Survivor Recap: Call Me by Your Nami

We are only six minutes and 19 seconds in the episode when someone says, “Siga Strong.” That person is Tim, a man who has been so insulated from the game of Survivor that he made an alliance with one of his tribemates and didn’t even bother to tell her about it. It seems like no one on Siga is really playing. They want to do everything together, but if they keep it up, they will all die together. Their reticence to engage with the other players even before the official merge sealed their fate, but at least we won’t have to hear “Siga Strong” every week until the five of them make it to the finale. (For the record, we heard it five times over the course of the episode. We only heard “Nami Strong” once, and Yanu was like, “Girl, you saw how we played. There’s nothing strong about us.”)

After spending about 10 minutes watching Hunter find his idol thanks to a riddle, the other tribes arrive on Nami beach and are told to “drop their buffs,” which doesn’t mean that they’re merged, just that they’re in Survivor limbo until Jeff figures out who has earned the merge. (It’s so Republican coded that there are no handouts on Survivor.) There’s a long stretch of time with lots of strategy talk — Venus wants to work with anyone, Tevin wants Venus out, Q is trying to get his “Journey Six” alliance up and running to no avail, Moriah and Tim think Venus is playing hard, Q is scared of Moriah because she likes past player Aubrey — but none of it matters. We don’t know who will go to the merge, who will be eligible to be voted out, or how any of this will shake out. They call it limbo for a reason and, just ask the S train that only goes between Grand Central and Penn Station, no one likes to be in between places.

Here is where Grandpa Moylan starts yelling to get off his lawn about how Survivor is played in the new era. All of these people are “superfans,” as they and Jeff tell us all the time. They know that the merge is going to happen at 13. Why have the merge at 13? Remember way back in Survivor: Thailand when they told both tribes to go to the same beach, and they all assumed they were merged, so Shii An flipped sides only to find out it wasn’t a merge, they were just on the same beach? Why not do more of that? People expect certain things to happen at certain times and play their game accordingly. Why not move the merge earlier, or later. Thwart both player and viewer expectations. Keep the people on their toes so they never stop playing. That’s what Jeff wants, right?

Also, why are we merging at 13? It made sense in the first two seasons of the “new era,” where there was that dumb hourglass twist where the person left out got a whole lot more power. Now, we just have one person sitting out to, what, look around the sit-out bench for an idol that won’t be there? Why not just wait a week and have the tribes divided evenly?

I don’t like the way the two teams are picked for this challenge, either. I believe that nothing in Survivor should be left to chance unless the group decides that’s what they want to do, like when everyone decides to go to rocks rather than break a tie. Why are they just putting their hands in the bag? What if the smallest tribe gets to pick the teams? What if the whole collective has to decide on the teams together? What if the last person voted out gets to pick the tribes? What if they arm wrestle and the winner gets to pick the teams and gets a DVD copy of Sylvester Stallone’s classic Over the Top? I don’t know. I’m not a producer on the show, but all of these seem like a better solution than having all the strong people on one side and a party bus going to see the Taylor Swift Eras Tour documentary in IMAX on the other side. (Though it was hilarious when everyone on that team said their heights, and Charlie was the tallest at five-nine.)

So, yes, there is a challenge that ends with a three-part puzzle where everyone has a little bit of solving to do. (Good twist. Keep that.) The Purple Team (not to be confused with Yanu) wins, so Kenzie, Q, Hunter, Tim, Tevin, and Ben are all safe at the tribal council. They also get to go to the merge feast. Tiff picked them as her team, so she’s safe too, and Charlie, Maria, Moriah, Venus, Soda, and Liz are the only ones eligible for elimination.

For most of Survivor’s history, Jeff has treated the game like it is sacrosanct. (Remember how terribly he treated anyone who ever wanted to quit?) Everyone got one vote, and the person with the most votes left. Period. Dot. But that isn’t true of the new era. There are people without votes, like Hunter, who just came out and declared it to the entire group, and there are multiple people with multiple votes. (Well, just Tevin, because Maria burned her last tribal for no good reason.) This is no longer a “one person, one vote” society. If we’re in “Survivor limbo,” let’s play around with that idea.

Here is my suggestion. Rather than all 13 people voting on who goes home, make the team that won the merge decide at the merge feast which of the remaining people gets saved. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and that should be true of the merge feast too. The winners get five buffs to distribute, and one person doesn’t get one and is sent home without a vote being cast against them. Call it the Cirie Fields Memorial Non-Vote-Off. They can decide this however they want, but if they can’t come to a unanimous decision about who goes home, then the winners have to draw rocks and one of them leaves. Then have an individual immunity, then have a full vote. Double-elimination episode! (Are we sure I’m not a producer on this show?)

The problem with the most recent seasons of Survivor is that we see one tribe get decimated and then become the swing votes between the remaining big tribes. Yes, that is good for an underdog story, but the three small tribes lead to intractable dynamics that are hard to break. What the producers should be doing at this stage is trying to shatter those group dynamics in any way they can. The way to do that is through structural changes in the gameplay, which, so far, they haven’t been willing to do. The two teams that draw from multiple tribes is a good start, but it needs to go further.

What happens with the rest of the episode? Exactly what I said would happen in the last recap, that Siga and Nami both try to recruit the remaining Yanu as swing votes. That’s exactly what happens, and Hunter says as much at tribal council. So, yes, there is a question of which tribe they’ll pick and which person from which tribe they’ll pick, but the whole dynamic is predictable. That’s the hard balance for any reality show to maintain: It needs to feel like a ritual, like things happen in a particular order, and they happen the same way ever week. But it can’t ever get dull; it can’t ever get predictable because then we all just go back to watching zits being popped on TikTok rather than Jeff Probst wearing the same shirt he’s had on for 24 years.

As for who Yanu will choose, it’s clear as soon as the merge feast is over that they’re siding with Nami. At the feast, Tevin says he wants to get rid of his tribemate Venus because he never trusted her. The Siga members, however, won’t give up a name. Begrudgingly, Tim calls out Moriah, and that’s the name everyone lands on because she seems smarter and more focused than Venus. Also, Yanu are hip to the fact that Siga wants to stay “Siga Strong,” so why would Yanu get rid of a Nami and help Siga, who will cut them as soon as they get to eight players?

Hunter makes an excellent point to Q and says that Nami is full of cracks, “Liz hates Soda, Soda hates Venus, it’s a mess.” That’s the best pitch for siding with Nami that Yanu has. If they all hate each other, they can side with them to get Siga out and then form new alliances that might get them closer to the end.

So, it’s Venus or Moriah, Moriah or Venus. There are 13 people left, and the producers, through all of their machinations, have left us with only two choices, and they’re both as predictable as a Hallmark Christmas movie. (Of course, she’s going to get back with her now-widowed high-school boyfriend to save the hot-chocolate stand. Duh!) Venus makes a great case that all the men went on the merge feast and they shouldn’t be voting out Moriah, they should get Charlie, one of the men, so that the women can have the majority. Not a horrible plan, but no one listens.

One thing does come out of it though: Q getting mad at Venus for wanting to enact her own plan. Tiff and Q approach her at the well and say that if she doesn’t vote for Moriah, she will be going home. When Q finds out that she was trying to change the plan, he gets upset and decides he wants to vote out Venus because she didn’t do as she was told. He says in confessional, “If she’s going to be ungrateful, I’ll send her ass back to Canada.” Excuse me? Ungrateful? Like he’s the one letting her play the game? No, it’s one person, one vote (actually it’s not, but whatevs), and Venus can play whatever game she likes. There aren’t only two choices, as much as the tribe would like us to believe. There are 13 choices. No, scratch that. There are six choices, and any one of them is valid, and maybe reexamining who they think is an actual threat, as Venus suggested, would benefit everyone’s games.

When they finally get to tribal, and Nami gets to stand in awe of Jeff Probst’s Pagoda of Doom, it’s all a bit perfunctory. Moriah tells everyone that the last tribal council wasn’t unanimous, that she voted for Ben and she’s on the bottom of the tribe so they should keep her. Oh, sister, that’s like a Smurf missing homeroom; it’s too little and too late. Q tells her that he asked her what happened at tribal, and she said it was unanimous. That means she was either lying to him then or she’s lying to him now. Why would anyone want to work with a liar? By the time Moriah gets to tribal council, she might as well be one of the half-broken toys in a pediatrician’s waiting room because no one wants to play with her.

Everyone votes for Moriah except Charlie, who votes for Venus. Why? This is the guy who said he was willing to get rid of Moriah to save his own game, but he’s the only stray vote? Maybe in case Moriah had an idol, but wouldn’t he have known about it? Those Sigas are so close. Anyway, next week, everyone is eligible for the vote, and tribal lines are going to be even deeper than before. This season, we keep waiting for the real game to start, but I’m afraid I’m spending most of each episode keeping these kids off my lawn.