Do you know what the only thing better than a great Survivor episode is? Two great Survivor episodes because that is what we were essentially treated to here. The finale starts with Jeff giving this long monologue about what else, community, and then talking about the six remaining players and why they all deserve to win. He says we’ll see two challenges, two tribals, and two kickouts on this “penultimate” episode of the season. Wait, so it’s not a two-part finale anymore like they said at the end of the last episode? Did someone from the CBS News fact checking department finally walk up to the Reality TV offices, push their glasses up on their nerdy nose and say, “Well, it can’t be a two-part finale, because those don’t exist. Finales, by their definition, are only one part?” Is that what happened? Who knows.
Usually, this is my least favorite part of the game because there are so few people that the votes can be somewhat predictable. Not this episode! Rachel’s funeral, Rachel’s idol reveal, Sue’s idol reveal, Sam’s idol reveal that Genevieve’s idol is fake, Teeny idly revealing that she thinks Genevieve’s idol is fake, no it’s real, no it’s fake, no it’s real, no it’s fake, no it’s real. We were guessing the whole time and reveling in all of it. Ugh, am I going to have to admit that (gulp) I actually like the new era?
Even the start of the episode is great. Teeny peels off with Andy, Sam, and Genevieve to find out how they ousted Caroline, and they’re all like, “Aw shucks. We have no idea. It was kind of an accident. Oops!” Teeny, who a conspiracy theorist loves to see coming, believes it all, says she wants to work with them going forward, and everyone wants to take out Rachel. However, Rachel walked through the dark, hid under a bush right behind them and heard their whole plan, including that they don’t know about her idol. See, you don’t need to showboat like silly Tony Vlachos and build a spy shack; you just have to be a reasonably quiet person in the dark. The one problem with Rachel’s recon mission is she is under the impression that Genevieve’s idol is still real.
At the challenge, which is a number of water obstacles followed by the classic Survivor logo puzzle, Rachel knows that if she doesn’t win, then she’s going home. She dukes it out with Genevieve until the end, but Genevieve pulls ahead, and Jeff puts the immunity necklace on her shoulders. As soon as he does, Genevieve screams, “Ew!! It’s a bat!! It’s a bat!! Jeff!! Get it off of me!! It’s disgusting!!” Haha. Just kidding. I wish. Genevieve takes Teeny and Sue with her to the sanctuary while Rachel goes back to the beach, puts on the crocodile tears, and mourns the loss of her game pretending like she’s going home which we know she’s not because we know she has an idol.
Then a crazy thing happens: nearly everyone tells Rachel that they’re voting for her, which means she’s sure they don’t know she has an idol, so she and Sue are basically playing a game of Duck Hunt, sitting about two inches from the screen. Rachel briefly tries to convince Andy that if she steals Sam’s vote and Rachel, Sue, and Andy all vote for Sam, they’ll have the majority, and he goes home. Andy, however, tells Rachel that he will be voting for her because he won’t beat her in a fire-making challenge. Then Andy makes his biggest mistake in the game and starts playing differently. The whole season, Andy has laid low, let other people underestimate him, and made everyone around him think that other players are responsible for his moves. His strategy seems to be that he will get to the final, draw back the curtain, and the jury will see that he has been the Great and Powerful Oz this whole time. The only problem is that the Great and Powerful Oz is already being played by Jeff Goldblum in the Wicked cinematic universe, and GPO is neither great nor powerful. He is, however, Oz. Now that Andy finally stuck his head up and let himself be seen by Rachel, she figures out that he’s a much better player than Sam.
Going into the final tribal, it’s set up that everyone is voting for Rachel; none of them know about her idol, and we have no idea where she’s going to place her votes. Should it be Sam or Andy? If I was in Rachel’s position, I would like to think that I would have voted for Andy, knowing that he’s a better player with a great story (“I passed out on day one, and I’m still here!”). But if Andy’s gone, I would worry that Sam and Genevieve would get tighter. Since Sue and Rachel are now working together, that means the next vote is basically whoever can convince Teeny to vote with them. We know getting Teeny to do the right thing is harder than trying to get Scooby Doo to resist the sweet, sweet allure of the Scobby Snack. (We all agree those have always been edibles, right?) Luckily for the hypothetical Dame Brian, who is on this hypothetical island after he, in actuality, said Jeff should be fired, this never comes to pass.
The tribal was perfect. First Teeny and Sam try to tell everyone that it was an accident that Caroline got voted out and Rachel literally says, “Can I call bullshit?” She lays it right out: Andy flipped. Then Jeff asks each of the players (minus Sue, who knows about Rachel’s idol) why they’re voting for Rachel, knowing full well she will play that idol and shock them all. Everyone gives their smug little answers and I haven’t been so excited for an idol reveal in ages. When Jeff asks for it, Rachel says, “The only thing better than attending your own funeral is knowing you’re going to wake up alive the next morning,” she goes into her bag, digs out her idol, and jaws all over tribal — heck all over the world! — hit the floor.
Eventually, she and Sue chose to get rid of Andy, which was definitely the right move. He couldn’t be trusted and had flipped more times than a Cirque du Soleil troupe on a Ferris wheel. While keeping Andy might have separated Sam and Genevieve, there is no predicting where Andy’s loyalties would lie, which makes him even more dangerous than Genevieve, who everyone thinks is the master schemer of the season, but only because they don’t know about Andy.
After the vote, Sam, Sue, and Teeny are all a little pissed that Genevieve and Rachel basically think that it’s a game between the two of them, that if either of them make it to the end then they will surely win. I totally get that, but Teeny has to be hip to the fact that she’s playing a horrible game. If she isn’t, she’s about to get a crash course on it right quick after a chat with Sam and Genevieve.
The challenge is running through a bunch of obstacles and then trying to balance plates and Jeffrey Lee Probst’s Patented Challenge Balls while standing on a wobbly plank. Just like in the earlier challenge, why do they even bother with the preamble? Why have them dive through all these obstacles when they all end up arriving at the puzzle at the same time? Why have them dig under a post and then balance their balls? It’s all going to come down to the ball balancing. Can’t we let them do it without more sand, as all the golf courses in the world are slowly settling into all of their fleshy creases? Give these starving waifs a rest! Anyway, it’s another showdown between Rachel and Genevieve, and Rachel pulls out yet another win, sending her to the final five.
At this point, Sam makes the only move he can and tells Teeny that Genevieve’s idol is fake because if they think she’s safe, too, he’s going to draw all the votes. She believes it, at least at first, and as Sam says at tribal, he wanted the information to get out, so he told Teeny. We see Teeny sitting in a hammock and she gets what I’m now calling the “mastermind edit,” where someone in solitude goes through a bunch of past clips and figures out everything that has been happening. Except in Teeny’s case, it’s more like the “idiot edit” because it basically goes through Genevieve lying to her about voting out Kishan, lying to her about voting out Sol, and lying to her about this idol and voting out Caroline. It’s like Teeny just Keyser Soze-d herself but she still doesn’t know whether or not Genevieve has lost her limp.
She tells Rachel and Sue, who don’t seem to believe that it’s fake. I don’t think this makes them all stupid; I think this is a testament to the excellent game that Genevieve has played. She fooled them so hard at the Caroline vote that of course she could pull off another double-bluff scheme to leave them all feeling dumb when the votes are read. I get it. They’re also in an impossible position because, unless they load up on Sam, who they all think they’ll have an easier time beating in the final, there is no way to be absolutely certain that Genevieve is getting sent home.
Teeny needs more clarification and goes to Genevieve and just asks her if it’s fake. Genevieve, like Andy before, plays differently than she’s played all season. She tells Teeny the truth. It is fake, but Genevieve knows that Teeny knows that she can’t even trust that information, which is the truth. Teeny’s brain is more scrambled than Dr. Frank N. Furter’s after he does “The Time Warp.”
When they get to tribal, we have all the information but no way to know what they’re going to do, no way to know if Rachel and Sue will believe Teeny and the truth and take out Genevieve or if they’ll do the safe thing and vote out Sam. Teeny tells everyone at tribal about the fake idol, but she still doesn’t know what to do. She tells Rachel that they should all vote for Genevieve, and Rachel says, “Are you sure? If it’s real, you’re going to get the ricochet.” This is when Teeny needs to make a decision, this is when she needs to stand on business and put her game on the line. She should have said, “If it’s real and I was fooled, I’m okay going home like that.”
But she doesn’t. Instead, Teeny goes into the voting booth and takes her sweet old time casting her vote. Before Jeff reads them, all eyes turn to Genevieve, and she whispers a little, “I told you it was fake.” Teeny rolls her eyes for the billionth time this season, probably at herself. Sue plays her idol because it’s the last time she can and she wants everyone sitting there to know that she had an idol since before the merge and that she never needed to use it. It was also the famous “red paint” idol that everyone was looking for, the most conspicuous idol of the season, and she kept it hidden. Good on you, Sue.
Jeff reads the votes, and it’s two votes for Sam, three votes for Genevieve, and she officially loses her feud with Rachel. At the end of the episode, if you watch how everyone voted, Teeny voted for Sam! She was the only one given the information, and she’s the only one who didn’t believe it. Has Teeny been right about one thing in this game? She was even unhappy with her decision to pack those ugly, patchwork pants that she’d been marooned in for almost a month.
This will be a great finale and I am officially rooting for Rachel to win. She’s had a great, all-around game, built trust with players when she needed to, won a few clutch challenges, found an idol that saved her at a critical moment, and managed to do all this without having to lie or double-cross anyone more than necessary. I think next, I’m rooting for Sue. It wasn’t a splashy game, but, like she said, she’s been underestimated this whole time. No one even thought that she could have an idol, which I think makes the fact that she did even more surprising. She had a simple strategy: find people she could trust (Gabe, Caroline, and eventually Rachel) and stick with them. They were her shields, and she has outlasted all but one (so far).
I can see an argument for Sam winning, which is that everyone thought he was a threat, so they voted out his closest ally, and he’s been somehow hanging on by his fingernails ever since. As the only person left who orchestrated Operation: Italy, one of the best plots ever in the game, he could also benefit from being in a plan that was all Andy, but Andy must have taken credit for that move with the jury by now.
I’m sorry, but Teeny has no shot. Oh, our Teeny. I like her, I really do. I’ve loved watching her on television, but her gameplay was like going the wrong way down a one-way street while crying behind the wheel and texting her girlfriend. Can she make it to the end? For sure! If I were any of those other three, I would bring her because I don’t think she could muster even one vote except maybe a sympathy play from Sol. She also isn’t that great of an orator, so I can’t see how she could turn it around at the final tribal. Even if pigs fly in a frozen-over hell and Teeny wins (and that is an “if” bigger and uglier than the immunity necklace), this is still one of the best seasons we’ve had in a long time. Heck, I might even miss Jeff saying “community” like he gets paid by the mention.
