Survivor Season 50, Episode 10
"A Side Dish of Chaos"
Host: Jeff Probst
Cast: Aubry Bracco, Cirie Fields, Emily Flippen, Joe Hunter, Jonathan Young, Ozzy Lusth, Rick Devens, Rizo Velovic, Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick, Tiffany Ervin
The looming threat of tonight’s episode was the MrBeast Beware Advantage twist. At Tribal Council, Jeff called him the known unknown, as in he has such a reputation for wild and out there ideas, that the looming threat of a twist created by him would create the situation where the players really had no idea what was coming. I’m delighted to say that I think the MrBeast twist is probably the most successful of any of the celebrity involvement Survivor 50 has done, even if the bar is remarkably low, but maybe the saving of Rick Devens at the expense of Stephenie LaGrossa-Kendrick is me judging these celeb twists by their results.
The episode begins with the fallout of the Christian vote. With Emily and Rick having put votes on Ozzy, they both know they are on the bottom. Ozzy seems upset that his name was written down specifically, especially from Emily who he thought he was close with. Both of them argue that if the vote was either Christian or Ozzy, their allegiances lay with the Professor first. In a confessional, Rick says he has to remind himself not to be angry. He played at his best his last time when he was having fun, so it’s going to be his principal moving forward. It’s hard not to argue anyone is having more fun on Survivor than Rick Devens.
He does reveal to the group that his idol was fake in an effort to scrub the target off himself. He figures the more he looks like an easy vote, the easier it will be for others to think there’s a bigger target that could be blindsided. Big moves is the name of the game (well actually Survivor is the name of the game, but you get my point), and de-fanging himself from the threat of a big move is smart.
The auction, which we’ve seen sporadically in the new era, makes it’s return. It feels mostly back to normal. Jeff says that items could come with comfort, chaos or both. The players take turns buying from the offerings, with the only bits of chaos coming from the risk of having to eat a bug or a slug, which both Aubry and Jonathan do rather well. But the final reward on offer is one for all of them, and assuredly has both comfort and chaos. They get their letters from home but at the cost of MrBeast arriving with a Beware Advantage.
The players then head straight to an immunity challenge that is won by Tiffany after she holds her ball on a bow while standing on a beam. I feel like all individual immunity challenges are basically fill-in-the-blank versions of hold ___ while standing on ____.
Before strategy kicks in, the players read their letters from home. I think notable that we hear from the following players: Joe, Ozzy, Stephenie, Cirie and Aubry. Cirie’s letter is from her dad, the first he’s ever written to her. It’s a nice moment for the legend in that it reminds her what she’s playing for. Meanwhile, Aubry’s letter reminds her that she has a fierceness inside of her that has softened since she became a mom, though maybe she needs to find a way to bring it out. She reminds us that no one is here to make the same mistakes they did before. So far, Aubry has mimicked her first season’s trajectory where she had a bit of a messy start, then found her footing. The real trick will be whether she can stick the landing.
Plans begin to get set in motion. As predicted by Rick, people begin to think that if he’s such an easy target, maybe they should pivot to make a bigger move. This is really led by Jonathan, who thinks that the big target is Ozzy. Things seem to be going well in that regard as Aubry, Emily and Rick would be on board, plus Steph has a Steal-A-Vote. Unfortunately, Jonathan tells the exact wrong person this plan: Cirie.
You think that at some point, people might realize that their plans to vote out Ozzy always fail to take off once they reach Cirie, but that day is not today. Instead, Cirie develops a counter-move to get rid of Stephenie. The two have played before, and so Cirie can read Steph like a book. When she realizes she’s lying, she knows she can’t keep her around. Steph gets word that her name is being thrown out, so things go a little haywire.
It’s really at this point that while Plan As are being formed, a series of back-up plans begin to develop to mitigate against the MrBeast twist (let’s call them Plan Beasts). It’s here that I think that perhaps the MrBeast advantage might have ruined what I thought was a perfectly intriguing vote on its own merits. There are really two sides of this game: the Jonathan/Steph/Joe side against the Rick/Emily/formerly Christian side, with Cirie, Ozzy, Rizo, Tiff and Aubry in the middle. After taking a shot at the other side last week, Jonathan wanted to eliminate a middle player gaining too much leverage. So what does the middle do? Look to swing back to the other side. Can they pull it off? Should they adjust and just take out Rick? Maybe Cirie or Rizo are easier options than getting rid of Ozzy? All of these things are interesting questions and what, to me, makes Survivor so compelling.
The biggest compliment I can give to the MrBeast advantage is that it didn’t really derail any of this. The reveal is that the tribe has to select one player to flip a coin. If they guess correctly, they double the prize pot to two million dollars, and if they fail, they are eliminated. What worked about this twist is that everyone knew the stakes before they played. Rick offers himself up, then there are doubts as to let him to do it. But no one really wants to take the risk themselves, so they let him try. This is very different from the twist with Christian last week, where he didn’t know the stakes before he offered himself up on a journey and his disadvantage felt far more tragic than if Rick had lost his coin flip (though maybe I’d feel differently if Rick had lost his coin flip).
However, he doesn’t. He calls heads and it goes his way. So, there needs to be a vote. While there is some scrambling to try and get Aubry out, even Jonathan sees the writing on the wall and votes for his closest ally in the game. Steph steals Devens vote, but it’s moot. She goes home in a unanimous vote. And so, the middle survives.
What I think is most likely at this point is that while Cirie is playing a great game, I think she might be seen as the leader of the middle. Ozzy, too, seems like too big of an entity. It’s then a matter of who else in that pocket (Rizo, Aubry, Tiffany) that could find themselves navigating the rest of the game and finding themselves in the Final Three. Or, perhaps the Jonathan/Joe side of things are able to regroup from this vote and hold on. Either way, I think that tonight allowed us to see some interesting gameplay, all happening in between a pretty seismic shift. It’s just good that things didn’t seem to be disrupted too much.
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