As we finally reach the first true merge vote of the season, Survivor 46 isn’t messing around. We’ve got drama, big players stumbling over each other, major characters throwing everyone for a loop, and all the Jelinsky references you need to delusionally convince yourself he’s coming back for Survivor: Forty Several next Fall and winning it all.
But this brilliant episode starts with the messy fallout from last week’s votes. After voting Tim out, Hunter and Yanu come together to cheer Ben up about the loss of his island best friend. Well, everyone except Q, who’s salty about his allies coddling the guy who needs to go next and leaving them open to his social charm. Q came to play, and he wants to play bigger than anyone. And if you’re here to play too, it’s going to be Q’s game you play, not your own.
Speaking of big plays, the other half of the tribe gets back and shocks everyone when Venus is not only still standing but taking all the credit for Soda’s blindside. As a little more icing on the cake, she calls Tevin out as a snake who ‘got got,’ having zero clue that she’s still powerless herself. Tevin doesn’t love the idea of Venus getting all the credit, but he sees the bright side pretty easily. If Venus is getting the credit now, it only makes her a bigger target than him, and he can always explain his move at the end when it actually matters.
Tevin tries to get Liz in on the Venus-dragging too, but in a shocking turn of events, Liz ALSO wants credit for the Soda move because apparently she’d been throwing out Soda’s name all season? I’m sure the edit didn’t include any beef they allegedly had, but I have to ask… since when?! Continuity concerns aside, Liz is ready to step out of the enigma role and play hard before she’s inevitably cut loose. Because, if Tevin can snipe Soda, he could just as easily snipe her.
The next morning, the Journey Six (well, now five) is scrambling to find a replacement for Tim, and they won’t have to scramble that hard. Charlie’s right there as Maria’s number one, but Charlie himself has doubts. The Six… kinda sucks. It’s led by players who can’t hold an alliance together to save their lives, and even worse for Charlie, they’re players he can’t beat at the end. So, for now, he’ll agree. But he’s still got his eyes set on a spicy Q blindside down the road, so if anyone’s going awry in this alliance, it should probably be him.
Speaking of Q, this man brings the entertainment when he stages a game of Hide ‘n Seek for the entire tribe. Not as a simple game, mind you, but as a way to suss out potential threats hiding in plain sight… in a children’s game that nobody is taking that seriously. Yeah. We’ll see how that turns out. But he (along with Venus, who buys into the same logic) seems to get a lot out of it, finding massive mistakes in almost everyone’s approach.
Liz is actually capable of playing harder. Mistake. Maria’s showing her creativity. Mistake. Tiffany is sloppy. Mistake. Kenzie’s proving she’s a little chameleon. Mistake. Ben and Hunter expose themselves as huge threats by avoiding detection. BIG mistakes. Now, how many of these reads will ultimately be prophetic and how many will be totally off the mark? Time will tell.
With the focus back on the million-dollar game, Venus tries reaching out to Tevin to mend fences after he was “left out” of the last vote. In reality, it’s less a coming together and more Venus bragging about a move she didn’t make as Tevin tries not to bust out laughing. When Tevin is finally able to laugh, it only serves to set Liz off on her own mission: getting Tevin out as punishment for his cockiness. It seems the Hide ‘n Seek prophecies might have legs to stand on after all.
Meanwhile, the Six have another fracture to deal with. Tiffany says voting Venus out would be a waste, but they shouldn’t lock any names down until they see who wins immunity. But if they had to target anyone, Ben and Maria would be solid choices. Tevin and Q hear this and immediately lose trust in her, figuring she’s ready to blow up the alliance and take some goats to the end.
Q hates the idea of taking goats to final tribal, but if Tiff really wants to keep Venus around another round, that’s cool. Tiff can sit on the jury in her place instead, and Q’s making it happen by selling her and her idol out to Maria and Charlie. And with Tevin and Hunter roped in, the plan seems to be a go as long as Tiff loses immunity.
The immunity challenge is a Survivor classic: Get a Grip! And this time, the rice negotiation is a flop as only Q and Liz want to sit out. Jeff even throws another deal at them: two lost votes for the rice, and everyone can still compete. But nobody’s buying the New Era vote nonsense, and we have a full line-up of players this time… that quickly becomes a showdown between Charlie and Hunter as most of the others fall out early on. The Swiftie vs the guy who played the most tryhard game of Hide n’ Seek ever. Yeah, it’s a predictable Hunter sweep, so Tiff is officially on the table for tonight’s vote.
Back at camp, Q storms off to vent about the challenge. Nobody else sat out, even with it being super obvious that most of them would never be able to win against Hunter’s Tarzan routine. But the plan remains the same: gun for Tiff for targeting someone in the Six (definitely not something Q himself would ever do, right?). But Liz is ready to strike elsewhere, pulling in Ben, Maria, Venus, and Kenzie as votes for her Tevin plan.
Meanwhile, Kenzie’s loving this, knowing this move would keep Yanu from just controlling another vote and allow them to fade back into the background of all this tension.
But things go awry when Tiffany is let in on the plan and tells Q, not wanting to leave her number one ally out of the loop. After talking with Liz one-on-one, he seems fine with the plan. Sort of. He can’t throw his game away for someone else, and if that’s where the votes are going, too bad, so sad. But it’s his leaking the plan to Hunter really stirs up the hornet’s nest because Hunter’s not about to let his ride-or-die leave the game without putting up a fight.
Rallying the majority alliance and Liz, Hunter tries to save Tevin and get the plan back on Tiffany. It’s not the right time to switch things around, and Tevin’s a great alliance member who won’t clumsily throw out their names like Tiff did. But his arguments get interrupted when Venus senses some shady stuff and crashes the meeting. In typical Venus fashion, her blunt, confrontational tactics are met with a resounding “go away” as Hunter proposes they just vote for her as a truce option nobody would be upset about.
Once again, it comes down to Charlie and Maria making a call. Do they vote for Tevin, a bigger threat with an extra vote that only gets more powerful round by round? Or do they go for Tiff, who threw out Maria’s name and has an idol? Either way, the Six is about to become the Five… again.
But none of that matters because as soon as Tribal starts, Q announces he wants to quit. Yep. No warning. No foreshadowing. Not even a hint that he was considering it. But he wants out via a unanimous vote, if only because he blames himself for the last-second chaos… or something, I guess.
Remember when he spent the entire premiere dragging Jelinsky for quitting everything and said he’d never give up? Yeah, I remember it well. Just like I remember that time he asked to be voted out for letting Yanu down in one challenge. And the time he tried to quit again, only to reveal it was a scheme to keep Kenzie feeling safe.
This man is just an enigma of quitting at this point. It’s not really clear why he’s doing this, or if it’s actually just some 4-D chess Zane Knight strategy he came up with on the spot. Regardless, Tribal quickly devolves into chaos as everyone shifts from trying to talk Q into staying to telling him to just leave and spare them all the coddling to whispering in groups about what to do about this situation. And just to seal his own fate, Q confesses to Tiff about his schemes against her, cementing his position as Bhanu 2.0.
It’s a complete disaster, a Tribal worth the hype for sure, and with multiple people in the firing line, it’s hard to tell where the votes will ultimately fall. But in the funniest outcome possible, Q doesn’t even get a single vote after his big meltdown. Is this a huge failure on his part for not getting eliminated when he explicitly asked to be? Or is this some galaxy-brained success in a plan we didn’t know about? Tune in next week to find out because the Tevin plan is the one that ultimately sticks, taking him out in an 8-2 vote with Hunter left on the outs and sure to secure the wrath of Venus for putting her name down.
Tevin was a star confessionalist, a refreshing player who came for the million rather than the experience, and his downfall was pure poetry. And for the one and only Liz of all people to spearhead that blindside? Iconic.
But after one downfall, we’re sure to get more. Because Q just tanked his game with whatever the hell that was, Venus has ousted two of her enemies thinking she’s the queen of the camp when she’s always next in line for the guillotine, and Liz just stepped up as a power player in an era where making big plays gets you nowhere but the peanut gallery.
Mistakes were made this week. Big mistakes. But as long as this cast keeps making them and going feral in the fallout, sign me up for a truly unhinged endgame.
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