Everyone Will Be Shooketh
Season 50
Episode 11
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Robert Voets/CBS
Usually when Jeff’s phoenix-shaped torch snuffer hits the fire, and we hear the soundtrack’s signature “BOOOOONNNNNGGGGG,” I feel a little bit of nothing. Sometimes I’m sad that one of my favorites was evicted, sometimes I’m angry at how it went down, sometimes (like last week) I’m thrilled someone I loathe gets sent home. That’s just the name of the game. Like death, taxes, and another saturated media blitz around a Taylor Swift album release, some things are inevitable, and we have to endure them no matter how much we may hate (or love!) them. But this time, well, it hit differently. I was legit sad that one of my favorites went home, angry at how it went down, and strangely rhapsodic about our inability to change or evolve and how sometimes you can’t outgrow fate or folly or some other f-word that shouldn’t be published in a family-friendly recap.
What I’m most angry about is the production. The whole first section of the episode is everyone discussing what their strategy will be going forward. Joe absolutely hates Devens and says, “The jury might love the fake idol, the ruckus, the drama, but I thought it was in extremely poor taste.” Everyone else is frustrated with straight-shooting Joe and his inability to understand the basic concepts of Survivor.
There’s a great scene with Cirie talking to Tiff, who is turning out to be one of her closest allies even though she’s not in The Throuple. Tiff says that she and Cirie need to flush Rizo and Ozzy’s idols. Cirie says, “I can work that because they think I will let them know if they need to play their idol,” followed by a laugh so evil, so delicious, so maniacal that Dr. Evil just asked for the trademark. Cirie is basically saying she can convince them to do something stupid with their idols to flush them, and this is why she will forever be the greatest. She even tells Tiff that they have a codeword for her to use at Tribal should either Ozzy or Rizo have to play their idols. Okay, how kinky is The Throuple that they have a group safe word just in case things get out of hand? And what is it? Tell me it’s not “pineapple.” It better not be “pineapple!”
Ozzy tells Cirie that he had a dream he was voted out and he was with Stephenie and Coach (nightmare blunt rotation) and they were like, “Why didn’t you play your idol?” Emily is around camp talking to Devens about how it’s time for Cirie to go because she’s clearly running the whole game. This is why Emily is the only player left with two functioning brain cells.
All of this talk is essentially moot when they get to the challenge. As Rizo figured out from the tree-mail, it’s the one where they have to balance on the top of a pyramid in the ocean and whoever lasts longest wins. Normally I would say it’s a travesty and indicative of the repetitiveness and predictability of the game that Rizo can guess what the challenge is and that anyone with a handy family member and a backyard pool could practice this at home. However, this is Survivor 50, and it makes sense, for this one season only, that we’re revisiting classic challenges. During his period of exposition, Jeff says the winner will get an advantage for the twist at Tribal Council that he will explain later.
The challenge is fairly uneventful until the end, when everyone has to balance on one foot, and everyone left falls faster than the value of the dollar when the president announces his latest trade war. Tiffany is crowned the winner, and Jeff tells them to hold on a minute. He’ll be right back. He gets in a boat and sails off to parts unknown, leaving the whole cast to just sit on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Is the twist that he’s going to leave them there? Are they going to starve them until they resort to cannibalism? The one they decide to eat first (definitely Rizo) will be the one voted out?
No. It turns out that Tiff didn’t get on one leg soon enough, so she’s disqualified, and the new winner is Jonathan, who can’t wait to make the necklace bounce by popping his pecs like the cheesiest guy at CrossFit. Jonathan says that none of his world records mean as much as this immunity win and being on Survivor. World records? What is this man going on about? It turns out that he is in the Guinness Book of World Records multiple times for performing the most weighted pull-ups, chin-ups, and other exercises. Of course he is.
Then Jeff explains the twist, and I have never hated anything more since the Blood Moon earlier this season. Jonathan is safe; the eight remaining players will be randomly sorted into two groups of four. Each group will be on a different side of a beach and will send someone home. Jonathan is the only one who gets to go between the groups and gets to vote in both Tribals.
There are numerous reasons why I hate this. The first is my principle that nothing in Survivor should be left to luck. This comes the week after the great Mr. Beast twist where the players had to decide who was going to flip the coin and if they couldn’t, it would be left to chance, but even then the chance is a decision by the group. Why couldn’t we do that again? Why couldn’t Jeff let them decide which groups they would be divided into? If he wants to give Jonathan an advantage, how about he sits out of the two Tribals, but he gets to divide the groups as he sees fit, like the winner of a RuPaul’s Drag Race mini challenge deciding the teams? Why not tell them before the challenge that the first four off the raft are the first group, which then allows players to decide if they want to throw the challenge to create more optimal groups. (For instance, if Emily were to fall off first and three people really want her out, they can hop off and vote out Emily.) There are a million different ways this could have gone that leave absolutely nothing to chance and make for more interesting gameplay.
It’s bad enough that this is left to chance, but small groups also suck more than a Dyson vacuum factory. Jeff likes these small tribes because there is no place to hide, but as I’ve said many times before, there is also no room to maneuver. It’s one thing when the game gets smaller. Players have been planning for that for days and should have a strategy in mind, but for them to spring a small group on them without warning and without knowing who the group is going to be, it throws all strategy out the window. At Tribal, Rizo talks about the twist, and Jeff says, “Something Rizo says just occurred to me. It is two final five votes, in a sense.” Wait. This just occurred to him? The architect of this entire twist (or at least the man who ratified it) has only now thought about the implications of it? Do I even need to say it?
I will admit that the idea of Jonathan being a “Power Broker,” as Jeff calls it, is not a terrible idea, but why is it wedded to this challenge? This is inherently a physical challenge and puts everyone who is not a physical player at a disadvantage. Why not the classic obstacle course followed by a puzzle which shows off both physical and mental prowess? Why not a puzzle alone, which is more mental but nominally everyone has an equal shot at winning? Why not have the players elect who the Power Broker is going to be, giving them power this time but putting them in danger next week when everyone realizes they’re the crux of the game? There are a lot of different ways to decide who has the power, but in Jeff Probst’s America it is only the physically strongest person who can be trusted with this responsibility.
The first tribe is Emily, Cirie, Tiff, and Devens. The second tribe is Aubry, Joe, Ozzy, and TMTMTLRIZGODRB. In the first group, Jonathan really wants to get out Devens, and everyone wants to flush his idol. Emily, however, comes up with this plan that she’s going to convince everyone that Devens will play the idol for her, then have them all vote for Devens, but then Devens will play the idol on himself, it will invalidate their votes, and they’ll both vote for Cirie and get her out. This sent my heart into a mild panic because there is no one I want to win this game more than Cirie, who is manipulating everyone around her with the ease that a spider descends on a single filament. The editors made us think it was a possibility; they made us think that Emily had them all convinced.
But there is no way that she would fall for this for even a single second. At Tribal, as everyone is speaking, they cut to Cirie like her wheels are spinning, like she is thinking about whether or not she can do something. When Devens gets up and plays his idol for himself, there is not a single reaction from anyone. I’m convinced the plan all along was for Cirie to use her extra vote, for them to split votes 2-2 on Emily and Devens, and no matter who he played the idol for, they would revote against the other person. Cirie Fields is not leaving anything to chance; she is covering her ass every which way until Sunday — and that’s why she wasn’t surprised at all. Emily, of course, is sent packing instead of her. After the tie is announced, Rick looks at Emily and says, “It was worth a shot.” Yeah, it was, but you will never out-Survivor Cirie.
I was nearly devastated thinking that Motha Cirie was about to get her torch snuffed again, but now is as good a time as any to mention that there is no way that Cirie can win this game. I know, I know. I hate to say it too because the best player to never win deserves to win. She deserves an EGOT. She deserves the car Dreamz stole from Yau-Man. She deserves a $3 million check just for breathing. But everyone knows how good of a game she’s playing, and they all know that if she gets to the end, the jury is going to give her the $2 million. There was a chance that Ozzy would have taken her (more on that in a minute), but Rizo is not taking her to the end because he wants to win. While she and Tiff get closer by the day, they don’t have a pact that we’ve seen. Cirie is not known for winning individual immunities or finding idols, which there will be few chances to do. Maybe she could eke out a win at the fire-making challenge, but there is no way that anyone is letting her get past the final five. They’re all too smart and not nearly loyal enough to keep her. I think we all need to come to accept that as fact now to stave off the devastation from when she gets voted out for real.
Before the Tribals, Jonathan says of this season, “When it seems things are cut and dried, it never has been.” But hasn’t it? So many Tribals, the edit makes us think that there are different possibilities, but so often it’s been the most straightforward answer, the thing we think is going to happen. It’s the same with Emily going home. We could see that coming. We can also see Ozzy not playing his idol to save himself when he needs to. Ozzy apparently does too, and, like a Bond villain monologuing his masterplan, Ozzy spills to Aubry in an attempt at jury management. Aubry tells everyone else that Ozzy and Cirie have a pact, that he gave her a secret vote, and that he isn’t going to take any of them to the end. (This, also, will damage Cirie’s game going forward, I believe.)
What was a straightforward Aubry vote becomes a straightforward Ozzy vote. Joe complicates it when Jonathan says that if Joe, Jonathan, and Aubry all vote Ozzy, they can blindside him, but Joe thinks they need to tell Rizo about the vote. I’m sorry, but this man does not know how to play Survivor. Has he learned nothing about Rizo? Sure, he hasn’t seen his season, but he knows this guy loves the game and that Rizo would be impressed by their machinations and probably wouldn’t care. When Jonathan asks Cirie what to do, she says to let Jonathan tell Rizo, hoping that Rizo will warn Ozzy. Couldn’t she use the safe word? Couldn’t she have let Jonathan say pineapple somehow?
Rizo never warns him, because he needs to be closer to Cirie, and Ozzy blew up all their games by what he told Aubry. At Tribal, Ozzy says how much he’s learned playing this game again. He says in the past he was a selfish player on his own who only cared about winning challenges. He was either too trusting of people or not trusting enough. This time he hasn’t won, but he’s worked on his social game. But when he casts his vote and says he’s not playing his idol, we all know he’s doomed. Ozzy doesn’t have a social game. Ozzy has Cirie, and she played the social game for both of them. She would have let Ozzy take her to the end and Tina Wesson-ed his ass, taking the whole check home. As soon as they were separated he lost the game. It is so sad watching Ozzy’s slump toward Jeff with his torch, knowing that he failed once again. He tells us we have no idea how painful it is for him to lose. This time I know it. He thought he could correct the mistakes of his past, but can any of us? They’re like tattoos, inked on us, and no matter how much we rethink them, how much we work, how much we evolve, is real change ever possible? It seems, for Ozzy, it isn’t. As he walks toward Ponderosa, with the stars smiling down at him, the moon singing a sweet tale, the breeze guffowing in his ears, and the idol searing its way into his pocket. Ozzy is proof that, in this one devastating instance, his dream did come true.
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