You wouldn’t expect any fallout after a near-unanimous Rome elimination, but the key word there is “near” because Andy still got two votes: one from Sue and one from Sol, and Sol’s is the only one out in the open. Andy pulls him aside to hash it out, and Sol’s argument makes sense. He didn’t want Rome’s vote to have all the power if he found an idol. But Andy still calls him out for putting his name down when so many others were vulnerable.
Sol is quick to throw Sam under the bus for the whole situation, and a surprised Andy decides Gata’s gotta go. Sam and Sierra played him for two weeks and proved he’s expendable in their long-term schemes, but Sol’s open to working with him, and so is Genevieve, who just lost her tightest ally and wants to unite the stragglers for a sneak attack against the power players.
The next morning, the newly named Beka Tribe is chilling and bonding, but new alliances are forming below the surface now that the game’s purely individual. Teeny dreams of forming a solid alliance of women like the Black Widow Brigade, and players like Rachel, Tiyana, and Sierra agree. Tiyana goes a step further and throws Gabe’s name out once again, framing him as the biggest threat as she voices her desire to break away from Tuku and forge her own game beyond tribal lines.
At the immunity challenge, there’s good news! They’ve ditched the final twelve double boot! The bad news? They brought back one of Survivor 44’s worst twists instead, the one where they still split into two groups, but the winner of the challenge wins immunity and reward for their entire team, leaving the other six to face Tribal Council with their own winner safe, all watched by the winning group from the safety of the jury bench. They replaced an undesirable twist with an even worse one, and whoever suffers from it won’t even make the jury, just to rub salt in the wound.
Making it even more absurd, the random draw sticks Rachel with the entire Tuku Tribe, and she can’t even survive long in the challenge to get an easy way out of the obvious vote coming her way. Kyle ultimately lasts the longest among the losers, only beaten by Teeny and Genevieve. Facing a pivotal vote, Caroline knows Rachel is the easy choice to go, but easy doesn’t always equal smart, and there might be a smarter move to be made.
To the winners go the spoils: a feast of ribs and a day off from the game. Sam and Sierra fear for Rachel, and the Gata/Lavo mix agrees that if she goes home and the Tuku Five survive, Tuku will be in the firing line for the next couple of rounds as punishment for putting such a massive target on their group’s back. It’s just basic math. Six beats five, and that’ll be that.
At the old Lavo camp, the losers start the scramble with the obvious plan being upfront: Rachel’s going 5-1 or 5-0 if she uses her Shot in the Dark. As Gabe explains it, these people are just chess pieces, tools he can use to further his game, and a united Tuku alliance is just another tool in his kit. But Tiyana sees the writing on the wall. If Tuku boots Rachel, they’re all getting sniped out of the game next because not only will they be an obvious strategic force to deal with, but they’ll look like liars for playing up how not united they claimed to be.
Tiyana meets with Kyle and Rachel to solidify a plan where they put three votes on Gabe, but the plan relies on Caroline flipping as well, as Sue’s too loyal to budge. Caroline said she was willing to make smart moves, and while this Gabe plan is a smart move for Tiyana and Kyle… is it a smart move for Caroline?
Caroline pushes back hard. While it’s smart to cut a Tuku now and nullify their growing threat level, she sees Rachel as the biggest social threat who holds a lot of people together, and cutting her now would open things up and leave a more fluid game for the future without the glue of Gata left to hold them together.
Across the beach, Gabe is working his own angle on the situation, approaching Rachel with a fake plan of targeting Caroline so she’ll avoid rolling the dice on safety and leave herself totally vulnerable. It sounds too good to be true, and Rachel picks up on that, but it’s so tempting to believe she’s actually in a solid position against all odds.
Meanwhile, a wrinkle presents itself among the winners: a new advantage at the feast. Andy is openly searching in front of the others, and Sierra and Genevieve are already annoyed with him. But it’s Sol’s stealthier, well-timed approach that nets him a little scroll with special powers. It’s called the Take Your Pick advantage, and he can pass it to someone in the losing group to give them a choice of two advantages for this round.
They can take the Block-A-Vote, which just stops one person from voting, or they can choose Safety Without Power, which we’ve seen a few times before. Sol weighs his options and has to take his own pick: possibly save Rachel with his power when she desperately needs a saving grace… or pass it to one of the Tukus to buy some goodwill with a larger block of voters.
Tribal is a discussion about big moves versus big smart moves with Rachel in the middle of it all as she fights for her life, but Sol throws her the lifeline when she needs it most. She takes the Safety Without Power because… duh, and away she goes, leaving the Tukus to have a Tribal all to themselves as the scrambling restarts from square one as if they were right back in the pre-merge.
Suddenly, people who thought they were safely on the jury are vulnerable, and nobody takes it harder than Tiyana, who tears up as her hard work earlier goes to waste. Fearing for her own life now, she starts the standard live Tribal scramble and commences the whisper train. Gabe and Sue swear to stick together with Caroline as their third, while Tiyana and Kyle vow to vote Gabe out… also with Caroline as their third. She’s the swing vote, holding Tuku’s future in her hands. She can cut Tiyana and keep her trio intact, or she can cut Gabe and blow the game wide open.
But predictably, it’s Tiyana who gets the boot after spending so long at the bottom of Tuku. And not just from the trio but from Kyle as well, who sees/hears the writing on the wall and votes for unity over discord.
Leaving in tears as she misses the jury by one night, Tiyana’s journey comes to an end at the hands of not one instance of twist-screwing, but two! Her game wasn’t great, but her hopes of a fresh start at the merge got dashed with the split tribal, only to have them saved with Rachel as the obvious boot and her own name nowhere in the mix, only to be treated to a time warp back to the pre-merge where she was suddenly the easy boot again.
The show can milk the moment’s emotional peaks all it wants, but it’s just not fun, not even if you love a classic Survivor tragedy. While Tiyana spending 90 minutes talking about how Tuku needed to cannibalize one of their own only to be Monkey’s Paw’d out of the game as the sacrificial lamb she asked for is definitely ironic, it wasn’t a result of being outplayed by her opponents. She got outplayed by production.
Sure, this take on the twist ended up better than Survivor 44’s attempt because the victim didn’t get screwed by not taking their bag to the challenge, but it’s still not a good one. It’s convoluted from the beginning and makes everything feel like a weird bottle episode where dynamics are still in limbo, strategic conversations were mostly a waste of time, and nothing is gained or lost outside of sadistically screwing one person over right before the jury starts.
But hey, at least production was kind enough to give us the Auction next week as an apology for how lackluster this episode was. Let’s just hope they realize the twisty nature of Survivor 45’s edition needs a serious rework in the less twisty direction instead of adding even more unneeded layers on top of it.
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