Survivor Recap: A Drop in the Bucket

Survivor is getting so meta that Donald Trump might stick it with an antitrust lawsuit because he inadvertently thinks it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s company. The challenge — the Survivor classic of holding up a heavy bucket and not letting it drop — goes a record-breaking length, and Kyle jokes that as soon as it’s over, Jeff will say, “Survivor is hard! Apply now.” Jeff is so into it that it’s how they do the commercial, right there with the casting website at the bottom of the screen. As all the strong-guy contestants are talking smack to one another (barf), Jeff says they’re going to cue a montage of the people talking smack, and Shauhin pipes in with the grunting tribal voices that punctuate so many scenes on this show.

Honestly, I loved it. Everyone watching Survivor is a huge fan, and Jeff has made sure everyone playing is a huge fan, so having fun at the show’s expense is cute. What I don’t like is that the show has become repetitive. It’s a tricky balance. Any good reality show should feel like a ritual, like attending church. It’s the same beats at the same time; we take comfort in knowing the words of all the prayers, and we know what is going to happen next. It feels safe. But all great shows need to change, evolve, and improve upon themselves so that, like so many times in church growing up, the repetition doesn’t cause the parishioners to zone out.

New Era Survivor is falling dangerously close to that path. It’s the same number of tribes every season with the same number of players. The merge falls at the same place; the fire-making challenge is a lock at the final four. These players, all superfans, know exactly what to expect. This week’s challenge is one of those parts of Survivor that have come to be expected, and it’s one I wish they would get rid of.

The challenge is not just holding up the bucket; it’s also divided into two groups of six, and each group competes for individual immunity for whoever in the group lasts the longest. The person who lasts the longest overall wins a reward and their grouping and goes to tribal second, meaning whoever is voted off from the first group doesn’t make it to the jury.

How do they decide between the two groups? You guessed it: LUCK!! Fantastic. Ugh, not really. You can tell that even the players may not like it. At her tribal council, Eva says, “It is really crazy how a random rock draw can pull all that out.” At his separate tribal council, David says, “Under different circumstances, this could be totally different, right? If you grab a different color rock, you could be here a long time.” Exactly. The defining moment of this episode, the thing that determines who goes home, is not the challenge, the alliances, or any conversation that happens on any beach at any time. The thing that decides who goes home is the freakin’ rock draw, which we don’t even see.

This challenge could easily be corrected, and I’ll tell you how in a minute. With the rock draw, we end up with two teams: Orange is Star, Joe, Mitch, Chrissy, Eva, and Sai; Purple is Kyle, Shauhin, Cedrek, Mary, David, and Kamilla. Pretty quickly, the weak players are out and the guys (plus Eva) remaining are all so jacked they look like a photo shoot for the International Male catalogue. (That joke goes out to my mustached doppelgänger Thomas because I know he stashed those under his mattress too.) Immediately, the guys all start shit-talking one another. David is not only flexing his biceps but also talking about how he can last at the challenge all day. “How’s second place going to look on you?” he asks Kyle. Ugh, I find all this macho-man bloviating so alienating, especially because it keeps coming alongside the discussion about how a “deserving player” will win. Yeah, anyone who says that is strong means that a strong player is going to win. I hate to break it to you, but there are more ways to win Survivor than just being strong and dominating challenges. Do I need to introduce you to Tina Wesson?

The showdown comes not for an individual immunity but for the reward. Predictably, Joe and David each win immunity in their groups and then battle it out to see who gets a PB&J lunch. David eventually wins, and for the whole challenge, I was thinking, These strong guys are doing so much and talking so much crap. I hope someone votes a strong person off tonight. But that’s impossible. Why? Because the strongest person was going to win in both groups, which just proves the show prioritizes brute strength over any other quality.

Like I said, this could easily be corrected. What if Jeff said, “There will be two tribal councils tonight, each with a group of six. The first six people who drop their buckets are in one group. There is no reward and no immunity; any of those six could go home. The final six all get a reward, whoever lasts the longest wins immunity, and one person from that group is also going home. That’s how you do it on Survivor.” This way, the show is no longer prioritizing the strong; you’re making sure one of them goes home. That means the second-strongest guy is vulnerable, whereas now, the second-strongest guy is safe. Also, the person who doesn’t make the jury is one of those who did the worst in this challenge. It had nothing to do with luck; it had something to do with strength, which is at least one of the core pillars of doing well in this game. (Not the most important, mind you, but definitely one of them.) Also, think about how much harder everyone would have fought to be in that second group? Now we have a challenge, as the Jeffrey Lee Probst windup doll likes to say.

Based on this challenge, the groups would have been weaklings Cedrek, Star, Chrissy, Sai, Kamilla, and Mary in one group and Eva, Joe, Mitch, Kyle, David, and Shauhin in the strongman group. The strongies would probably have just kicked off Mitch, so that doesn’t add too much more excitement. However, removing Mitch from this group would have caused one of the strong five to vote out on their own. That creates some potential for real disruption and eliminates the possibility of the strong people banding together and boringly trudging to the finale side by gym-toned side. But what would the weakies have done? Cedrek, Sai, and Mary could have reformed to create some kind of alliance, or we could have had the Sai-vs.-Cedrek showdown that has been brewing all season.

Both these scenarios would have been much more interesting than what we got: two safe, easy votes that didn’t do much to move the game forward. As much as I’m enjoying this season (yes, it’s sometimes hard to tell from these recaps, but I love Survivor like Swifties love being wrong about numerology), all this tough-guy talk about loyalty and honor is really getting on my nerves. Same with Chrissy, who says, “The little guys like me, the older person, not so great in challenges. I have to somehow find my way and figure out how to get to the top; it’s not going to be loyalty and honesty.” Exactly right. Most people watching the show and living vicariously through it do not have the gym and chocolate-milk-drinking regimens of Joe and David. We’re all more like Chrissy and want to see someone rewarded for playing a game we too could play.

In the Orange group, it comes down to either Sai or Mitch. People don’t like Sai because she’s erratic at camp, she drives everyone a little crazy, and no one can really trust her. Because she’s so unpredictable, no one would want her on the jury because who knows how she’s going to vote? She would probably vote for Cedrek again just to drive home how much she hates him. The case for Mitch is that he has a Block-a-Vote, is good at challenges, makes friends easily, and has a good story. I think Sai, who eventually goes home in a unanimous vote, is the right choice here. But since we see it coming, it is a bit of a letdown. I will say (pun intended) that I will miss Sai. She is a terrible player who doesn’t deserve to win, but the Real Housewives fan in me loves the drama and uncertainty she brings.

Things are a bit more exciting on the Purple squad, where Kyle and Kamilla, the secret duo I am not so secretly rooting for, continue to come up with some ingenious gameplay. They decide they’re going to tell David they think Shauhin has an idol in the hopes of flipping him and getting out Shauhin, who is technically in Kyle’s alliance but Kyle doesn’t trust him. So Kyle is working against one of his own using a secret partnership. This is The Traitors behavior, and we love to see it. The other possible vote is Cedrek because he has no one else in the tribe. Heck, he doesn’t really have anyone at all because even Sai, whom he saved twice, hates him so much that she voted for him in cursive so he will never figure her out.

While I always hope for some last-minute excitement, it looks like K-Squared can’t convince David to go rogue quite yet, and they end up sending Cedrek home. This poor man gets five votes, and his name is spelled four different ways but none of them is correct. Can’t they have a list of the names and how they’re all spelled in the voting booth? He’s already going home; let the man do it with some dignity. But apparently, dignity isn’t what is important here. All we really care about is strength … and loyalty … and honor. Oh, and let’s not forget luck. Luck is apparently what matters most.