Survivor 47 recap: Genevieve (who?) makes the move of the season

Where did that come from? And where did she come from? Bust out your favorite purple highlighter everyone, because the woman we weren’t even completely sure was on this season of Survivor just made the move of the game so far.

Genevieve Mushaluk. I know, you have no idea who that is. At least you didn’t until this week’s breakout episode, as Genevieve had been the most under-edited player of the season. With Rome running around being Rome, and Sol and Aysha shaping up as the opposition, and Kishan and Teeny being positioned as the power-players in the middle, there was sadly no time or story left for Genevieve.

Her lack of screen time and recognition was not helped by the fact that half the time she appeared with glasses on, and the other half sans specs. Honestly, it was starting to become a bit of a Clark Kent/Superman situation. Are they the same person? Have they ever been seen in the same place at the same time?

I felt for Genevieve. It’s no fun living a full week of your life out on an island, and then having your 168-hour experience distilled down to about 168 seconds. It’s hard to feel seen when you are not… well, seen. Genevieve must have sensed it was happening in real time, leading to her to jump in with last week’s first Tribal Council comment after Rome balked at being asked first. But that was pretty much the only time we heard from her over the first three episodes.

But this week, Genevieve removed the glasses, stepped into Shane Powers’ old imaginary Blackberry phone booth, and indeed turned into Superwoman. Because the wily Canadian did one of the hardest things in all of Survivor — getting two people who absolutely HATE each other and really, really wanted to vote each other out to instead combine their powers like the mighty Wonder Twins and actually work together.

Even after being told of Kishan’s deception and move to vote him out, Rome still wanted to take his shot at Sol. And Sol was so offended by Rome’s threat (ultimatum?) over the Shot in the Dark, that he was also insistent on voting out Rome. Yet somehow, some way, Genevieve convinced each of them to put their feud (and babysitting duties) on hold to take out the person she deemed the biggest threat on the tribe in Kishan.

I can’t overstate how difficult that is. People can say all they want about how they won’t let emotions run their game and how they want to think strategically and not emotionally, but that is much easier said than done. When someone is driving you absolutely bananas and pissing you off beyond all measure — and you are already on edge because you haven’t slept, haven’t eaten, and are wet and cold at night — it is almost impossible to put those grudges and grievances aside. And yet Genevieve got two people to do it. Super impressive.

Of course, the irony in all this is that Genevieve put these wheels in motion because she was hurt that Kishan threw her name out there — not even as a real vote, but as a decoy vote. That may seem like an overreaction on her part, but if someone is using your name as the decoy — and there is no obvious reason to do so — then that does usually give at least a vague indication as to where that person views your place in the tribe.

So instead of sitting back and seeing if that was true, Genevieve struck. She also probably correctly ascertained that taking Rome out would leave her on the bottom of the new four-person Lavo tribe and give all the power to Kishan and Teeny. Why would she do that to herself? And why would Kishan think she would do that to herself?

What a lapse in what appears to be otherwise very sound judgment on Kishan’s part. “Nobody is saying our names,” he noted to Teeny at one point, who responded, “because Genevieve loves us.” Not so much, it seems. And just like that, the dynamic duo who seemed poised for a deep run in the game are suddenly shattered. The cruel twist in all of this is that if Kishan and Teeny had let things be, Rome would have used his Steal-a-Vote on Sol and been all out of idols and advantages. The playing field would have been leveled. Oh well. Teeny still has Sol, and if he has forgiven her for voting against him last week, they could still be a combined threat in the game. All is not lost for my episode 1 winner pick, but Kishan’s hopes and dreams have been snuffed, and to use the show’s own parlance, in an epic, boss-girl-move way.

Until this week we didn’t really know who Genevieve was. Now we do. “I am a bossy type-A woman,” she informed us. “And I don’t want to go along with plans, especially if they are not in my best interest.” This week, she didn’t, and established herself as a stealth undercover force in the game. Okay, let’s get into what else went down in episode 4 of Survivor 47 before someone notices this mysterious red paint all over my keyboard.

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Bread to play 'Survivor'

I got a root canal once. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I got two root canals. On the same tooth. And then I eventually just got rid of the tooth. It was a whole thing. But that first root canal — which took place just days before I left for Survivor: Gabon — was the most pain I have ever experienced in my entire life. It was my own personal Vietnam. While in the throes of agony, I traversed across all of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.

The first circle was filled with slow walkers.
The second circle consisted of all my neighbors that throw their dog poop into my trash can.
The third circle was just a big Dallas Cowboys logo, but that is neither here nor there.

But the fourth circle was a collection of every white dude who has ever had the audacity to rap on reality TV. This long, very unproud tradition kicked off back in the summer of 2001 with a gentleman who called himself Mike Boogie, residing in a district known as “Chill Town.” Mike Boogie impressed his fellow housemates on Big Brother by rhyming the words “Hardy” and “party”, and since then we have been treated (if that is the right word) to an assortment of rapping white men on reality competition TV, one seemingly worse than the next. Sam Phalen joined that inauspicious group this week when he dropped some bars for his tribe mates, and if ever there was a reason for the women on the tribe to form an alliance to rid themselves of all alleged rapping skills… excuse me, skillz… then this was it.

Sure enough, we saw Rachel, Anika, and Sierra going so far as to pull a Nick Wilson and naming their women’s alliance — the Breadwinners. On an reality TV alliance naming scale? Not bad. Certainly not as embarrassing as the Friendship or Quack Pack. I can live with it.

Especially since it’s not even real. At least not to Sierra. The big drama — if you want to call it that — around Gata this week centered on Sierra telling Andy about the Breadwinners, and then Andy telling Sam about the Breadwinners, and then Sam getting mad at Sierra for not telling him about the Breadwinners. Fortunately, he did not do this while rapping. This led to a tiff between Sam and Sierra in terms of if Andy should go next. I don’t want to take sides or anything, but how can you get rid of a guy who pretends to be asleep to fetch his Shot in the Dark cube?

Speaking of which, does anyone understand why some elaborate ruse had to be pulled to get Andy’s SOID cube back? Like, it just fell out of his bag. What is the big deal about putting it back? I guess there were people who didn’t want him to put it back so he lost it? But I feel that was either not really conveyed, or I got distracted for a second with images of a shirtless, rapping Chris Noble dancing through my mind.

You've got red on you

The Survivor creative team was on point this week. We’ll get to the Journey later, but for now, let’s talk about the Tuku Beware Advantage. Sue found it, and it told her to cut the vine at a palm tree to release an immunity idol. Wow, so easy! And it was easy. But there was a complication. Because when that vine got cut, the idol slammed down to the ground and red paint spilled everywhere. You’ve heard of being caught red-handed? Sue was caught red-handed, red-haired, and red-faced. The more she attempted to get the red off, the more it spread to the point where she looked like she had entered a time machine, gone into the future, devoured one of Gata’s chickens (thereby pissing off Sam, who immediately wrote a diss track about it), and then came back to present day on Tuku without washing off the bloody remains of one Mrs. Clucks.

Even better than Sue being caught at the water well with red paint all over her was the awesome-sauce excuse that she “bit the back of my tongue.” Unless Sue chewed straight through her tongue, and then smeared the severed tongue all over her hair and knees and face, and then restitched her tongue back together so could speak, I don’t see how that could possibly make a lick of sense… slight pun intended. And the cherry on top was her proclamation that “I pulled it off! I pulled it off!”

But major props to the Survivor creative team for this fun wrinkle (which, yes, we have seen variations of before) of forcing someone to quickly think on their feet and, more importantly, serving up what was almost guaranteed to be a super awkward excuse-making conversation at some point.

A puzzling situation

Rome was not built in a day. And, apparently, neither are puzzles built by Rome. The end of this week’s Survivor immunity challenge was absolutely spectacular in a spectacularly bad way. The contest began with a whole lot of entertaining window dressing (including a really cool block window frame that players had to build and then throw sandbags through) before ending in a puzzle that all three teams essentially started simultaneously. Suffice it to say, they did not finish simultaneously.

Rachel and Anika once again welcomed the other teams into the Puzzle Domination Station, obliterating the competition. Caroline and Gabe were completely respectable for Tuku, however — solving their fire puzzle in what probably would have been a winning time if not playing against total puzzle terminators. Lavo, on the other hand…

The only thing funnier than watching Rome sit there on the ground and fail to put a single piece in correctly was listening to a fully dispassionate Sol just repeat “Not it, Rome” over and over again. Yo, someone loop that shiz as a backing track for Sam’s next mixtape!

Anyhoodle, not only did Lavo not get a single piece in before Gata finished their puzzle, they didn’t even get one in before Tuku did. In fact, the only person who did get a piece in on the Lavo tribe puzzle was Jeff Probst, who hilariously dunked on the tribe by doing so — ON HIS FIRST TRY! — during the commercial break as he solicited casting audition tapes. Now that’s digging deep!

Combating the dis(advantage)

I was down on last week’s Journey because it did not truly force any interesting decision making or negotiating between the players. This week was so much better. Teeny, Caroline, and Andy were told that if one person agreed to lose their vote at the next Tribal Council, then all three could share an advantage. However, if they could not all agree on the player to lose the vote, all three would lose votes and would not receive the advantage.

Teeny eventually caved, losing her vote and giving all three an idol that had to be played together by all the people still in the game after the merge to save the same person. Personally, and this may be a bit of my own Survivor hot take, I think Teeny made a big mistake here. Not in agreeing to lose her vote instead of calling their others’ bluffs — especially since she was the only one guaranteed to go to a pre-merge Tribal Council.  While I do think that was poor negotiating on Teeny’s part, my biggest issue is that this advantage reads more like a disadvantage to me.

Why oh why would you want anything that incentivizes people to vote you out? Look what happened to the folks who denied Austin his sandwich back on Survivor 45! If I’m Caroline, I’m looking to take out Andy and Teeny at the merge so I can get that idol all to myself. Or vice versa. Had I been on that journey — and this is not a joke — I would have refused to agree on either of the other people taking it, ensuring we all lost our votes, but also killing the disadvantage in its tracks. Yes, the instructions specifically said, “If one of you agrees to lose your vote at your next Tribal Council, then all three of you can share an advantage. But that’s not all those instructions said. They also stated, “If you cannot all agree on one player to lose their vote, then all three of you will lose their vote.”

So, by the letter of the law, could I have not agreed to someone else volunteering to lose their vote, thereby neutering the advantage? Because that is exactly what I would have done. I took this question all to way to the top and asked the Hostmaster General himself, Probst, so go check out what the man had to say about that.

Spooky, scary

I love chaos and confusion almost as I love my suddenly-not-terrible Washington Commanders, so this was a juicy Tribal Council. The real fun kicked in when Rome got up to use his Steal-a-Vote and used it on… Kishan. All of a sudden, lots of looks of panic. “I am absolutely freaking out,” Teeny told us while voting. “I have no idea what’s about to happen”

What was about to happen was her island BFF was about to have his name misspelled multiple times while being ushered out of the game. And then, reality set in. “Damn,” mumbled Kishan. “That’s not how I imagined.” THAT IS THE GREATNESS OF SURVIVOR! That’s it. Right there. Someone being so sure of something, and then slowly realizing they knew nothing at all courtesy of a rare unanimous vote (since Kishan’s was stolen and Teeny lost hers). I called it out in a previous recap. It’s that glorious mix of the thrill of victory (Genevieve, Rome) and the agony of defeat (Kishan, Teeny). So many great moments. Teeny asking Geneveive, “Why?” Rome’s s--- eating grin as he walked out of Tribal Council with that goofy hat. All of it was absolutely intoxicating, and I’m not just saying that because I may be a few Switchback Ales in at this point.

 Okay, that is probably my cue to go, but before we do, we’ve got plenty of extra goodies for you. I asked Probst about U.S. players going on Australian Survivor and other shows like The Traitors, and you can see his reaction here. The Hostmaster General also cleared up the Journey amulet rules for us. We’ve got an extra glimpse at the Gata tribe thanks to an exclusive deleted scene, and I’ll be chatting with the ousted Kishan on Thursday, so keep your eyes peeled for that as well. Hope you enjoy, and I’ll be back next week with another scoop of the crispy.