Survivor 51 recap: a thumb and Survivor’s rules, forgotten

I’m not a biologist, but I feel confident saying that Brady’s chunk of thumb has more brain cells than Rob’s plan on Survivor 51 episode 2. “This game makes you nuts,” Rob said. “This game absolutely makes you go crazy.”

Apparently: Rob literally told Eric he had a secret plan he’d share later. “We’re gonna make history tonight. What I want to do for you, I don’t think has ever been done,” Rob said. Sure, Jan.

That hinged upon voting for himself—which is explicitly prohibited by the Survivor rules. I guess his plan was for Eric to be immune either through the Shot in the Dark or Rob’s immunity idol, and the one remaining vote would be for himself? Assuming the rest of the players unanimously voted for Eric, which a tribe would probably not do?

What an amazing moment hearing a producer tell him, in the voting booth, “You can’t write your own name.” Rob, shocked, said, “Oh no, this screws up everything.” Should have read the rules!

Rob is also clueless as to what the tribe was doing, which was voting for Ana after she volunteered as tribute. This isn’t Big Brother; we don’t put ourselves up as pawns. But just like Big Brother, the pawn went home. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. And I’m a smart player,” she said.

But her gameplay wasn’t smart. Ana went from Alexis is “my Persian sister” to trying to “cause a rift” by talking shit about Alexis—while Alexis was right there! And then Ana badly pivoted to a believable topic: popcorn.

At least Ana recognized “I fucked up; I made a mistake.” That’s more than I can say for:

• Linnea, who thought Carter was scheming against her when Linnea overheard Carter telling Ori, “They’re onto us. They know what’s coming.” Carter was talking about crabs. LOL
• Sharonda said she had a secret alliance with Ori, and then, in front of others, told Ori “I don’t want to jump on board without you” while he looked at her like WTF are you doing?
• The players who ran through the challenge and left their blindfolded partner to fend for themselves!

That immunity challenge produced the second injury: Kristin’s food, as she tumbled over the net without any help and smashed into the bottom. I guess she’s fine, since she participated in the immunity challenge?

But I was not fine after Brady’s injury. While chopping wood, he circumcised his thumb. While waiting for the doctor to show up, he picked up the axe, and there it was: his thumbnail and thumb. That may be the most shocking image in Survivor history.

The faces of Brady’s tribemates would have been enough, that’s how horrified they were. And we got descriptions, too, like Maggie saying, “I looked at that hunk of meat and it’s huge.” (She meant the thumb chunk.)

Brady was more concerned with being removed from the game than his body parts strewn all over the forest floor.”Did I just knock myself out of the game?” he asked a producer, who’d radioed for the medic and said, “Just focus on keeping pressure.”

Another new twist for the open era: The medic showed up alone, without Jeff Probst! And he left with Brady’s thumb but nothing else?

I once sliced open a finger. I used my Boy Scout pocket knife on a plastic container that was around a 99 cent cassette single, probably for something like Debbie Gibson’s “Electric Youth,” and the knife slipped through the plastic too fast. I’ll spare you the details but I needed several stitches. And I wasn’t living on a beach.

By the way: What happened to Brady’s thumb? The doctor took it to show Jeff Probst and Jeff never mentioned it? Did the doctor play a game like slip it into Probst’s pasta? How else to explain Jeff not turning that into a 45-minute episode of his talk show at the challenge?

Maybe that’s part of the Open Era! The refreshing nature of Survivor 51’s premiere continued into this episode, with no twists, no journeys, just two challenges and a fun Tribal Council outcome.

One thing the Open Era has in common with the New Era and the Before Times is is Narrator McExposition, who’s now Narrator McYoujustsaidthat, repeating himself over and over, saying the same thing again and again.

But I barely notice it any more, and was more excited that we got a reward challenge and an immunity challenge. The reward challenge’s pairs was a fun twist on the blindfolded challenge, and while we’ve seen dragging a giant fake animal, the 500-pound whale through the water and rain and over the roller looked brutal and epic.

“You wanted Survivor, you got Survivor!” Hosty McMosty said, raising his hands to the sky. Where is the god of lightning when we need them to send a little message?

Purple was so far behind they almost gave up, thinking yellow was about to win, but then continued on. And still lost. Yet in the reward challenge, the tribes were pretty evenly matched. So much better than watching a tiny tribe lose again and again.

Things I almost chopped off my recap but decided to keep so Jeff Probst can see them:

• “How do you spell Eric?” Carter: “It’s gotta be an A or an E first.” I was so ready for him to write AIRIC
• Lewis joined the yellow tribe. “Oh my god, you’re alive!” Brady said to Lewis, apparently thinking that his journey was actually one to the afterlife.
  • By the way, Lewis said in a video that the trip to Exile was a two-hour hike, leaving him depleted and dehydrated. He estimates he spent about 30 to 40 minutes, but still doesn’t really know. And he shared that he spent the rest of the time recovering, hunting for an idol, and making a fake idol.
• Post-reward challenge, Rob wanted to know why Eric was blindfolded and Linnea wasn’t, and asked that by thinking he was working at a fair in the Guess Your Weight booth. “That was ludicrous because this guy is, no offense, 215? 210?” Eric replied, “I’m 193.” Rob: “You’re a big guy compared to her.” But that’s nothing compared to Rob’s mouth!
• When Jelly found the hidden immunity idol, she was as stunned as we were that it was twist-free. “I’m checking the fine print,” she said. “This is so old-school, OG Survivor.” Also old school: telling someone immediately! She told Patt, but not Devin, because after his Tribal Council performance, she doesn’t trust him to stay quiet. Devin otherwise evaporated from this episode, and really may have screwed himself, despite his efforts to convince everyone that the Open Era means voting against your allies and then becoming BFFs again.
• At camp, Rob and Eric did an improv scene. Despite my appreciation of improv as an art form and belief in it as a useful strategy for life, those few seconds made me cringe more than I did when I saw the thumb.

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