Survivor Recap: Chickens Out

I can’t believe I am about to say this, but what an expertly crafted episode of Survivor. There were surprises, a twist that wasn’t supremely annoying and paid off immediately, and a tribal council that was tense but also made total sense. My hats off to everyone involved, but not to the cast, who sent three poor chickens to Jeffrey Lee Probst’s Chicken Sanctuary and Petting Zoo.

The episode starts off with the customary check-in at the tribe who voted off a member at the last tribal, and it’s just Rome being a crazy jerk all over again and Genevieve playing everyone around her like so many fiddles. How was she invisible for three episodes and then roared to the forefront? After that, things get unexpected quickly. Everyone walks right into a challenge. Say what? And it’s not even an immunity challenge. A reward challenge? How retro! What are we going to do next? Reelect George W. Bush?

Jeff announces that there’s a big twist, and since all the tribes saw that there were only blue and yellow mats, they probably thought that they were going to combine into two tribes. Wrong! I love it when Survivor keeps us guessing. They draw to form two tribes of seven, and whoever wins gets the reward of hanging out at Jeffrey Lee Probst’s Chicken Sanctuary and Petting Zoo, where good things (and sometimes corporate sponsorships) happen.

The challenge is to do a bunch of stuff and then get balls in a basket, and the team that wins is Sue, Kyle, Teeny, Sam, Rachel, Tiyana, and Caroline. At the sanctuary, the bus-throwing starts immediately. Teeny tells them all that she is at the bottom because they took out Kishan. Sue comes after Sam and Sierra about how they may be running things on their tribe. Most aggressively, Tiyana tells everyone that Gabe is always hunting for idols. He played an idol at their first tribal, and since everyone else in his tribe is at the reward, he’s probably back at camp hunting right now. As soon as she said that, I steeled myself, my loins were girded, and yet there was no flash to Gabe back at camp hunting for an idol.

In fact, there is no idol hunting this whole episode. That’s what I love about this twist. We get to see a challenge, which is fairly exciting, and then we get to see the players talk about how they perceive the game, and we get to see how they are setting things up for the merge. Who needs idols when we get to see these blossoming relationships that will inevitably pay off in future episodes? Then, when the disparate members got back to their tribes, we get to see the effect this reward has on all of them. Excellent work, Survivor crew. In the new era, they love to invent twists and keep them around forever. I don’t know that we need this merged reward every year, but I would definitely be down for more.

We also get to see what’s happening back at camp. We mostly focus on Lavo (red like lava) because Teeny is the only one gone, and Rome is on another tear trying to totally upend his game. Dude, just let it ride for a minute. Playing so hard and so aggressively is turning everyone off. This time, he takes Sol aside as a way to bond with him and get Teeny out, but he blabs all the information he has and then totally misinterprets his conversation with Genevieve, the one person who seems to want to keep working with him. She verifies with the most cursory of chats with Sol. She says that if he isn’t telling her the truth, then his usefulness drops and his danger increases. Yes! This is exactly why you can’t play with someone so erratic, as Teeny reminds them when she returns to camp and finds it a complete emotional shambles.

There are some relationship fireworks over at Tuku (blue like Joni Mitchell’s best album) when Sue comes back and tells Gabe that there are tire tracks on the back of his neck from the bus that Tiyana drove over him like he’s Regina George. Caroline convinces her to apologize to him because she wants to keep Tuku strong after the merge. When will these tribes figure out that it almost never works? Players should find the people they actually like and want to work with. For Caroline, it seems like it would be Rachel and Teeny, whom she hit it off with at the sanctuary. Stop triaging this tribe and just hold on for one more day, things will go your way. Hold on for one more day. Sorry, Wilson Phillips took over. I meant she should hold on for the merge. So Tiyana apologizes but doesn’t give Gabe the full story, which he gleans from even the most cursory of chats with Sue. Why is everyone such bad liars this season?

Over at Gata (yellow-like baby chicks), the big thing is where Sierra sits in the tribe of five. She is between Sam and Andy — which seems like a close pairing, even though Sam never told Andy about his idol — and Anika and Rachel, who have named themselves the Breadwinners and seem even closer. Even before the immunity challenge, Sam is trying to get her to vote out Anika and work with him and Andy, but Sierra seems more inclined to work with the girls. I have always thought she should go with Sam, who openly tells her that she is his No. 1. If she goes with the girls, it seems like they would kick her out if they had to. What I don’t get about the Sam and Sierra dynamic is that for two players so closely aligned, they seem like they want to play different games. You can really like someone in your tribe but also not play with them, something that these two rumored lovebirds seem to forget.

Speaking of birds, Gata brings their three chickens to the challenge and tells Jeff that they want to negotiate with him. They say not everyone on the tribe is comfortable killing the chickens and they aren’t laying eggs, so they’d rather just get a bunch of eggs and give the chickens back like an ugly sweater your Aunt Nancy got you for Christmas. Jeff takes their gift receipt and negotiates them from 24 eggs down to 18, which seems like a decent deal. I just hope tribes don’t start trying this all the time. “Jeff, none of us watched a YouTube video on how to work a Hawaiian sling, so we would like to trade it in for half a fish, a roll of toilet paper, and a kind word from you?”

I’m obsessed with these homeless chickens, though. Will they hold onto them and use them again for Survivor 48? Are they going to give them to some local Fijians? Are they going to set them up at Ponderosa and give them their own TikTok show? We need closure on the chickens! When one of the dispossessed poultry starts pecking at Sierra’s toe, Jeff tells the tribe, “That’s what family members left on the side of the road do.” I think this is potentially the only time that Jeff has made me genuinely laugh. Good one, JLP.

For the challenge itself, everyone has to drag all of these nets full of coconuts and sandbags through an obstacle course, throw them at a puzzle, knock them down, and build them back up again. Oh, an obstacle course followed by a puzzle. I haven’t seen that since … last episode and … the episode before that and … the episode before that and … the episode before that and … how many episodes in are we, because we’ve seen it in every one? I always love when Jeff makes unintentional double entendres during the challenges (they usually have to do with “balls”), and he had a great one this week. “It’s hard to get those bottom blocks off,” he shouts. Oh, Jeff, I’ve spent my entire gay career trying to get bottoms’ blocks off, and you’re right; it’s nearly impossible.

With all that we saw going on at Lavo, I thought for sure they were going to lose, but at the very last second, they pull it out and we have to wait yet another week to fiddle while Rome burns. With the reward challenge and all the tribe check-ins, there is barely time left in the episode for a scramble, and it turns out we don’t really need one. Andy proves himself to be a master manipulator by figuring out that Anika and Rachel want him gone, so he plays dead and tells them he will go along with whatever fake plan they feed him. It turns out he didn’t need to do this, but it’s nice to show Andy, who seemed DOA at that first challenge, learn what it takes to play the game.

We all know that Sierra is basically deciding if it’s going to be Andy or Anika that goes home, and the edit makes it look like she’s going to convince Sam to give up Andy and stick with her and the girls. However, this is a lot harder because Anika lost her vote on a journey a few episodes back. If Sam really wants to push it, he could force a tie, which could mean rocks. He could also just play his idol for Andy, since it expires after this tribal anyway, but he decides he doesn’t want Andy not to trust him because he never told him about it.

As everyone is walking down the beach with their torches, I honestly have no idea where the vote is going to go, and that is a wonderful feeling. But the episode has really earned it. We know what tribe dynamics are at play, we know there is an idol that could be used, and we know that there are a number of possibilities, all of them dramatic; it’s just a question of which one it’s going to be. When Jeff asks if anyone has an immunity idol and Sam doesn’t play his, I know for sure he’s convinced Sierra to go with him, because the only way he’s holding onto it is if he knows the outcome of the vote. Yes, it’s Anika, who sore-losers her way out of tribal, showing that Andy’s ploy worked; she was truly surprised, and so were all of us sitting at home. As I said, a perfectly constructed and rather rewarding episode of Survivor. Well, for everyone but the chickens.