#love pearl and gem striking up a frenemyship based on murder and camels

[cattimeswithjellie]

Secret Life was great because every perspective on it is so fresh, you can watch just about everybody without even getting bored. Even in the finale, where everybody had the same secret, the plot unfolds like a flower, where you understand more of what actually happened the more you watch.

I just happened to watch Scar's episode first, which was a great place to start obviously because I got the basic story of the finale from beginning to end, and of course it was a wild ride! But there was so much left unknown, so many friends and enemies fallen without knowing what happened to them, so many plots unspooling outside of Scar's POV. In the end we were left with the same question he had: How did the guy with no friends win the game?

Part of the answer, of course, was obvious. Scar was absolutely on fire in Session 9, scoring an astonishing number of permakills and racking up the hearts to offset his recklessness. I'm not sure he quite realized the banger strategy he fell into by rushing in and just soaking damage while bashing his opponent to death, then using the ten hearts to repair the damage over and over again, but boy was it effective!

Beyond Scar himself, though, was a massive plot throughline that was only partially visible from his POV, and that was the loyalty the previous winners had to their teams above themselves. With the exception of Martyn, whose partner was lost two sessions ago, each previous Games winner had their own alliance and eventually their own favored player that they wanted to win.

Scott's loyalty to the Cherry Blossoms made their home into a fortress and Gem into a powerhouse partially fueled by his own life energy. She's a hell of a player on her own merits and tore a wide swath through the server in a brilliant first outing, but without Scott convincing Impulse to give her both their yellow lives, she would not have survived the combined effects of Grian's two ambushes to make her way into the final three. Along the way, the Cherry Blossoms took out both Bdubs and Joel, the two players who were Pearl's and who would otherwise have had her loyalty to the end of the line.

Grian's loyalty to the Roomies alliance was always more questionable than Scott's, because he is who he is, but he came through in the end and sent Cleo out of the portal cave while remaining behind to take on the near-suicidal task of triggering the explosion. And when he was discovered, he attempted to 1v3 the Cherry Blossoms to give his teammate more time to escape. (And it probably would've worked, if the remaining Mounders and Scar had not found Cleo and run her to ground at the same time.) Grian's last stand was perhaps the most pivotal moment in the late game because it changed the whole balance of power on the server. Scar never knew why Scott, Gem and Impulse were so much weaker than they were supposed to be at the end of the game, but we the audience know.

And of course Pearl's loyalty is unquestionable, even if by the end of the game, all the original targets for it were gone. Pearl proved herself a Mounder, bred and buttered (as they said in my neck of the woods.) She was quite wary of letting Scar into the alliance at all, but she is loyal and more interested in helping her team to victory than in taking a second crown for herself. Scott and Gem killed her guys before the end of the line, but she still had Scar, and she was still loyal to the end.

And thus the man with no friends wound up on the other side of a fight he'd already lived through four games ago, fighting an ally who didn't want to win for a victory he wasn't sure he deserved. But there's an important difference that I'm sure we'll be spending the entire rest of the series downtime dissecting: this time the victor _lived._