Survivor Recap: Crash of the Titans

I’m just going to pause for a second here to ensure you’re in the right place. You clicked on a Survivor recap because you already watched the episode, right? Right. Okay. I am just looking over my shoulders here, making sure there are no interlopers, because there is something I really, really, really, really, really want to say.

Thank the Catholic Jesus that David is out of the game! I didn’t think they were going to do it despite an entire episode of evidence to the contrary. When the tribe is walking to tribal and Eva talks about how she has always been on a team and knows she can’t accomplish anything without a team, I thought, She’s gonna chicken out. She convinced Joe to just stay the course. This is boring old Survivor, where they try to trick us into thinking the best, exciting thing is going to happen and then the likely, boring thing happens anyway and then I’m even sadder. But no! Eva caved. Joe caved. Kyle, Kamilla, and especially Shauhin triumphed; and David, not only the biggest threat but the biggest annoyance, is out of the game, and it is the smartest gameplay we’ve seen all season.

It all starts the night after the vote, when the Strong Six have a chat on the beach where they’re all like, “I don’t care who goes. Who do you want?” “Oh, I don’t care either. Who do you want?” “I’m just going with the group, man. Who should it be?” Finally, David says, “Well, I’m just going to go with the group, but Mary really wants Kamilla.” If Mary were a Real Housewives fan, she would have hit us with the NeNe Leakes classic “Now why am I in it?” Kyle uses this opportunity to talk to Shauhin and tell him the reason they’re after Kamilla is that David and Mary are trying to weaken the two of them because they think they’re working with Kamilla.

At this point, David reminds me more of someone on The Traitors than on Survivor. He has figured something out, for sure, but it isn’t what he thinks he’s figured out and the evidence he has for getting there doesn’t make sense. “Why aren’t they scrambling?” he asks about Shauhin and Kyle. Well, they are in an alliance of six dominating the game. Why should they be scrambling? If they were scrambling, I’d be even more suspicious because it would mean something’s going on that he doesn’t know about. And yes, David is right that Kyle and Kamilla are running this whole damn game like Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole, but Shauhin has nothing to do with it. That’s just his paranoia working overtime.

It’s clear to see whom Eva trusts the most based on whom she tells about her advantage the morning after she gets it. At sunrise, she sits down with Joe (duh), Shauhin, and Kyle, leaving Mary and David to run around the camp trying to convince everyone the little green men are living in the trees and they should fashion hats out of coconut husks to protect themselves. Eva tells them the truth about her advantages: How she approached a table and was awarded an extra vote; she then risked that extra vote for a 50-50 shot at Safety Without Power, the advantage where you can leave tribal council and stay safe but can’t vote. She could have risked that for a one-in-three chance of getting an idol, but she already has an idol, so what does she care? She does the smart thing and keeps it.

After that, Kyle tries to talk to Joe about David and how he’s driving him insane, but David comes over to them because he doesn’t trust anyone and apparently is playing the Boston Rob “buddy system” tactic, in which no one can ever be alone so they can’t flip. Once Kyle leaves, David tries to do just what Kyle said he would: convince Joe and Eva that Kyle and Shauhin are working with Kamilla and that Kamilla needs to go.

Here is problem No. 1 with David’s gameplay. He has painted himself into a corner of playing this loyal and honorable game, so if he thinks someone in his alliance is working against him, he can’t vote for them. That’s why he’s gunning for Kamilla, to weaken those two. But what he should really be doing is trying to vote out either Kyle or Shauhin. Why? Because they’ll still be gunning for him at six and he won’t have anyone else around to help him make a move. After the immunity challenge, Star even walks up to David and Mary and says, “Let’s vote Shauhin.” They say they can’t because they think Shauhin has an idol thanks to a little birdie called Kymilla (that’s Kyle and Kamilla’s couple portmanteau) who told him that a few episodes back to fuck with his head. But there’s another reason David can’t vote for them: As soon as he does, he’s “going back on his word,” and when he goes to the final tribal and talks about his honorable game, everyone can tell him he’s full of shit. I love honor as much as the next guy, but it makes the game far too rigid as the dynamics evolve.

Speaking of going back on his word, that is what David accuses Joe of doing, and this is his fatal mistake. David says Joe said they were all going to vote for Kamilla, but ultimately, they all voted for Chrissy. Joe says that was a group decision and they all talked about it, so it’s not going back on his word; it’s changing his mind. Also, David said he was going to vote for Kamilla but then voted for Chrissy, so didn’t he renege, too? I would say the call is coming from inside the house, but there is no call, there is no phone. If David’s brain were a cell phone, there would be no bars, just the SOS where they should be in case you have an emergency.

We see Joe and Eva talk about David and Mary repeatedly throughout the episode, and Joe keeps demurring to Eva, saying he’ll follow her lead. Her instinct is to play peacemaker and keep the whole group together. She seems to keep talking Joe down off the ledge. After the challenge, however, David talks to Eva and tells her again that Joe went back on his word even after he explained that he didn’t. I think that is either what Joe used to convince Eva or what Eva used as justification for voting against David.

As everyone walks into the challenge, Jeffrey Lee Probst, from Wichita, Kansas, is affecting some kind of posh British accent. Is Jeff okay? Has anyone checked on him? He already cried this season; now he’s playing characters. I don’t like it unless he’s auditioning to play a butler in the next season of The Gilded Age. Anyway, it’s the challenge where you have to keep a ball above your head in the jaws of death. Predictably, it becomes a strongman battle with Joe and David lasting until the very end. When David has his first wobble, it throws him and he steps off his pedestal, giving Joe the win.

When David sits down, he is visibly pissed that he didn’t get the necklace: “I should have won that. I had a lot left in the tank … I should have had it … I’m beating up myself over it because I made one mistake.” This is problem No. 2 with David’s strongman game. The challenges are unpredictable, the players don’t know what they will be, and they don’t know what skills they’ll need to win them. Also, winning comes down so often to one silly thing. If you keep all the strong people, that just narrows a player’s chance of the silly thing happening and someone else taking it. If David got rid of the rest of the strong people, it wouldn’t be as honorable or whatever he’s always crowing about, but it would insulate him a lot more from other very strong competitors like Joe (and Kyle and Mitch and Eva).

Joe’s picks for who goes on the reward with him were what gave me the first inkling that David’s ouster might be in the offing. He chooses Mitch, the only person who hasn’t had a reward, along with Shauhin and Eva (duh). Joe and Kyle had already started confabbing about David being erratic, and Joe had confided in Eva that David said he “went back on his word,” which really miffed him. Is this where he gets a gang together to pull the switcheroo on David? When they ask Mitch, he says he wants to vote for David, and it seems that is the opening everyone is looking for.

This makes total sense. He is definitely a threat in challenges and seems to be causing confusion around camp. Also, because David can’t vote for anyone in his alliance, for integrity reasons, he wants to work with Star, and he won’t vote for Kamilla because he thinks Shauhin will play his nonexistent idol for her. That leaves him with only Mitch as a target. This just means Kamilla, Kyle, and Shauhin will still be in the game. If they all just vote Mitch and stay safe, they have to endure another week of David and Mary spinning the same b.s. and driving them all crazy. Not to go back to The Traitors and Boston Rob once again, but it was like the vote against the four-time Survivor loser. Everyone agreed that if they didn’t banish him, they’d be having the same conversation every week, so it was easier to just get rid of him.

When we get to tribal, it’s still unclear if it will be Mitch or David. Once again, David does that thing that annoys me the most, pretending like he’s the only strong player who ever played, that he’s the only one with integrity. But here are problems No. 3 and 4 with David’s game. The third is that Survivor is always going to be a little bit about lying, and those who don’t recognize it are exposing their weakness. The problem is that it takes only one liar to flip and ruin a good alliance. No wonder David was so paranoid; he knew how vulnerable he really was.

Problem No. 4 is how David is always harping about it, making his game so clear. He is playing honest and loyal. Period. Kamilla, for the second tribal in a row, points out that David’s problem is jury management. What if he made it to the end and all the people he put on the jury don’t like an honest and loyal game? What if they thought he should have lied more? Then they won’t give it to him. Also, he has painted his game as somehow better or different, more saintly, than the other games. He thinks the people whose games he has demeaned are going to reward his sanctimoniousness. If they were Drag Race fans, they’d hit him with the Kennedy Davenport classic “Fuck my drag, right.”

But David won’t have to worry about the fourth problem in his game because problems one through three did enough to send him to an early ouster, and you could tell he was pissed but trying to hide it because, you know, he’s the nice guy. He’s the strong one. Everyone else is a liar and a loser and doesn’t have pecs as big as his. Well, I hate to break it to you, David, but one of them is going to be a liar and a loser with $1 million, and all you’ll have are your precious morals.