I don’t know what to say, nor what to think about Phillip Sheppard‘s return to Survivor.
I mean, of course, I knew he’d be back. He was the only thing vaguely entertaining in Redemption Island.
The guy still remains a mystery to me. Is he really insane? Was he just trolling the show? Did he have a very long con strategy?
I mean, all along Redemption Island, I was somewhat convinced he was pretending to be crazy and would reveal all of it during the final tribal council as the best strategy ever to make it to the end as the perfect goat and then reveal how he played every single person for 39 days. Except that he stayed crazy during that tribal too. But maybe his strategy was even more complex, maybe he was not trying to win that season, but buying himself a spot into an All-Stars season where he’d reveal himself.
Maybe. It’s a pretty risky strategy though, because now, with his reputation, I can’t who would want to align themselves with him and he seems like the obvious first boot this season.
Yet, there is some sort of method to his madness. In some pregame interviews, I read that he brought his feather during the pregame “meetings” in Los Angeles, and in the pictures from the beginning of the season, he’s obviously wearing his infamous pink underwear. I mean, really crazy people don’t realize that they are crazy, they are not aware of the gimmicks people see in them. Phillip Sheppard does. That’s why I’m still leaning more towards the troll theory than the crazy one.
What will he do this season? Nobody can tell obviously. Probst said somewhere we’ll see a Phillip Sheppard 2.0, but I can’t completely believe in the Coach’s style turnaround. It was always obvious that Coach was being “insane” for the camera, but was a somewhat normal (yet eccentric) person who just takes himself a bit too seriously and who’s a bit too over-dramatic at times. But Sheppard? And this is his whole-paradox, on the one hand, I think that he’s more of a troll than a lunatic (a bit like Coach was), but on the other hand, I can’t see him starting to act like a normal person from Day two.
And I don’t really see anyone in his team wanting to keep him beyond the first vote either.
In any case, I refuse to make any more speculation about him beyond this point and before the game starts.
We’ll see.
And with this post, I conclude my series of previews about the returnees of Survivor Caramoan. I hope I’ll get to preview the newbies too, although, I’m not sure I’ll have the time to cover the 10 of them before the premiere. I may do just one or two posts about them as a group, once again, we’ll see.