing "Stupid Survivor." But it was that choice which eventually led to the ascendance of Fang and to Charlie's own demise.

After Marcus's removal, Crystal's edit has shown her settling into her new narrative role -- not simply as a failed athlete, but as a failed athlete who has discovered in herself the ability to emerge as social and strategic player.

From "I will win with blazing speed" we have come to "Can't outwit Crystal Cox, baby!"

This is good stuff, to be sure. I've been enjoying the hell out of Crystal's story this season, and think that it makes for an immeasurably better storyline than it would have if she had been as good at the challenges as we -- and more importantly, she! -- had expected.

All that said, I don't really expect her to win the game. But damn! has she received a great story arc!

ETA: edited, because the Nelson character on the Simpson's is Nelson Muntz, not Nelson Riley!