“Earning the merge,” as Jeffrey Lee Probst loves to call it in the new era, is now a difference without a distinction. Don’t get me wrong: I loved all of the changes they made this season as they brought the tribes together, but once everyone is on the same beach, there’s only one person immune, and they’re voting as one big tribe, then that is the merge, whether or not they’re wearing a buff to prove that they’ve made it. Can’t we just call the merge a merge?
This chaotic episode starts with Mitch, Chrissy, Cedrek, and Sai returning to camp to talk about the vote at the end of last week. Usually, this is my least favorite part of the episode, but it did give us the answers to some very valid questions we had after last week. Cedrek says he wants to talk, and Sai immediately tells him that she will talk to Chrissy and Mitch in the morning because she no longer trusts him, believing that he voted for her. He then explains that Bianca told him about losing her vote right before Tribal Council, giving him just enough time to grab Chrissy, tell her to vote for Bianca, and then go off for their fateful meeting with Jeff. He clarifies that Mitch also didn’t know. When Sai finds out that Mitch voted for her, she then flies off the handle at him because, well, Sai what you will, but Sai is gonna Sai. But also, yeah, it sucks to know you were originally the plan until Bianca screwed it up.
The next morning, the boats pick everyone up and bring them to one big beach so that they can start preparation for the merge, even though it’s not the merge but it is the merge but it’s not. When they arrive on the beach, they read a sign that says the following day will have a “grueling” challenge, but there is an advantage hidden on the beach. Everyone scrambles looking for it, but Charity is following Sai to make sure she doesn’t get it. She spots it and starts running for it, but Sai passes her, grabs the weird little bottle thingy sitting on a pedestal, and gets the advantage.
Once that’s dispensed with, we can then get on with the greatest discussion we have this season, which is, How much milk can you drink, bro? I thought it was bad when we had to deal with Charlie and his Taylor Swift obsession every episode in Survivor 46. We already know that David consumes at least a gallon of the moo juice a day, and now Joe admits that he has the exact same habit. Normally, I would agree with Shauhin that milk is a “7-year-old’s drink,” but have you seen David and Joe? Is that their secret? If I drink a gallon of milk every day, I can look like a brick shithouse with man-tits like Arnold Schwarzenegger and a waist as tiny as Snooki? Get me a gallon!
I do have a little problem with David and Joe and their alliance of the strong. They want to get together with Eva, Kyle, and Shauhin to try to rule the game. “We’re no longer the meat shields of Survivor, right?” he says in his confessional. “We’re getting all the strong people together and we’re winning Survivor 48. From now on, if you’re lying, if you’re manipulating, if you’re a strategist, you’re a puzzle solver, you’re a social player, now you’re the target.” He then adds, “Let’s put someone on the podium who deserves to be there.”
I absolutely hate this way of thinking and this way of playing the game. Think of Survivor like a heist. In a heist movie, like The Italian Job, Mark Wahlberg gets together a driver, a thief, a safecracker, some muscle, and a random girl so it’s not all dudes. This alliance is like if Mark Wahlberg got together only a bunch of muscle and they just lumbered their way to the gold. Well, they do have the random girl, but otherwise, it’s all people with the same skill, and I hate to break it to them, but not all the challenges are based on strength. The minute there is a puzzle or endurance challenge, the rest of the tribe will gun for the strong dudes, and that’s why you need diversity.
The thing I hate even more is that they’re trying to play a dishonest game with loyalty and morals. As Jeff points out to David at Tribal Council, that’s really easy for him to say considering he’s never been to Tribal Council before. (It’s insane that we are at the merge-not-merge-but-merge-but-not and there are still people who haven’t been to Tribal.) The biggest problem with this strategy is that it only works if everyone is honest and loyal. Like in a heist movie, if one of them is a dishonest rat, he’ll sell out the whole crew to get ahead. And need I remind David, Joe, and the rest of the goody-goodies that Kyle is in their tribe? Not only has he been lying to everyone about his profession since episode one, he’s lying to the whole group about his secret allegiance to Kamilla. That’s why Kyle and Kamilla will more likely go further than the strong men, because they’re willing to be deceitful. Also, the very idea that there is a more deserving way of winning Survivor is bullshit. You win by making it to the end, period, and everyone who manages that is deserving, no matter how they went about doing it. (Remind me of this when I freak out at the end of this season when Cedrek goes home with an enormous check.)
Then, everyone goes to the challenge and Jeff tells us how it is different. There will still be two teams chosen entirely by luck (vomit), and the winning team gets the merge feast and the losing team gets nothing. But this season, the winning team doesn’t get immunity, they win the right to compete in an individual challenge, and the winner of that will be the only person immune. This is so much better than the winning team “earning” the merge and immunity, which means only half of the players are up for elimination and the reason they are in that half has mostly to do with luck.
Sai’s advantage as the 13th player is she gets to sit out of the team challenge and just compete for immunity. The real advantage, however, is that she doesn’t have to dive into the mud pit and then feel gray dirt trickling down her ass crack for the rest of the afternoon. When they cut to everyone at the end of the challenge, they’re all in different shades of black and white, covered in mud, and there is Sai with her green tank top, practically in Technicolor. It was like watching Pleasantville.
The first challenge is crawling through mud, scaling a wall, and then doing a puzzle. The second challenge is the classic holding a ball (ball!) on a long length of pole. At one point, Jeff shouts, “That’s a lot of pole you’re balancing,” and, well, it is nice of Jeff to talk about how I look in a pair of gray sweatpants. Anyway, the purple team wins the challenge, sending Mary, Chrissy, Kamilla, Kyle, David, and Star to join the completely clean Sai for immunity. After a showdown between Star and Kyle, it’s the liar-liar-pants-on-fire-pretending-to-be-honorable Kyle who takes the W, but does not get to take a shower until after everyone eats at the merge feast.
After they’re all rid of the mud, they start talking game, and three distinct names emerge. Charity is one, for no reason other than people don’t seem to like her and there is a vague unease about how she’s playing the game. The next is Sai, for no reason other than people don’t seem to like her and there is a vague unease about how she’s playing the game. Finally, there is Eva, only because of her close ties to Joe and that she has an idol everyone knows about. This quickly dies, however, because it seems like going too hard for the first group vote. I don’t love that this is all coming down to which of two unlikable women is going home when someone like Cedrek, who is so careless with his gameplay he puts everyone else in danger, is still in the mix, but whatever. Also, not a single person was like, “Let’s go after the big dudes,” which is annoying, mostly because I don’t like how the big dudes are so holier-than-thou.
What’s strange is that the voting blocs, as we’ve come to think of them post–Millennials vs. Gen X, don’t really seem to be emerging. We know that Mitch and Charity are a duo, and we know that Joe and Eva are a very solid duo. Then there is the “strong man” alliance mentioned above. There’s also the New Vula group of Kamilla, Kyle, Joe, and Shauhin. We also see the Old Vula group of Mary, Sai, and Cedrek talking on the beach about how they’re voting, but we know they all hate one another and don’t want to work together. There’s also the Kyle and Kamilla connection, which seems to be the strongest of all because no one knows it’s happening.
When we get to tribal, there is no indication of how the vote is going to go, but everyone seems calm, like they know they have the votes, though we haven’t seen how a coalition of the willing has come together to oust one of the three (but really two) candidates whose names have been bandied about. Other than people telling Eva that Sai is gunning for her, strangely we see no one approach Charity or Sai to tell them that they may be in danger that night.
Charity is ultimately the one who goes home, getting seven of the 13 votes. Sai gets five, and Cedrek gets one from Sai, which makes no sense, but I love that she hates this man so much that she voted for him regardless of how the numbers were going to go. As she should! This man is not her friend, and the two times he saved her do not outweigh the two times he voted for her. Anyway, none of the blocs that we’re seeing voted together, except for Kyle and Kamilla and Mitch and Charity (RIP). Eva voted for Sai and Joe voted for Charity. For the “strong men,” Eva voted with Shauhin and David for Sai, while Joe and Kyle voted for Charity. For the Old Vula, Mary and Cedrek voted together for Charity, keeping Sai, but Sai voted for Cedrek. The New Vula all voted together against Charity, except for Shauhin, who wanted to get Sai out. I don’t think all of this alliance fuzziness is a bad thing, especially because none of the original tribes voted as blocs, which means the old tribal lines are officially gone. There’s nothing worse than a season where we watch the same boring groups gun for each other.
Right now, none of it makes any sense. It would seem more people chose Charity over Sai because they didn’t want the original Civa (which was orange and consisted of Charity, Chrissy, David, Kamilla, Kyle, and Mitch) to have all of their members. Okay. Fair. But when we’re watching a show that is presenting us with a merge while telling us that there isn’t a merge but it is though they say it isn’t, there isn’t much sense to be found.