Survivor 51: one vote took out two players

I wrote the headline above to have two meanings: a pair of Survivor 51 players was voted out tonight during the vote, and that’s what the preview teased so not a big spoiler. But it’s also demonstrating my shock and horror that it was a single vote—one!—that sent two big players and characters out of the game.

All of Kristin’s preparation couldn’t save her from the game of Calvinball that Survivor has become. “Calming the chaos is harder and harder to do,” she said, meaning at camp but I also take it to mean from the game’s new malleable structure.

This vote wasn’t as bad as Cirie being eliminated from the game with zero votes cast against her. But I don’t love a game with 12 players in which one person single-handedly sends two to the jury.

We actually lost a third player tonight in a Survivor first: Brady bailed on Ponderosa and the jury to get treatment for his thumb, Jeff Probst told the other players. So was the thumb really bad and Brady just brodied right on through it? Or could he not imagine sitting in the jury box without saying “brody” all the time and bailed?

It’s even weirder considering that, in an exit interview conducted last week, Brady said, “Now it’s my job to be on the jury.” And even funnier because when Probst announced it to the cast, no one seemed to care.

Calm and collected Kristin and chaos tornado Kilby exited thanks to a series of cascading twists and advantages at Tribal Council:

1. Cristian gave Eric his extra vote, telling him to vote for Devin and Jelly. Eric did not play the extra vote, which expired.
2. Jelly played her idol, which covered her and Devin as a pair. “Hopefully, I don’t need to, but we will see,” she said. (I didn’t think she would, with all her preceding talk like, “if we can bank those past this vote, we are smooth sailing!”)
3. Kristin played her Shot in the Dark: she and Kilby were not safe.
4. Cristian played his Shot in the Dark: he and Carter were safe.

So Kristin and Cristian have no votes, especially since Eric refused to play Cristian’s extra vote, and two pairs were immune: Carter and Cristian, and Devin and Jelly.

Devin’s vote for Kilby/Kristin is the only one that counted, and the only other vote came from Jelly, who voted for Carter/Cristian.

That is wild! And it’s less interesting to me because it’s basically just the producers shoving so many fireworks into a fireplace that eventually they’ll all explode. Spectacular but inevitable.

The players who tried to blindside Devin and Jelly all voted for Devin/Jelly. They had no back-up plan! That’s just an unforced error, especially considering how worried Cristian was that Devin or Jelly would play a Shot in the Dark.

“I don’t know why people make this game so dang hard. This is easy!” Carter said at one point. Not so easy when there are a zillion permutations of advantages.

One fascinating data point: It was Sharonda who told Thien An and Maggie she would not vote for Devin/Jelly, and then secretly told Jelly and Devin what was coming. Yet Sharonda still voted for Devin/Jelly!

So Sharonda is doing a considerably better job of keeping her relationship with Devin and Jelly than Devin and Jelly are doing with their plan to split up at the merge. If you’re worried about people thinking of you as a duo, maybe don’t become a duo!

In other curious and fascinating game play:

• Eric compared himself to “Frankenstein’s monster” for surviving the vote, and then insisted people to talk to him about voting for him. Just like Frankenstein’s monster, they rejected and ignored his attempts to re-join them.
• Eric didn’t take the hint at the challenge when Jeff Probst said, “Eric’s feet are numb but his mouth is certainly not,” That made me laugh. So did Cristian and Carter whispering to each other: “It just never stops.” “Never.”
  • Someone’s taking Eric to the final three, right? Because he’ll never win?
• Mike, who knows he’s freaking people out, followed Cristian to the water well. “I’m not trying to spy on you,” Mike said, spying on him.
• Maggie, furious at Mike, told him to think about that “maybe it’s because people don’t trust me.”
• Farmer Carter and his VPL shorts showed Little Edie his idol. I mean, Cristian. I understood that; I had no idea what Carter meant with his metaphor when he said, “hope they don’t get bred by that bull over there.”

We’re in the post merge, so the immunity/reward challenge was balancing balls, balancing before putting things in a hole, and then balancing while putting together a puzzle.

Lewis and Sharonda’s win was genuinely heartwarming, especially his faith in her as a competitor. “I’m truly underestimated and I seem like just a sitting duck to them,” Sharonda told us, after detailing the racism she experiences as a doctor, like when people mistake her for the janitor.

There was genuinely delightful moment when picking people to join them, and Lewis said, “I heard someone talk about spaghetti a lot.” He then called for Jelly, causing Eric’s face to drop into the sand.

In honor of Jeff Probst saying “spu-get-teeeeee” in the weirdest way possible, here’s the supercut I made a few seasons ago:

While I strongly dislike the one-person journey, and I hate the producers just taking away someone’s vote like that, I thought Cristian’s challenge was more fun than the immunity challenge.

On a sand spit, he cut a rope, and coconuts dumped into the ocean—nuts dumped, tee hee—and he had to scramble to gather them while they drifted away.

Some coconuts had letters, which, when unscrambled, revealed the location of the vote he had that morning: IN JEFF PROBST’S LEFT POCKET NEXT TO BRADY’S THUMB. Oh wait, no, it was at the well.

So Cristian’s journey ultimately meant nothing, and we could have had an actual reward challenge instead.

Next week someone might go home because of a coin flip, so we’re definitely back to Calvinball Survivor. Sigh. Survivor 51 was fun while it lasted.

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