Every week here at Inside Survivor we will be gathering a selection of behind the scenes information relating to the latest episode. Most of this information comes from the exit interviews of the recently eliminated castaway. The information is linked to the original sources within the article, but the majority comes from Parade, People, Entertainment Weekly and Xfinity – with a little bit of Redmond sourced info sprinkled on top.
Monica’s Downfall
Monica Padilla was the first person from the original Bayon tribe to be voted out of the game, and by the hands of her own alliance mates. But how did it all go down? Was the edit completely accurate? Was Monica voted out because of an argument about clams and the suggestion of an all girls alliance? Or was there more happening behind the scenes?
The Purple Edit – sources say that shortly after the Day 7 tribe swap, Monica stopped being interviewed by production. While other contestants were interviewed each day, Monica apparently went without an interview for consecutive days. This is noteworthy if true because players are interviewed nearly every day. It is extremely rare for someone to go without an interview for more than two days in a row.
Challenge Throw? – It has been speculated that Bayon threw the immunity challenge. Monica has mentioned this in some of her exit interviews. Even Jeremy seemed to hint at this in a post-episode tweet – which was subsequently retweeted by Stephen. It could explain Jeremy choosing to sit out of the challenge, and also Stephen’s epic blunder when he hit the Angkor tribe’s target.
Between the lack of interviews and the implication the challenge might have been thrown, there are reasonable grounds to believe that Monica might have been set-up to be voted out. Obviously, the ultimate decision is in the hands of the castaways playing the game, but a little bit of a push in the right direction has been a part of Survivor since season one.
Girls Alliance – in the edited episode, the sequence of events showed Monica approaching Kimmi about a potential girls alliance after the immunity challenge. It was this conversation that triggered Kimmi into action and set in motion the events that led to Monica’s elimination. But did this conversation really take place post-challenge? Apparently, this talk happened the day before, and the discussions to vote out Monica had been held before the challenge.
Clams – was the ocean really depleted? Well, there was definitely fewer food sources in the sea due to Season 32 having filmed in the same location just weeks before and apparently production had to replenish it.
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Monica implied production had a hand in her being voted out… Maybe, maybe not, we’ll most likely never know…
However, if production was setting her up to be voted out, wouldn’t she be interviewed more, rather than less?
Not sure, but that’d be my guess.
That being said, I’m pretty sure they threw the challenge (or didn’t try too hard). Jeremy sitting out didn’t make sense. Stephen didn’t seem to get a lot of flack for his big blunder… Even this week he joked about it a lot on social media, that kinda goes against his personality (had it really been unintentional, he’d still be embarrassed about it even months after the facts).
I guess the implication would be that production stopped interviewing her because they thought she was uninteresting. Then when an opportunity arose to potentially see her eliminated they helped push it along. Two separate events.
[…] new news from remarkable Survivor spoiler Redmond (a.k.a. Martin Holmes) on his site Inside Survivor suggests prolongation might not have disposed that Monica was voted out. The news cites inside […]