‘Survivor’ Recap, Ep. 9: The Curse of the Fake Immunity Idol

Yay! I get to dog on Jeff Probst for more of his silly antics! Hurray for me! Well, as much as I love it, I also kind of hate it because it means an otherwise standard episode of Survivor was made that much worse by Jeff, my favorite target, who has been wearing the same shirt since the Bush administration.

It starts at the challenge, the classic in which players have to hold their body weight hoisted in a bucket, and the last man standing — and this is a challenge made for men — gets immunity. (Apparently, the challenge is called “Wrist Assured,” and according to this fan wiki, several women have won but only because the last man and the last woman each won individual immunity. Monica Culpepper is the only woman to win the challenge solo, way back in Blood vs. Water, and she was only up against two men.) Mr. Jeff, as Jonathan always calls him, says this is the point in the game where he usually asks people to sit out the challenge to earn rice, but this time, it’s going to be different; he’s going to make a side bet. If five people think they can outlast him in the challenge and they do, then they get the rice. If he outlasts even one of those players, they don’t get the rice.

Jeff says this whole thing was Jimmy Fallon’s idea, and I don’t mind it so much in theory. Jeff says more than 90 percent of people polled on The Tonight Show wanted to see Jeff play. But we don’t want to see him play just a challenge; we want him to play a whole season. We want him out in the cold, sleeping under a leaky tarp, getting yelled at by the host, starving himself, trying to form alliances and decipher impossible twists. When Jeff says, “That’s how we do it on Survivor,” we want Jeff to understand exactly how it is they do it on Survivor. Based on how he did in the challenge, he does not, in fact, know how they do it on Survivor.

The real problem here is that Jeff once again makes the proceedings all about himself. (There’s an entire article about how this is happening more and more and exactly why it’s a problem.) First, it was the impressions, then it was the rap, then it was his bonding sesh with Zac Brown, and now here he is making the challenge Jeff-centric when we could be hearing from the players. Usually, I root for someone in a challenge, but this time I don’t care about the outcome for immunity; I just want to see Jeff embarrassed. The best part of the challenge is when everyone is shit-talking Jeff the way he always does the contestants, and we get a montage of all the terrible things Jeff has said to people who’ve done badly. Of course, the first three, the meanest comments of the bunch, are all solidly directed at women. We don’t see the targets of some of the insults, and while one is aimed at a tribe composed entirely of men, I would venture to guess most of those targets have two X chromosomes.

Anyway, Joe predictably wins a challenge based on upper-body strength, and Joe, Jonathan, Ozzy, and Tiff all outlast Jeff so they win their rice. (They bargained to get the number for the side bet down to four. What, was Jeff not going to play in the challenge? Jonathan probably could have talked him into a one-on-one.) But a majority of people outlast Jeff, including Aubry and Christian, and while they are both several decades younger, I would be smarting if I were Jeff.

Jeff says that Joe, as the winner, has to send someone off on a journey. He asks for volunteers and then has the volunteers square off in a game of rock, paper, scissors, and Christian is chosen. I kind of hate this method. Joe is someone who is all about strength, but he’s leaving it up to fate to decide rather than being strong by taking a stand and making a choice. RPS is the easy way out. Everyone is worried that Christian may come back with an advantage because they’re thinking of voting him out. Well, if Joe had just used that noodle of his, he could have picked someone else, but no. He was too fried from holding a bucket in the air and humiliating Jeff. Okay, since my main objective of this entire episode was achieved thanks to Joe, I think I can forgive him.

That said, I absolutely love this journey. It’s one they’ve deployed a few times over the past several seasons, where a person is on a barge and has to do a puzzle while weights tied to ropes go over the side. They act as a kind of timer where, if the last weight is dropped, it takes the puzzle with it and the person loses. This is so much better than watching sand go through the hourglass like it’s the days of our lives. You can hear the splash of the weight and see the ropes unspooling. It’s inherently cinematic and visual, especially when we follow the weights under the ocean and see a shark in the distance and then, right behind that, Zac Brown is still underwater, spear hunting. He never went home! Hi, Zac! Bring me back some sea bass. Also, the contestant can hear those things too, which gets their adrenaline pumping, letting the panic set in and making the challenge that much harder. So hard, in fact, that Christian loses.

The advantage is, again, thanks to Jimmy Fallon. He calls it “One in the Urn,” which just makes me think of “the shocker.” If Christian had won, he would have gotten to place one vote in the urn for that tribal council right at the challenge. It’s basically an extra vote you have to use immediately. On the hierarchy of advantages, an extra vote is already at the bottom, and this one having a time limit places it even lower. If advantages were fruit salad, this would be cantaloupe. The real twist here is a disadvantage because, in losing, Christian has to take an envelope back to camp and read its contents in front of his tribe mates. The letter says that Christian lost and that at tribal that night he has to vote for himself. This is even worse than losing a vote because it seeds the pot for other people voting him out, penalizing him for losing at a side quest he was chosen to go on by luck. (Sure, he volunteered, but still.) I think the danger of losing this challenge far outweighs the advantage from winning it.

Christian does, in fact, end up going home, and even though the edit tried to make us think there were some other options, I think his fate was sealed. Was it sealed because of his loss and eventual vote against himself? No, I think it was actually secured by his closest ally, Rick Devens, and his stunt at last episode’s tribal council with the fake immunity idol. While it made for great television, everyone is mad about it and they’re all gunning for him. He doesn’t seem to care because he thinks, correctly, that no one will really vote for him because they think it’s a real idol. This will get him through this tribal council, but what about the next one?

Devens’s biggest problem is the same one he had last time he played: No one trusts him because he’s so erratic, so he has few allies. Now, he has lied about the idol being real, has lied about certainly playing it this episode, and will continue to lie as long as it exists in the game. It is the fruit of the poisoned tree. Eventually, they’re going to find out the truth. Either he plays it and Jeff says it’s fake and then everyone is even more mad when they discover his string of lies, or he really needs it one week and doesn’t play it and everyone will know he was punking them like Ashton Kutcher in the aughts. This fake idol is a ticking time bomb, and if he were smart, he would have come back from tribal, said “Guys, I was worried and I put this idol there in case things went bad, but it’s fake,” and thrown it in the fire before Jeff did. Also, Joe even told him he wasn’t going to vote for him, and I believe Joe. I think he didn’t even need to use it. Because they didn’t change their votes, I think people would have been slightly annoyed, as they are at Rizo not shutting up, but not hyperannoyed, as Cirie is when Emily tries to teach her how to cook rice. Cirie has cooked so much rice at this point in her Survivor tenure that she has a side hustle at Panda Express.

Now, everyone is gunning for Rick but scared of his idol. So what do they do? They go after his closest ally, Christian. The Captain America alliance of Joe, Jonathan, and Stephenie is already after him, thinking he’s shifty and a good replacement for Devens. Then Christian sits down in the hammock with Cirie, who is good with literally everyone left in the game, and says his idea is to get rid of Ozzy. She gets right up off that hammock, sending Christian ass over teakettle into the sand, and points her finger in his face and says, “Don’t you come for my husband!” Not really. Of course she doesn’t. She says what Cirie always says when she hears a bullshit plan she’s not going along with: “Interestinggggggggg.” If you hear Cirie say that, your ass is boiled like a pot full of rice. Cirie, of course, knows the Captains America are going for Christian, and she just has to line up herself, her husband, his lover, and hangers-on Tiff and Aubry, and Christian is toast.

During the scramble, Emily knows her triumvirate with Christian and Devens is in trouble, so she also goes to Cirie and Tiff and pitches Ozzy. Cirie gives her an “Interestingggggggg” and then as soon as she walks away, Tiff and Cirie are saying they’re going to vote her out, which was this episode’s red herring in a mock turtleneck. It was always going to be Christian and the editors just needed to do a little head fake. Did Christian’s self-vote send him home? No. I think Rick’s need to be a showman gained him attention and then Christian’s sloppy gameplay recommending Ozzy to Cirie sealed his fate. That just proves, right now, that no matter how many stunts Rick, Christian, or even “Mr. Jeff” pull, it’s Cirie who is running this whole damn game.