As we always do, we start at Malolo, right after they voted Brendan out. Not much of note happened in this opening scene. But Bradley has taken note of Michael being more of a threat than he initially thought.
No time is wasted as we head straight into the reward challenge, playing for coffee and pastries. One under appreciated aspect of Survivor is watching contestants’ reactions to finding out what the reward is.
The contestants run through a series of tables, dismantle a pile of large sandbags. This reveals a lever which they then pull to drop smaller sandbags which are then gathered and thrown at targets to spin them around, revealing three flags.
Both tribes get to the target portion at roughly the same time, but it doesn’t matter. Chris blows right through them while Sebastian puts up a nice, big goose egg. Chris was nothing short of dominant during the challenge and he wanted the world to know it, giving us a little freestyle in a following confessional.
“This was just me being me, and I guess it’s fair to say I was pretty hot today. I’m like a diamond in the rough. You see me glow, this ain’t pay per view, it’s a free show. I’m still shooting ‘em all dead, free throw. Mic drop.”
Not exactly the stuff of genius, but I don’t think anyone was expecting him to take the mantle of best white rapper. Just another example of Chris being Chris, which could also translate to Chris being a goon. As douchey as he came off in the pre-season (and has at times during the season) at least he’s been pretty entertaining most of the way through so far.
Anyway, we have someone else going to Ghost Island and Stephanie is the winner(? this week and she draws the white rock, sending her to Ghost Island for the night. I’m not a huge fan of the rock draw to determine who goes to Ghost Island. I’m not sure of a good alternative, as I don’t think a “majority rules” policy would work either. Plus you could get into even splits and then you’re just stuck in the same spot. My initial, knee-jerk solution would be this. Force the winning tribe to come up with a unanimous choice, or else they draw rocks, sending one of them to Ghost Island. It would add an interesting layer of strategy, as someone would naturally try to force their option on the rest of the tribe, potentially causing a rift (aka, more drama) within the tribe. And in a show like Survivor, more drama can only be a good thing. Coming on the heels of a reward win, nobody would want to miss out on whatever the reward is, whether it’s as simple as eating some pastries, or something more extravagant like one of the sure-to-be-upcoming spa days. Just a thought. I’m sure there are flaws in there that I haven’t considered, but I just thought of it like 5 minutes ago so I’m standing by it…for now.
Stephanie arrives at Ghost Island and again no game. But worry not, Stephanie gives us yet another deeply personal, heartfelt Ghost Island confessional. I touched on this on a similar point in last week’s recap but I NEED to see someone like Sebastian (goofball), Chelsea (who?), or no-air-time-again Libby get sent to Ghost Island. The GI confessionals have been pretty emotional so far and having a player who hasn’t given us much in that department (or any department for that matter) could be fun to see.
Back at Malolo Donathan is having a bit of a moment. He shares with Laurel how the coffee and pastry reward really reminded him of home and they share an emotional moment. These two continue to be a seemingly close-knit twosome, and I’m not sure how much the others see that. I would think it wouldn’t be any great secret, but when there’s a strong two-person group, it usually gets brought up. So either they’re doing a surprisingly good job of keeping it more on the down-low, or the others don’t see them as much of a threat together.
Chris sees that Donathan is having a tough time and takes the opportunity to reach out. It was a rare moment where he actually took the other person’s feelings and perspective into account rather than just turning it all back on himself. Donathan talks about wanting to stay loyal to Laurel but now he’s feeling this connection to Chris. This was one of my worries about Donathan; that he would easily feel connected to people and could be easily influenced or manipulated. However, he did say he needs to start thinking about “what’s best for Donathan.” That’s a good sign, but at this point, they’re still just words. If he needs to make a decision between loyalty to one or the other, it will be very interesting to see where he ends up and how he gets there.
We get to the highlight of this episode, the immunity challenge. Contestants raced across a floating bridge carrying a skim board attached to a rope, grab a bag and then get pulled back in by your tribe. This had to be done three times. Each bag contained tiles that were used to find a combination to unlock a slide puzzle. Naviti gets their bags and unlock the puzzle first. But Malolo has Kellyn as one of their puzzlers (along with Bradley) so naturally you assume Kellyn is going to crush yet another puzzle. But this time around Naviti’s lead was too much to overcome and they win their fourth challenge in a row, sending Malolo back to Tribal Council. The sneaky best part of this challenge was that you had to do the slide puzzle with a partner. Because it’s a slide puzzle, I would personally hate that. I think those, on average, would be much easier to do on your own. Which of course means I loved that they had partners, as it’s just another added level of difficulty.
Let’s take a quick moment to appreciate how awesome Kellyn is. Dalton Ross of Entertainment Weekly captured these two quick videos before and after the challenge. Side note: I’ve mentioned Dalton Ross a number of times in my Survivor posts. The guy is simply awesome. He’s one of my idols (no pun intended…I don’t think) when it comes to Survivor coverage. He kills it. It was reading his recaps, interviews, pre-season coverage, etc. that gave me the itch (not that kind of itch, a good itch!) to want to starting writing about Survivor, which then led to this website being created!
Here’s Michael trying to pump up challenger closers Kellyn and Bradley. She’s dialed in and ready to dominate again (whoops).
And here she is shortly after the challenge. She wants nothing to do with the condolence shoulder rub. Although it could be that she simply didn’t like being touched by Jenna nearly as much as she did Michael (and honestly, who could blame her?). But I’m going to go with the logical explanation and say that she is just so hyper-competitive, and knows how much a puzzle beast she is, that in the moment she just couldn’t handle the fact that she lost. Kellyn is amazing and I would love to see her win.
And look at Chelsea getting front and center screen time here, good for her!
Back at Malolo, Michael, Jenna, and Stephanie are feeling the heat. Kellyn and Chelsea talk about targeting Jenna as she is one of the weaker players in their eyes. Des floats the idea of Stephanie as she is more of a threat in the long run. Bradley then tries to change the vote to Michael because of course. So we go to Tribal knowing it will be Michael, Stephanie, or Jenna going home. Well, we could pretty safely assume Jenna wasn’t going to be voted out, at least not if the Naviti 5 were smart. Stephanie had shown she was clearly a strategic and social threat. Michael was an obvious physical threat, and his showing at the previous Tribal proved he had some strategic chops as well. But Jenna? Jenna hasn’t really done anything up to this point, aside from telling Sebastian to smell her apparently disgusting hair (barf). She does not seem to be any sort of threat long term, and could probably be easily controlled as a member of an alliance who then gets the boot if and when the time comes. From an entertainment standpoint, I wanted Jenna gone 100%. But from a game standpoint, I would have been furious if Jenna had been the vote tonight. Luckily they played it smart and voted out Stephanie.
Stephanie ended up being a much better player than I thought she would be. I was convinced she would be an early boot because it would be an easy choice. She would be seen as a weak player, someone who was kind of kooky who just didn’t quite vibe with the rest of the tribe. But it was quite the opposite. She was voted out because she was a dangerous player who her rivals didn’t want to leave in the game. It was quite the pleasant surprise.
All in all, this was probably the weakest episode of the season. But we started off with four very strong episodes, so it was bound to drop off some eventually. And with another swap coming next week, we’ll hopefully have our fill of some more good old-fashioned Fijian drama.
