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The latest episode of Survivor begins with the Edge of Extinction Isle ‘Get Back in the Game’ challenge. Several people had advantages, but the clear front runners were Rob, Tyson, and Nat until near the end when Yul managed to get almost caught up. That was a bit of a disappointment for me, so close and yet so far. I do like Tyson, but he wasn’t my favorite to get back into it. With such a close challenge, who can say if that peanut butter truly helped him or not?
Back in the game, only Denise arises as a ‘winner’s game’ threat to be voted out (as coined by Wendell in a disturbing encapsulation of modern Survivor strategy) while theoretical physical threats like Tony, Jeremy, or Kim are ignored and ‘low key’ players like Sophie or Sarah are barely mentioned. Denise enraptured the crowd with her tale of voting out Sandra, which Sophie is the first to vote as being on the ol’ Survivor ‘resume’.
Additionally, an ‘anti-low key players’ coalition forms of Jeremy, Ben, Tony, and Tyson, while Ben brings up Nick always butting in on conversations (Ben gets a lot to say this episode). This leads into a very amusing little editing montage of Nick sneaking into camera frame over and over. He becomes a threat because he’s always around, while Adam becomes a threat because he’s so sneaky.
We get some bits of misdirection eventually with Adam asking for comfort from Sophie, who seems to provide. It’s funny because we’ve seen so much incorrect interviewing from Adam over the season, but he is dead on here at Tribal when he tells us it’s Wendell or him, but maybe Wendell doesn’t know.
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So why did Wendell lose?
He was, perhaps, a bit too obvious with his connection to Jeremy, I think. While Jeremy nor Denise (as obvious threats themselves) were safe, their allies were not. Sophie started the whole ball rolling by noting the Wendell/Jeremy pair, which became an interesting parallel to Jeremy wanting to be the invisible hand behind Nick getting voted out, which was actually what happened with Sophie. But Jeremy was still tight enough with his alliance that he too voted with them to vote out Wendell.
We’ve seen a lot of negative footage from Wendell of late, leading to some perhaps unfair anger at him. I’m not sure he realized he was a target of a vote in this case, while Adam (always so paranoid) figured it out. It remains to be seen how the tangled ‘spaghetti’ (as per Sarah) of alliances will resolve soon.
We know now that there will be one more Edge challenge for people to return, and that the rest will be on the jury. I suppose that putting that information out there is better than not, and it feels like the fire tokens have yet to be fully realized. I noticed on the new sheet ‘Steal a Reward’ and that is something that should almost never be played. So perhaps it will be.
Wendell’s gone, and is it unfair for me to take that as revenge for Yul? Well I will anyhow.
Next time, it’s Nick’s duty to take revenge, Sarah says that’s a mistake brother, Adam cringes on playing with fire.
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