I wholeheartedly agree with the different but not better comment. Coach was entertaining as a character, but by the end of his run I was sooooo tired of the extraordinary amounts of air time the editors were giving him.
The biggest problem I had with this season was the lack of strategy. Both tribes fell into the usual "vote the weakest or most annoying first" train of thought and no interesting alliances of any note were formed early on besides the ill-fated Exile alliance. So that leaves us with a first half of the season that played out quite ordinarily, especially without the benefit of a tribal switch or some other sort of twist. Once the merge came things got really good, really fast. If not for Joe's injury leading to an anti-climactic end, the first post-merge episode would have been amazing. Sadly, things didn't remain as great as the Stephen/JT/Taj trio rolled through the old Timbira tribe like a set of bowling pins. No one made any big moves after Tyson's blindside and everyone stuck to their guns, including Debbie and Coach, who's strategic guns were shooting blanks all season. I guess my point is that Tocantins sorely lacked all of the alliance-shifting and unexpectedness that the previous two seasons (I've only gotten back into Survivor in the past year) had. Micronesia had people playing the game from the moment they stepped on the island, and things never let up from that point on. Gabon started off typically, but pre-merge you had the tribal shake-up, the Ace/Sugar/Ken dynamic that followed, and then the post-merge game with Ken and Crystal coming into power while Sugar repeatedly made moves that shot everyone's plans all to hell. Tocantins....was considerably vanilla in comparison.
Sugar has to be back for Allstars. She alone made Gabon a blast and the whole season so much more interesting. From finding the idol, to sugar shack, to blindsiding Ace, to playing with Randy, to voting Crystal out, followed by Ken, then not voting Bob out, and a bitch fight with Corrine AND then letting Bob win. Like OMG, we wonder how she even did it and made it all the way to the end. lol.
