Drop your buffs! We are merged. Credit (again) to the Australian Survivor editors for doing their best to make a fairly workaday merge boot interesting. The tribes merge with seven original Brains and six original Brawn. The ratio of women to men is also 7:6, in favour of the women.
Kate wins the Cocktail Party reward challenge after Zara and Logan offer to drop in exchange for being taken on the reward. She also selects OG Brawns Morgan, Kristin, and Paulie, and, bafflingly, OG Brain AJ. Also baffling is the production decision to have a majority go on reward. Cruelly, the Cocktail Party is within eye-line and earshot of the minority at camp.
AJ takes his “ladies’ man” persona out for a trot as he follows Chat GPT prompts for “lines to feign interest on a first date” in an attempt to schmooze Kate. He goes off the rails when he praises Kate’s eyes. Don’t do this. Don’t compliment someone on an accident of genetics. Praise her strength, her talent, her endurance, something within her power.
Logan is the big winner of the episode. Not only does she hold a hidden immunity idol, which only Karin and Kaelan know about (as far as we have seen), but she also wins the Individual Immunity necklace. She has been longing to get AJ out and has been frustrated at being denied by others, being told “not yet, not yet.” Riding high in her power, it is she who now says “not yet” and sets her sights on Jesse.
Kate also wants Jesse out. She was orchestrating his ouster in the Vote That Never Was, and she needs him out of the game before he gets wind of her plotting his demise with the Brains women.
Laura opts to vote for Paulie on the split, and a very tight split it is at 6:5. But she is more interested in bleating about Zara stealing her advantage. It wasn’t an advantage, and Zara did nothing more to her than she was planning to do to Zara. However, the “truth” is shifting through a whisper campaign. We’ll see how that affects the post-merge.
Zara opens the door for a reconciliation with Laura, but as we know, Laura is guarding her resentment like a precious jewel. Zara wins the episode for me by using “jungle rat” as a verb (to be “jungle ratted”). That takes the sting out of the two votes she cops, one from each of the two real targets, Jesse and Paulie.
Paulie and Myles meet on the beach, and the fandom goes, “Ahhhh”. They bond about being on the bottom. Paulie has gotten through by “chaotic self-preservation.” Myles is loaded with an idol no one knows about and a real advantage that no one knows about: to steal someone else’s idol.
Jesse tells Morgan and Kristin he is happy to be “Brawn strong.” He wants Myles and Laura to jump on for a Zara vote and maybe Logan too. Jesse pitches this as a straightforward vote. But Jesse, do you know who else is a straightforward vote?
The women are happy in their cross-tribal majority, none more so than the Brains women with their double majority. Logan targets Jesse, and the women agree. Kate approaches AJ with the plan. And, even though he discussed targeting Logan “but Jesse first” with Myles, now that it is someone else’s idea, he pushes for a split on Paulie.
On the way to Tribal Council, Paulie is hit in the face by a torch. We are all disappointed narratively that it wasn’t Kaelan’s torch.
At Tribal Council, no sparks fly. JLP tries to find cracks to exploit, to find the drama. But everyone seems confident that the plan they know about is The Plan. Kate says that “everyone should be an open book” at merge. Logan says friendships are not the same as gameplay. “It’s not Friend Island”. True, that. She says that her vote is about “vengeance,” before saying she is kidding and that it’s really about solidifying who she is working with.
When Logan votes for Jesse, she backtracks. Her vote is about vengeance, after all. Myles votes for “Pauli” because “there’s only room for one hunk on this island.” Jesse goes out with the same laid-back good humour we glimpsed as he played. He says, “Thanks, guys, all good, all good”, and hits JLP with a “shaka bra” on his way out.
In the end, this episode was a lot of table setting for what we hope is the feast to come. Next Time On tantalises with Myles finding out who the idol-holders are. Will he play his advantage? Channel 10 marketing department promised us “OMG episodes,” though we’ve been let down by them before. Still, we’ll all be sat with our napkins tucked into our collars, ready to eat, when episode 14 comes around.
Written by