Open Wounds
Season 50
Episode 5
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
The game starts to speed up as the Survivors do their best to shed their baggage and keep history from repeating itself.
Photo: Robert Voets/CBS
We’ve had to deal with some real indignities here on Survivor 50. Last episode, there was the Zac Brown debacle, the week before it was Jeffrey Lee Probst rapping, and now it’s Jeff’s impressions of the players. At the first of two Tribal Councils, Vatu, which has been to tribal nearly every week, jokes that they’re going to tell the other players how much fun they have around the campfire with Jeff always giving them food and booze so that the other tribes will want to go. Jeff responds by pretending to be one of the players in a weird bit of Survivor theater. The players go, “Oh, that’s a great impression of Colby.” And Jeff says, “That was supposed to be Jonathan. This is Colby.” He then does the most generic cowboy impersonation that it could be anyone from Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to Quick Draw McGraw. It is not a good sign when no one can guess who you’re parodying in the moment. RuPaul would have stopped the Snatch Game right in the middle to send Jeff packing.
Jeff decides he’s not done and gives us his Christian Hubicki impersonation, and, know what, it’s pretty good. Jeff won me over on that one. Accurate, well-observed, and pulled off in front of the man himself. One out of three ain’t bad. Angelina says, “First the rap, now the impersonations, what else do you have?” And Probst responds, “It’s 50. We’re early. Who knows what’s coming?” Oh god, please don’t let it be mime.
I tease Jeff, but this is the second episode in a row that proves that when Jeff and production get out of the way and just let everyone play Survivor, it’s a great and entertaining game. Though I’m enjoying the company of everyone still left on the island (minus Jeff), it is good that they’re also starting to boot people with swiftness. There are just too many players. Are they going to merge next week with 17 players? That’s insane! That’s as complicated as a polygamist trying to schedule date night.
The episode kicks off with Ozzy being pissed that they left him out of the Mike White vote, whom he really trusted and wanted to keep in the game despite any evidence whatsoever that they worked together for even a second. Christian says that what might have upset him is that the last time he was blindsided, it was by a nerdy guy named John Cochran in Survivor: South Pacific, and now he’s been blindsided by another nerdy guy. How does Christian remember not only this season but also this specific vote? How many times have the people on the show rewatched these episodes? I’ve seen every season and consider myself a huge fan, but I’m not a rewatcher. I can’t even tell you who won Survivor 48, and I wrote recaps of it. (Spoiler alert, it was Kyle.) But Ozzy admits that it is partly the case. The real theme of Survivor 50 is that the past is always prelude and that history is a nightmare from which no one can awake.
Christian’s talk about Ozzy is part of a larger check-in that we get at Vatu (the purple one), where Christian is worried about how upset Ozzy is about being left out of a vote and even calls him a “Polly Prissy Pants,” for the fit that he’s throwing about not being included. We get a big fat check-in at Cila (the orange one), where Jonathan says that he is in an alliance of four, who he’s been with from the beginning, along with Dee, Kamilla, and Charlie. He tries to bring Devens into this alliance and gain his trust by farting in front of him with the kind of impunity that is usually reserved for frat boys and couples married more than 25 years. We also see the real story, which is that Dee is getting close to Rizgod and wants to work with him, Cirie, and Kamilla. There’s a shorter check-in at Kalo (the Coach one) where the antagonism between Aubry and Genevieve is alive and well, and, personally, I can’t wait until this implodes like Timotheé Chalamet’s most recent Oscar campaign.
Everyone walks into the challenge — swimming, keys, grappling hook, sandbags, targets in the air — and the preview tipped us off to two tribes voting someone out, and I already know that Kalo wins because we barely see strategy talk from their tribe. While they’re trailing the whole challenge, Coach works some magic with a grappling hook, Tiff whips some rope like she’s a member of Devo, and they end up winning. See, I told you.
Over at Vatu, which now has only five members left, the editing makes us think that a showdown between Christian and Ozzy is imminent. Ozzy tells Christian that, after the last vote, he doesn’t trust him and tells him to give him his Shot in the Dark to prove that he can be trusted. Once Ozzy says this and walks away, Christian says, “Shit head,” straight into the camera. It might have been “Fuck head,” which is not as likely a construction but a much better one in terms of utilizing a varied lexicon of curse words. But Christian is right. Ozzy’s problem is always that he can’t read people or figure out how his actions are going to be received. If he’s asking for Christians’ SITD, then the trust is already blown and irredeemable. A player as aware as Christian would know that. If Christian gives it up, then he’s just disarming himself and setting himself up to be voted off. Relinquishing the SITD is a move that is only good when it’s volunteered, usually by a person at the bottom of the tribe. That move says, “I want you to trust me, so I am putting my game in your hands.” The way Ozzy does it says, “I’m getting everyone together to vote you out and you can’t have this.” As soon as Ozzy demands the SITD, his fate seems sealed.
Christian gets together with Emily and bitches about Ozzy, but ultimately he gives up his little die. Ozzy also tries to get tighter with Emily, telling her that he wants to work with her but that her relationship with Christian is going to be a problem down the line. Much like anything at Zara that is not a mustard mock turtleneck, Emily isn’t buying it. Angelina thinks, erroneously, that she is the swing vote, that Ozzy and Stephenie are voting for Christian, and that Christian and Emily are voting for Stephenie, and that she gets to decide who goes home. It seems like Ozzy might want to pack his bags.
Over at Cila, it looks like Rizo is in danger, too. This is mostly because we see a lot of footage of him talking about how great his gameplay was on Survivor 49, which no one on this season has seen yet. He’s telling them he found an idol; there were lots of blindsides; he made it so far; Jeff called him TMTMTLRIZGODRB to his face as he snuffed his torch. It’s the kind of shit-talk Survivor loves to pile on right before a person gets voted out. For a moment, it looks like Ozzy and Rizo are going home, and Billie Eilish herself is going to show up on the Kalo beach in the largest pair of shorts you’ve ever seen, poke Genevieve in her sleep, and say, “Hey, it’s Billie Eilish. Here are both of your idols back.” Sadly, that doesn’t happen.
Rizo is using his knowledge of the idol to try to build trust with people. He tells Dee about how the idols work this season, solidifying their alliance. He tells Kamilla about it as well and she’s starting to build trust with him. He takes it even one step further with Cirie, not only telling her how the BEBI works but telling her that he has one. Cirie says that she’s old-school; she doesn’t like to tell people her business, but she repays Rizo’s info with some of her own, telling him she has an extra vote she got from Ozzy. They promise to be loyal to each other and Cirie says, “We’re married now.” That’s how you get legally wed in Fiji, not by exchanging vows or rings, but by exchanging secrets in a hammock.
Kamilla is really the linchpin to Rizo’s plan to stay. She says that Dee, Rizo, and Cirie are all voting for Charlie, and that Charlie, Jonathan, and Devens are all voting for Rizo, and she’s in the middle. At Tribal, Rizo crows once again about his game (which, to be fair, was very well executed), and says that the people who have returned right after playing their first time — Amanda Kimmel, Malcolm Freberg, Russell Hantz — end up doing very well in their second seasons. Charlie makes an excellent point about what the disadvantage might be. He says, “We’re the hero of our own stories, because going through the game in your own head rather than watching yourself play Survivor and getting to see all the other stories, it colors things differently.”
When the votes came in, Vatu ends up doing the most boring thing possible and votes out Angelina, and all that set up about Christian versus Ozzy was a red herring. Now we’ll never see the Survivor 50 face-off I’ve been longing to see all season: Angelina’s lash tech versus Cirie’s lash tech. Whose falsies will stay on the longest? I guess we’ll only find out at Ponderosa. Angelina, after her torch is snuffed, gives her jacket to her remaining tribemates, a call back to her hilariously rebuffed request to her tribemate Natalie Cole on her original season.
When Cila goes to vote, we don’t know which way Kamilla is going to flip and it turns out that she joined Cirie, Dee, and Rizo to get rid of Charlie. I think what clinches it is when Charlie tells Kamilla about the BEBI after Rizo already told her and she remarked that his game is too slow. Also, I think that Kamilla finally has the alliance of baddie schemers that she’s always wanted on Survivor. While I’ve been rooting for Cirie since the outset, I’m even more excited to root for her now with this group around her. I can’t believe I just said that about a quartet that includes TMTMTLRIZGODRB.
As Charlie gets snuffed, he quotes what I assume is a Taylor Swift lyric about teardrops on his guitar. (After this season, I have listened to more of Zac Brown’s songs all the way through than I have Tay-Tay’s.) That’s the weird thing about this season, about its reliance on old players and the past. It’s trying to flatten them all into the fragments we remember: Angelina and the coat, Charlie being a Swiftie, Ozzy is a provider, Cirie got off the couch, Christian is a weirdo, Joe is trustworthy, and Emily was hated by everyone. We see a whole segment of this earlier in the episode where Coach gives nicknames to Colby and Joe that are so cringe, my brain refuses to retain them. We’ve been seeing some layered and interesting strategy when the players can be themselves and have fun, but with so many superfans, they’re often just replaying the hits, giving fellow fans the catchphrases, sadly reducing themselves to bad impersonations.
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