‘Survivor’ recap, S47 Finale: Fire-Making Challenge Blows

Survivor

The last stand

Season 47

Section 14

Editor’s assessment

4 stars

****

Photo: CBS

This, right here, is why I hate the way the playoffs are playing out in the new era Survivor. I’ve been saying in these recaps all season that nothing should ever be left to chance; nothing should be left to chance. That everything should be about the decisions the players make and the consequences of those actions. Then we see Sam and Teeny sit down to make a fire. Who wins? The wind. Vinden won the challenge and now had to sit next to Sue and Rachel in the final tribal council. Sol said, “Yeah, my question is to Wind. Why did you blow Teeny’s fire away from her rope and Sam is right onto it at the coupling moment?” The wind cannot answer because it is a voiceless force of nature, but it can blow through the tops of the trees, rustle branches and leaves, drive away the group of bats that have guarded the cursed immunity necklace all season, and when it does , the wind will howl something that sounds like, “Please return for a finale twwwwwwwwwwwww.”

How did we get to this final two? Well, first there was a challenge. The final four have to do a lot of shit, but the ultimate tiebreaker is for them to solve a hanging bat puzzle that was about 17 billion times closer than the taxidermy nightmare that is the Immunity Necklace.

When the challenge starts, everyone has to crawl under a net through the mud and the last one to emerge is Sue. “Come on, Sue! Let’s dig!” Jeff yells at her. Uh, Jeff, she digging. She is only seconds behind Teeny and Sue is almost three times her age. This is what digging looks like for a 59-year-old. Give the woman a moment of peace. In the end, Rachel wins the immunity challenge, and back at camp, she tells the four that she’s taking Sue to the end, and Sam and Teeny make a fire. This far into the finale, it looks like it’s Rachel’s game to lose.

At camp, Rachel, who is a huge superfan, gives Teeny a complete YouTube tutorial on how to make a fire, and Teeny looks ready to win. Sam tells everyone that he has no idea how to make fire, and even though they think he’s lying, he actually doesn’t. Then it all starts, the tide seems to shift, the wind whips up, and we see Sam reading a letter from his father: “(He wrote) he knew I’d give it all I got out there and that he wasn’t I wouldn’t bet against me and the thought of him rooting for me told me you’re not one to quit.” Yes. The inspiring chats. They come from inside the house. This is not a good sign.

Then the Sam-making-fire montage begins, the wind starts rattling the kindling by his knee, and Sam says, “The moment you give in to doubt is the moment you lost,” and it’s that kind of fridge magnet bullshit it’s like fast-acting Viagra for Jeffrey Lee Probst. It was at that moment that I knew Sam would win the fire challenge.

After tribal’s pleasantries, Teeny and Sam sit down at their stations and Teeny immediately gets a spark, immediately makes a flame, and immediately starts adding sticks to it. It works. But then Teeny, who doesn’t know how to do one thing right in this game except vote wrong, looks at Rachel and asks, “Now what?” Rachel tells her to keep adding sticks. Sam barely has a flame at this point, while Teeny has full fire, but the wind, Sam’s close personal friend, is blowing at a bad angle for her. She works at it, but the elements are against her. Sam begins to nurture his flame and it builds bigger and bigger. Although it looked like a fight, it’s now a showdown, and Jeff, full of pablum and inspiration, gets all fired up. Then Sam throws the rest of his wood onto his fire in one last attempt, just as, as Jeffrey says, the wind blows Teeny’s fire away from her rope and blows Sam’s fire up against his rope.

Thus the wind decided. The fire challenge was created to give people without a shot in the game one last reprieve. It was essentially created to produce a controversial winner Ben Driebergen a path to the final. I always thought it was a hoax. It boils the final stage of the game down to one skill, one that Sam didn’t even have to try until the last day, a skill he didn’t even learn better than Teeny; he just ended up in that lucky spot with, literally, the wind at his back. He should have been voted out unanimously by the three women at this point in the game and shouldn’t have been there at all.

Teeny says she will be haunted by this moment for the rest of her life and I will be haunted right there with her. We get a great speech from her at the final tribal about how Sam is the guy she always wanted to be at school, the one that all the teachers loved, who was good at sports, who got lots of romantic attention from the ladies, and his confidence (some would say arrogance) can be a little undeserved. He’s the kind of guy that it seems like the world bends around him to make sure he has an easy path to victory. And here it is again, when even the forces of nature say, “No, Teeny. Not today. You’re not good enough,” and while she might not have played the best game, she certainly deserved to see a world where every dwelling wasn’t made for someone like Sam.

His win is so annoying. “Find a way to find a way!” he shouts as if Joe Rogan is right there in his ear. Yeah, find a way to control the weather, I guess. Who will we all become? Storm in X-Men? Now one of the last three is a man who has never eaten watermelon until he traveled the world and someone forced him to try it and he didn’t even really like it that much.

And the inspiration starts again. The jury tells us that Sam is a pariah with a scrappy game and that he persevered no matter what. No, Sam was so bad at everything – winning challenges, finding idols, forming friendships – that while people talked about him as a threat, there was always a bigger one. In his Final Tribal, he will try to show that he made Rachel look like a bigger threat on purpose so people wouldn’t look at him. Dude, nobody looked at you because you had a terrible track record.

As the entire jury says who they’re rooting for, we get Teeny, Kyle and Sierra to choose Sam; Sol, Andy and Genevieve choose Rachel; and Caroline and Gabe choose Sue. Now I’m sure the producers sat everyone down and had them give reasons why each of the three should win and they only chose those answers so we’re being manipulated by the edit, but it looks like they sets up a showdown between Sam and Rachel, which it really should be.

Sue shocks everyone when she tells them that she is 59 that day and that she beat them all. Kyle is still mad that she thinks she could have beaten him in a one-on-one competition at the barrel challenge. She is twice his age! That it was a showdown at all is amazing.

That’s when I started thinking about the kind of games that the jury rewards. Rachel absolutely ran the show, she won challenges, she found idols and favors, and she might have been on the wrong side of some votes, but like she said, she got an alliance between Andy, Teeny, Sue and Caroline together and that took her to where she sits at the end. Yes, Andy turned on her and Sam was part of Operation: Italy, but it wasn’t Sam’s plan and even after they executed it, Rachel’s idol play at the last stanza sent Andy home, setting the stage for her could decimate almost all of them until the wind stepped in and said, “Um, maybe not.” But that’s the kind of play we often see from men, and the kind of play usually rewarded by men, especially Jeff. It is muscular, it is active, it is risk-taking. But now people like Kyle who voted for Sam see Rachel and are mad that they got kicked out by a girl and they won’t vote for her.

Sam doesn’t like Rachel’s game either, but I think that’s because a woman played it. He says that it was only luck that she got a favor from Sol, that she bought the right item at the auction and that she solved a puzzle on a trip. Uh, no. She got that from Sol because he liked and trusted her. It’s called a social game. She got the idol in front of everyone, which is skill. She had to solve a puzzle before it was swept into the sea. Rachel deserved them all. The only other player with as much upside as Rachel was Rom – look where he is and look where Rachel is. Although she got them by luck, she deployed them with skill to save herself and optimize them. As she says in her final speech, everyone thought she was going home and eulogized her for the jury, and then she stood up at her own funeral, played an immunity idol, and not only saved herself, but apparently got mad enough to would take Sam’s side in the fire challenge.

I’d say Sam played like last year’s winner, Kenzie Petty, because he couldn’t manage to win anything. She was the underdog who also made it all the way to the end and won. Yet she also did it by making friends and giving her heart to every person she played with, whereas Sam did at least Teeny and probably a few others, including Rachel, whose game he played down every time. I’m not saying one game is better than the other, and we’ve had players of different genders play it successfully. Still, the stench wafting from the jury is that they’re not impressed with Rachel’s dominance, and they’re impressed with Sam’s pluck, and that really gets my goat. (In this case, the goat is not Sue because she had as much right to be there as the other two, whereas Teeny would have been a classic goat.)

Fortunately, there was just no doubt that Rachel played a dominant game after the merge. As she said, when she woke up to Sierra being voted out and realized she had no friends, she figured out how to play Survivor quite quickly. She did everything you’re supposed to do in the game: win challenges, find idols, make big moves, and make strong allies, including one she took to the final two. I don’t see how anyone who likes a muscular game Survivor (and even some of those who don’t) could vote against her. I’m glad that while Sam got the edit of playing the underdog game, Rachel proved what it takes to really win this game and she’s a big winner in what was possibly the best season yet in New Era.