No good deed goes unpunished on “Survivor: San Juan del Sur.”
Boston fireman Jeremy Collins may have defied the show’s protocol by joining Natalie Anderson in declining a luxury reward and letting that strangely powerful couple Jon Misch and Jaclyn Schultz go in their stead.
But later in the same episode Collins found himself being voted out by the same power couple.
“I knew Jon had a target on me, I was just trying to gain more time with Jaclyn,” he said. “If I could gain more time with her, I could go farther in the game.”
He was rewarded by being sent to Exile Island, and then voted out of the competition altogether.
Collins was was unable to save himself in an immunity competition, having been exhausted by two days on Exile Island, looking to find a hidden idol that Jon declined to tell him he already had.
And so he got the old blindside.
“As soon as my name started coming up,” Collins said last week, “I thought it was Nat was the last person in my alliance [to cast a vote against]. I didn’t know it was Reed.”
It was Reed Kelly’s partner Josh Canfield who had been eliminated the week before.
Josh and Jeremy had emerged as the two poles of the merged Huyopa tribe; the two leaders seemed to be the only ones playing hard this season of “Blood vs. Water.” Now, ironically, they’re the first two members of the jury.
Collins had been hanging by a thread for a few weeks — Julie McGee quitting the game eliminated the need for a tribal council during a week when he surely would have been targeted.
But he says, “as soon as Josh was gone, that was the first time I started thinking: wow, I’m going to win the game. Before than, I didn’t think about the end game.”
It was a tough season, though because so many people weren’t playing with any strategy at all, he says. “It’s kind of scary when you’re thinking and you can think logically of what other people might do, when they are not thinking at all, I think it’s really hard to play the game with people playing with no common sense at all.”
Jon ultimately scrambled to get rid of Jeremy because he didn’t even think that having him go to Exile would result in the realization that Jon had already found the hidden immunity idol there.
“I don’t know why he didn’t think that I’m going to realize he had it,” Collins says. “i don’t get that.”
Collins said he was surprised to learn that Missy Payne voted against him.
“I don’t see the logic in her turning her back on me,” he says. “We were together from day one. I took care of her. I went to Exile — she was the one who was supposed to be going to go to Exile, someone from our alliance to go there to find the immunity idol. It would have been her. But I knew she couldn’t hack it out there. So I thought we were all set.”
He says he the only reason he could think of was so that she and Baylor could stick with the other couple, Jon and Jaclyn.
Tonight, on the eve of the American Thanksgiving, there will be another offer for a trade and a hidden immunity idol will make its first appearance at tribal council.