With the lopsided alliance forging ahead on the single, newly-merged tribe on “Survivor,” tribal councils can be pretty predictable — even when an episode has two of them, as Wednesday’s did.
With the blissfully clueless Aras blindsided last week, brother Vytas had to scramble to survive, first saying to a camera that he’d do everything to seek revenge but not showing it to the rest of the tribe, until they got to tribal council, where he spilled in a way that sealed his fate.
Before then, it was time for what Jeff Probst called “a ‘Survivor’ classic” — the gross bug eating contest that was a hit back when the show’s competition was “Fear Factor.”
The live, wriggling mealworms everyone had to choke down was actually “no big deal” to eat “In this part of the world,” Probst said. Not that he happened to be chewing on any.
As it happened, almost none of the women could stomach it except Monica.
In the semi-final round she finished three ounces of pig intestines, as did Gervase, who Probst mentioned as many times as possible faced the same challenge in season one. Back then he choked on the wriggling grubs just as he did last time, though he came close to consuming it all. The winner was Monica, who earned her first individual immunity possibly by hunger alone: The woman looks absolutely emaciated.
That didn’t save Monica rom being paranoid that people would vote for her, perversely. So her general paranoia put her at odds with others in her seven-person alliance.
Still, Vytas’ strong words — against Monica as well as everyone else who voted his brother out — spelled doom for him. Monica in fact switched her vote from Katie to him because she didn’t like what he said. The men in the alliance were going to vote for Vytas; women for Katie in case one of them had an immunity idol. Monica’s last minute switch quickly made her suspicious.
“Loose cannons are going to fire,” Gervase said, coining a phrase that wasn’t necessarily true.
Nevertheless, after a coin balancing contest that left Katie an immunity winner at a time she really needed it, it was her mom and alliance partner Tina who was voted out.
Tina’s dubious moves Wednesday was to call out Tyson after last week’s tribal blindside, relinquishing Katie from an alliance if it will further the daughter’s game and to lead others on a wild goose chase to find a hidden immunity idol, which she comically pretended to have as votes were about to be counted.
Tyson knew she didn’t have it because he did, and he continues to keep that fact from the large alliance he seems to be leading.
Despite some noise that Monica might be blindsided to silence her loose cannon tendencies, it was Tina all the way, sent to a Redemption Island where her competition are two brothers who are sometimes keen to beat one another, Vytas and Aras (“I have a weirder name!” you can imagine one of the young brothers taunting the other as a child. “No, I do!”).
But more than the brother vs. brother, the real drama will be among the last surviving pair of loved ones still in the game, Ciera and Laura.
In previews for next week, Katie says point blank: “My mom needs to go!”
The preview probably won’t play well at Thanksgiving family dinner for the two.
And the blood part of the “Blood vs. Water” season again starts to stick things up.
One sobering injection of reality to the long-running reality series was the devastating hurricane in the Philippines and Probst’s brief pitch for Red Cross donations. it’s where this season was shot. And any real life survivors there may well have to resort to mealworms.