Survivor Recap: Snakes in the Grass

Survivor

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Season 50

Episode 2

Editor’s Rating

3 stars

A throwback episode sees Coach sabotaging his game and Cirie whipping the votes in her favor. Some things never change!
Photo: Robert Voets/CBS

What a delightfully old-school episode of Survivor! I don’t know if it’s because there are so many players from the “old era,” if producers are trying to take the show back to its roots, or if it’s trying to appear more old-school as fans who checked out ages ago return for this 50th-season celebration, but this was like an episode from ten years ago. Colby scrambles through someone else’s bag like way back in season two, and someone hallucinates beef jerky. There is a reward challenge! A whole, actual reward challenge with a real reward. If it were brought to us by Charmin, it would have felt like 2007 again. All that was missing was Jerri Manthey singing “Criminal.”

Speaking of Charmin, one of the first scenes was a ball, or should I say a bowl … a toilet bowl. (No, you do not need to be a father to tell dad jokes.) When Christian talks to Joe by the fire, he suddenly straightens up as if something has gone amiss. As he walks away, the blurring on his behind makes it clear that his butt has delivered some treemail right into his pants. Christian turns to talk directly to the camera and says that they don’t want to follow him as he goes to change his pants and undies to clean up the mess. At camp, Joe and Emily both lose their shit (teehee) laughing about it while Christian tells us, in confessional, that he joins the great pantheon of players who have discolored their pants. I can’t think of even one of them. Back in the day we’d hear a lot about their intestinal distress or throwing up after binging reward meals after so much starvation, but I can’t think of even once where someone went No. 2 in their No. 1 pants. Well, we can thank Survivor for reiterating one of life’s great lessons: Never trust a fart.

The most delightfully old-school part for me, however, was the whole scene about how some people don’t want to work around camp. Tribal life was such a huge element of the original seasons, and what it was like to actually survive on an island. In the early years the early votes would often revolve around who does or does not pull their weight around camp, but in recent years, all the talk of strategy and “Survivor bucket lists” has surpassed who is going to get the firewood. Strangely enough, it’s Q — the most chaotic player of the New Era — who is bringing this up. How much fun is it to watch Q talk about Angelina being like a statue around camp? Or Rizo saying that he’s not there to start the fire, he’s there “to cut some throats and win some money” and then using getting a fake splinter to totally skip out on foraging?

Jonathan says that he’s not going to be the provider of his camp, but then we see him going out fishing and taking his ally, Coach, along with him. After ten minutes in the water, Coach is out there bobbing along on his back with cramps in both of his calves. That’s when the rescue boat has to come and drag them to shore. Wait, there are rescue boats? How bad can it be out there? Next thing you’re going to tell me is that they have a coffee machine, sunblock, and a secret radio hidden in a tree, and Charlie is just pumping the camp full of Taylor Swift songs. I don’t want Coach to drown, but can someone please drag him in when something like that happens?

I’m also rediscovering something about old-school Survivor, and it’s that I hate Coach. I can’t stand the man. But how fun is it to watch him think that he’s swimming out to glory, only to have to return to camp with two cramped legs while still trying to find a way to burnish his glory? Yes, I hate Coach, but I love to hate him. He’s not the kind of person we see on Survivor anymore. He’s much more a part of the universe of reality TV I more often write about, “docusoaps,” giving us deep glances into horrible people who are just shy of a personality disorder. The delusion, the self-mythologizing, the malignant ego-mania — he’s basically Ramona Singer on a desert island. Coach is one trip to Thailand away from being on 90 Day Fiancé and walking away with the whole franchise.

This is most evident at the reward challenge (In this economy? With the tariffs?) when Jeff asks Coach about how hard the challenges are. Coach needs to pipe up and talk about what Ozzy said about him at the fight for supplies, where Coach competed with Q and Ozzy, his old archnemesis. Coach tells the group that Ozzy said if Q got the key off, then he could have it. Then, when Ozzy got the key off, Coach took it, because he never gave his word that he wouldn’t. “I’m playing this game with as much honor as possible,” he says, right after telling everyone he wouldn’t make a deal for fairness and stole the key after someone else knocked it off a post, after more than an hour. Um, okay, Coach. Where’s the honor?

Ozzy then says that if he didn’t get the key off, then Coach probably never would have gotten it. Coach reiterates that he’s playing the game the same way he always played. Ozzy then lands the killing blow, “He’s playing the game the way he’s always played. At least the last time I played it with him,” meaning that he’s just as shady as he was last time. That is what people are going to remember. He just had to bring it up, to clear his name even though no one cared about or even heard the comment. Also, his name is muddier than the contestants after a crawl under a net challenge. What is there to clear? By bringing it up, he just makes himself look worse. Coach’s gift for self sabotage should be studied in a lab. Then, when I couldn’t be more annoyed, he says about Ozzy: “Yesterday’s adversary is tomorrow’s enemy. Today’s enemy is tomorrow’s adversary.” Coach, those mean the same thing! What you’re saying is that your enemy is always your enemy every day. If that’s what you mean, why don’t you say that? He drives me absolutely bonkers, but at least they didn’t saddle us with Russel Hantz.

There is one innovation in this episode that I think is pretty cool, and it is based on subverting the old Survivor trope of going through someone’s bag, as I mentioned earlier. Genevieve thinks that Aubry is spending too much time with her bag. We see her taking it off into the woods suspiciously. Genevieve thinks Aubry has one of those Billie Eilish Boomerang Idols (BEBI) that she found, but after digging through her two changes of clothing, they find out she has nothing. It is just another mass delusion among paranoid people on a beach.

Then, later in the episode, Christian finds another BEBI and decides to give it to Aubry for reasons that are a bit unclear. I think his rationale is that she is the least likely to tell people about it, but I’m not sure how that works into his strategy. Anyway, we see Aubry taking her bag into the woods suspiciously, the same footage we saw earlier, but this time she goes into her bag and takes out the BEBI, and we know that she had it all along, even when they searched her bag. Where did she hide it? Is it in her crotch, just like Ozzy’s? (Do not smell the idols! Unless that’s your thing …) We need to know, but I think this is a great bit of misdirection and Rashomon-like storytelling.

The immunity challenge brings the return of one of my new favorite Survivor creations: the giant stuffed snake. Each team has to drag three giant snakes through a bunch of obstacles and then get a ball through a snake maze to win immunity. Cila loses, and they’re going back to Tribal Council for the second week in a row. When they get back to camp, Emily lies down with Cirie and lays out who is in danger. She says that Christian wants Savannah out, Devens wants Joe out, and Emily wants Ozzy out.

Cirie says she’s going to go through the pros and cons of everyone that Emily listed. She says that Ozzy’s social game sucks, so he’s easy to get rid of; Joe is erratic and playing with too much honor; Savannah brought something back from her journey, and they have no clue what it is. Cirie leads Emily right to the conclusion that it should be Savannah, and then goes around helping everyone else get to the same conclusion. This is exactly why Cirie is one of the best to ever play. Her campaign is that Savannah should have to see her torch snuffed for the first time. Savannah clocks exactly what Cirie was doing, warning everyone off of Ozzy, and says as much to Emily and Christian. I hope she didn’t blow up my darling Cirie’s vote on her way out.

This is the second week in a row where the edit gets us to think we have no clue who is going home, only for it to be a unanimous vote. The confusion is thanks to Joe and Devens, who are at loggerheads about whether to play the game with “honor” or as a lying trickster who has to rely on idols and advantages to get ahead. Again, a classic Survivor argument. Christian, Emily, Devens, and Cirie are all saying that they don’t know how to play with someone like that because they don’t know if Joe will necessarily turn on anyone he’s working with. On his season, Joe, Eva, and a few others gummed up the works by insisting on loyalty and honor over everything else, and it was one of the most boring seasons in recent memory. I’m so glad that, just like back in season one, the schemers seem like they’re going to be triumphant, at least once they finally vote out Joe.

Tribal is once again a bit of a snore, until the very end, after Savannah walks away and Devens and Christian enact a plan I thought was cheesy until I saw it in action. This just proves why schemers are so much more entertaining than boring ass Joe. Christian pretends to fall so everyone looks at him, and then Devens stashes a fake idol wrapped in the real sheet from the BEBI. Their plan is that, if they ever need it, than can pull it out at Tribal and make everyone think there was an idol hidden there all along. Finally, during an episode that is all about the foundations of Survivor — old arguments, classic gameplay, familiar narratives — we get something totally new and quite revolutionary. The way they set it up, the idol is a Chekhov’s gun, and I can’t wait to see it go off and wonder whom the bullet is going to strike.