Survivor Recap: A Horse Is a Horse

Survivor

That’s Not How I Play Survivor

Season 50

Episode 7

Editor’s Rating

3 stars

Coach gets back to his old ways, and it’s just as frustrating as it was every other time he’s played the game.
Photo: Robert Voets/CBS

I hate Coach with the fire of a million billion suns, but it’s a good hatred, one that burnishes my insides and gives me fortitude, the sort of hatred I tend to like a bonsai tree because it is precious to me. Boy, did that bonsai grow into a full tree after this episode. No, not just a full tree, a forest. A jungle on the beaches of Fiji. It grew into the entirety of Survivor. 

The episode starts with each of the three tribal councils filtering back into camp one by one, with Coach arriving with the last tranche and saying that one of the “Four Horsemen” has gone out “valiantly.” He’s referring to Colby. Ugh, of course Coach is calling his alliance that because he thinks that they’re all so righteous and play so honestly. Doesn’t he know that the Four Horsemen are war, conquest, famine, and death? That doesn’t sound so righteous to me. When he reunites with Jonathan, that slab of beef reports that Dee was saying Coach’s name, and they decide, for some reason, that Dee is their greatest enemy.

The next morning, things really boil over. Dee approaches Jonathan about betraying her and voting out Kamilla, even though he told her all day that he was going to vote out Chrissy and keep their former tribemate and alliance member. Jonathan is standing over Coach, who is lounging in a hammock like a bruised banana that is too good to touch the counter. Dee asks Coach if he’s alright, and he says that he’s sad that she’s lying about him to everyone. Jonathan, Coach, and Dee get into an altercation about who is lying about what, like they’re on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on a beach excursion that has gone horribly awry. It turns out that Jonathan is still pissed at Dee for turning on him and voting out Charlie two episodes ago. While Coach and Jonathan are trying to spin it like Dee is lying about everything, she just left them out of one vote. Dude, that’s Survivor. As Dee points out in the fight, what else is she lying about? They can’t come up with one other thing.

That’s when Coach goes on his tirade: “This isn’t how I play Survivor!” he shouts at a small crowd that includes Emily and Devins. He says that no one is going to win unless they have honor, and he’s going to vote out anyone who he catches lying or cheating, and closes out saying, “If they vote me out today, there will be hell to pay!”

After he spouts off, Emily encapsulates my feelings about Coach for every single season he’s been on the game expertly: “Coach pisses me off. Coach is just a flat-faced liar most of the time.” Exactly! It’s one thing if Coach were Joe and his actions actually backed up all the bluster that he shows. But other than instill ridiculous nicknames and write a bunch of haiku (which aren’t always syllabically correct, I checked them all!), the only other thing Coach has done this game is sneak away the key after Ozzy knocked it off its post in the first episode which has about as much honor as taking steroids and hounding out tax loopholes while using AI to write your term paper.

Rizo and Ozzy return just in time for Coach to induct Rizo into the Four Horsemen while telling him that they lost one of their members. Yeah, that sure sounds like a winning tribe to join. Rizo says he doesn’t even want it because he solidified his alliance with Ozzy and Cirie, which they’re calling “Cirie’s Rizard of Oz,” which is terrible. Their alliance is obviously the Throuple, and that is all that we’re ever going to call it. (Turns out on Exile, Rizo was the big spoon. Consider me shocked!)

Then a boat pulls up and takes its next victim, but this time there is no blood moon to hide from. Stephenie LaGrossa is selected by random draw to get on the boat and face a challenge where she has to hold her arm over her head attached to a bucket of water for an hour. If she does, she gets an advantage, and if she doesn’t, she loses her vote. This looks absolutely excruciating. Do you remember trying to answer questions in sixth grade? I couldn’t even keep my hand up for ten seconds without having to use the other one to prop it up, and Stephenie is still dealing with a Survivor-related shoulder injury in one arm. The worst part of the challenge, though, has to be the silence during the hour she stood there holding up her arm. I’m sure that’s the only time in her life she was begging for Jeff to yell at her through the entirety of a challenge just to pass the time.

I do not like Stephenie for very obvious reasons, but I do enjoy this segment the same way I enjoy Colby discussing how Survivor changed his life before he was ousted last week. Maybe it’s because I am middle-aged myself and have been watching this show more than half of my life, but when the players get to wax lyrical about how they’ve changed since first playing, how their lives are different, how their bodies are different, how they’re proving something in the present to correct the sins of the past, it hits me right in my soft, paunchy, spreading middle.

Stephenie completes the task and gets a Steal a Vote. When she returns to camp, she tells everyone that if she lasted 30 minutes, she would get her vote back, and if she lasted a full hour, she would get an advantage, but she didn’t last the full hour. Cirie, our one true queen, immediately knows this is bullshit. Cirie goes with Stephenie to the water well and gives her all sorts of winks and nudges that she knows she’s lying. Stephenie finally admits, “Listen, bitch, I got an advantage. Shut up.”

Cirie says right back, “I know you did. Bitch, you know I can tell when you’re lying.” And that is why she will always be the best, and those idiots who didn’t get her out at the very beginning will be paying right up until the final five when everyone wakes up and remembers that she is one of the best to ever play the game.

The challenge is broken into two teams, where they have to push a giant boulder through a course and then solve a puzzle. The winning team earns the opportunity to compete for individual immunity. The winning team, which comes down to the puzzle, as always, consists of Christian, Ozzy, Devens, Emily, Dee, Joe, and Stephenie. The showdown for the necklace comes down to Joe and Ozzy, with our favorite polycule participant pulling out the W.

At camp, Coach and Jonathan, but really Coach, somehow convince everyone that Dee needs to go. Why? It mostly seems like an attempt to shut him up. Also, at Tribal, Dee says that there are two groups forming with a bunch of people in the middle. It’s hard to tell what she means from the edit we’re seeing, unless she means there’s the Throuple and the Four Horsemen and all these others lollygagging in the middle waiting for someone to tell them how to vote, which is sort of what happens. Someone has an idea, and the Chrissies, Aubries, Emilies, Devens, and Christians just get onboard with it.

As Coach tries to figure out how to get seven people to vote for Dee and four to vote for Tiff in case Dee plays her Shot in the Dark, he starts to lose it a bit. He doesn’t want certain people to know who is voting for whom or that they’re even splitting the votes. He ends up on a hammock by himself, writing haikus out loud to anyone who will listen, but no one is listening. Emily watches him from afar and says he’s talking to no one. No, he’s not. He’s talking to someone. He’s talking to us. This is all for the audience. This is all so that Coach can feed his own narcissism even while being annoying, wrong, smarmy, and somehow totally in control. (Reminds me of someone else who is in the news every day.)

This season has an annoying habit of taking what is an easy vote, trying to confuse us into getting excited that something interesting is going to happen, only for the easy and most boring thing to happen in the end. That’s what happens when Emily and Devens decide that maybe Coach is so annoying that they should vote him out. Yes! Please! Get that man off my screen forever! Don’t let the hypocrite slayer win! But fit never comes to fruition. I think the problem is that Dee tells Emily about Rizo having an idol, and Emily, whose mouth closes as often as a hospital emergency room, goes and tells Rizo. Without the Throuple, who decide it is time to cut Dee loose, she just doesn’t have the numbers.

At Tribal, when Rizo says that when someone is “I, I, I all the time” instead of being “we, we, we,” that they won’t have the numbers to save them, it seems like they got it together. Maybe Coach would finally get his karmic comeuppance. But no, the most boring thing happens. Aubry plays her idol that everyone knows about, Dee plays her Shot in the Dark and it’s unsuccessful, and she ends up going home. At least Tiff gets to yell to the camera exactly what I was thinking when she places her parchment for Coach: “You are a self-righteous hypocrite, and I hope I get to write your name every day until you go home.”