Survivor Season-Finale Recap: Gone With the Wind

This, right here, is why I hate the way the endgame plays out in the new era of Survivor. I’ve been saying in these recaps all season that nothing should ever be left to chance; nothing should be left to luck. That everything should be about the decisions that the players make and the consequences of those actions. Then, we see Sam and Teeny sit down to make fire. Who wins? The wind. The wind won the challenge and should now be sitting next to Sue and Rachel in the final tribal council. Sol would pipe up, “Yes, my question is for Wind. Why did you blow Teeny’s fire away from her rope and Sam’s right onto it during the clutch moment?” The wind cannot answer because it is a force of nature with no voice, but it can blow through the tops of the trees, rattling the branches and leaves, dislodging the group of bats that have been guarding the cursed immunity necklace all season, and when it does, the wind will howl something that sounds like, “Please return to a final twwwwwwooooooooooooo.”

How did we get to this final two? Well, first, there was a challenge. The final four have to do a bunch of bullshit, but the ultimate tiebreaker is they have to solve a hanging bat puzzle that was about 17 billion times closer than the taxidermy nightmare that is the immunity necklace.

When the challenge starts, everyone has to crawl under a net through the mud, and the last one to emerge is Sue. “Come on, Sue! Let’s dig!” Jeff yells at her. Um, Jeff, she is digging. She’s just seconds behind Teeny, and Sue is practically three times her age. This is what digging looks like for a 59-year-old. Give the woman a moment of peace. Ultimately, Rachel wins the immunity challenge and, back at camp, tells the foursome she’s taking Sue to the end and Sam and Teeny are making fire. This far into the finale it seems like it is Rachel’s game to lose.

At camp, Rachel, who is a huge superfan, gives Teeny a full YouTube tutorial on how to make a fire, and Teeny seems poised to win. Sam tells everyone that he has no idea how to make fire, and while they think he’s lying, he actually doesn’t. Then it all starts, the tide seems to shift, the wind is whipping up, and we get to see Sam reading a letter from his father, “[He wrote] he knew I would give it everything I have out there and that he wasn’t going to bet against me, and the thought of him rooting for me told me you’re not one to quit.” Yup. The inspirational chats. They’re coming from inside the house. This is not a good sign.

Then the Sam-making-fire montage begins, the wind starts to rustle the kindling at his knees, and Sam says, “The moment you give in to doubt is the moment you lost,” and that is the sort of refrigerator-magnet bullshit that is like fast-acting Viagra to Jeffrey Lee Probst. It was at that moment I knew that Sam was going to win the fire-making challenge.

After the pleasantries of tribal, Teeny and Sam sit down at their stations, and Teeny immediately gets a spark, immediately makes a flame, and immediately starts adding sticks to it. It’s working. But then Teeny, who doesn’t know how to do one thing properly in this game except vote incorrectly, looks at Rachel and asks, “What now?” Rachel tells her to keep adding sticks. Sam barely has a flame at this point, while Teeny has a full fire, but the wind, Sam’s close personal friend, is blowing at a bad angle for her. She’s working at it, but the elements are against her. Sam starts nursing his flame, and it’s building bigger and bigger. While it looked like a rout, it’s now a showdown, and Jeff, full of pablum and inspiration, gets all excited. Then Sam throws the rest of his kindling onto his fire in a last-ditch attempt just as, as Jeffrey says, the wind blows Teeny’s fire away from her rope and blows Sam’s fire upward toward his rope.

With that, the wind decided. The fire-making challenge was created to give people without a shot in the game one final reprieve. It was essentially created to give controversial winner Ben Driebergen a pathway to the final. I’ve always thought it was a sham. It boils the final stage of the game down to one skill, one that Sam didn’t even need to attempt before the final day, a skill he didn’t even learn better than Teeny; he just ended up in the lucky spot with, quite literally, the wind at his back. He should have been unanimously voted out by the three women at this point in the game and shouldn’t have been there at all.

Teeny says she’ll be haunted by this moment for the rest of her life, and I will be haunted right there with her. We get a great speech from her at the final tribal about how Sam is the guy she always wanted to be in school, the one who all the teachers loved, who was good at sports, who got lots of romantic attention from the ladies, and his confidence (some would say arrogance) may be a little undeserved. He’s the kind of guy who it seems that the world bends around him to make sure that he has an easy path to victory. And here it is, happening again, when even the forces of nature are saying, “No, Teeny. Not today. You’re not good enough,” and while she might not have had the best game, she definitely deserved to see a world where every accommodation wasn’t made to someone like Sam.

His victory is so annoying. “Find a way to find a way!” he shouts as if Joe Rogan is right there in his ear. Yeah, find a way to control the weather, I guess. Who are we all supposed to turn into? Storm in X-Men? Now, one of the final three is a man who has never eaten watermelon until he went across the world and someone forced him to try it, and he didn’t even really like it that much.

And the inspiration starts again. The jury tells us that Sam is a pariah with a scrappy game and that he lasted no matter what. No, Sam was so bad at everything — winning challenges, finding idols, forming friendships — that while people talked about him as a threat, there was always a bigger one. In his Final Tribal, he’ll try to show that he made Rachel look like a bigger threat on purpose so people wouldn’t have to look at him. Dude, no one was looking at you because you had a horrible track record.

When all the jury say who they’re rooting for, we get Teeny, Kyle, and Sierra choosing Sam; Sol, Andy, and Genevieve picking Rachel; and Caroline and Gabe choosing Sue. Now, I’m sure the producers sat everyone down and made them give reasons why each of the three should win, and they only chose these answers, so we’re being manipulated by the edit, but it seems like they’re creating a showdown between Sam and Rachel, which it really should be.

Sue shocks everyone when she tells them that she’s 59 on that day and that she beat all of them. Kyle is still mad that she thinks she could have beaten him in a one-on-one competition on the barrel challenge. She’s twice his age! That it was even a showdown is amazing.

That’s when I started thinking about the kinds of games that the jury rewards. Rachel absolutely ran the show, she won challenges, she found idols and advantages, and she might have been on the wrong side of some votes, but, as she said, she got the alliance of Andy, Teeny, Sue, and Caroline together and that took her to where she is sitting at the end. Yes, Andy flipped on her, and Sam was part of Operation: Italy, but it wasn’t Sam’s plan, and even after they executed it, Rachel’s idol play at the final tribal sent Andy home, setting the stage for her to decimate nearly all of them until the wind stepped in and said, “Um, maybe not.” But this is the kind of game we often see from men and the kind of game that is usually rewarded by men, especially Jeff. It’s muscular, it’s active, it’s risk-taking. But now people like Kyle, who voted for Sam, see Rachel and are mad that they got outgunned by a girl, and they don’t want to vote for her.

Sam doesn’t like Rachel’s game either, but I think it’s because a woman played it. He says that her getting an advantage from Sol, buying the right item at the auction, and solving a puzzle on a journey was just luck. Um, no. She got that from Sol because he liked and trusted her. That’s called a social game. She got the idol under everyone’s noses, which is skill. She had to solve a puzzle before it was yanked into the ocean. Rachel deserved all of those. The only other player with as many advantages as Rachel was Rome — look where he is, and look where Rachel is. Even if she got them by luck, she deployed them with skill to save herself and optimize them. As she says in her final speech, everyone thought she was going home and eulogized her to the jury, and then she got up at her own funeral, played an immunity idol, and not only saved herself but apparently pissed off the wind enough that it would take Sam’s side in the fire-making challenge.

I would say Sam played like last year’s winner, Kenzie Petty, because he couldn’t manage to win anything. She was the underdog who made it all the way to the end as well and won. Still, she also did it by making friends and giving her heart to every person she played with, whereas Sam pissed off at least Teeny and probably a few others, including Rachel, whose game he downplayed at every turn. I’m not saying one game is better than the other, and we have had players of different genders who have played it successfully. Still, the stench wafting off the jury is that they aren’t impressed by Rachel’s dominance, and they are impressed with Sam’s pluck, and that really gets my goat. (In this case, the goat is not Sue because she had just as much right to be there as the other two, whereas Teeny would have been a classic goat.)

Luckily, there was just no denying that Rachel played a dominant game post-merge. As she said, when she woke up to Sierra being voted out and realized she had no friends, she figured out how to play Survivor right quick. She did everything you’re supposed to do in the game: win challenges, find idols, make big moves, and create strong allies, including one she took to the final two. I don’t see how anyone who likes a muscular game of Survivor (and even some of those who don’t) could vote against her. I’m glad that while Sam got the edit of playing the underdog game, Rachel proved what it takes to really win this game, and she’s a great winner of what was possibly the best season yet of the New Era.