Survivor Season-Premiere Recap: From the Gekko

Like any new season of Survivor, a few things have changed, and they’re certainly not Jeff Probst’s cargo shirts, which have remained the same since the Clinton administration. The first new thing is that everyone is speaking in the third person. “Survivor is Bhanu’s life,” says Bhanu. “One thing you have to know about Liz is you don’t have to apologize to me for being yourself,” says Liz. “Jelinsky doesn’t have a vote tonight, and Jelinsky has never talked in the third person in his life before,” Jelinsky says at the tribal council, which is a lie because earlier in the episode, he also said, “Jelinsky is a legend.” He was not lying about being a legend because this first episode was all about his legendarily bad gameplay.

The episode starts, as always, with the three tribes coming onto the beach to stare into Probst’s dimples for the very first time. I always hate the arbitrary tribe names. There is not one of these from past seasons that I can remember. Can’t we just call them by colors? Can’t we make them like the “Silver Snakes” and “Blue Barracudas” like they used to on Legends of the Hidden Temple? This year, Siga is green, Nami is orange, and Yanu is purple. Who picks these colors, and why do they make the tribe dress in them? Imagine showing up and being forced to rock purple or (God forbid) orange for the next 21 days? No one looks good in orange.

Immediately, they meet Jeff, and he gets to one of my other pet peeves about the modern era of Survivor: Jeff is telling us how great a game this is and how difficult it is to play. “This is what makes Survivor so fun to watch,” he says. Yeah, Jeff, we know. We’ve been watching this M-er F-er for more than two decades. How about you apply a little creative writing workshop and show rather than tell?

The marooning challenge consists of pairs of tribemates having to go under a muddy net and get some giant puzzle pieces that will build a podium. One tribemate must climb that podium like they’re Muhammed Ali lighting the Olympic cauldron, but instead of a torch, they have a stick, and the stick gets them a flint which can light a fire which can make you a torch. There you go, this is now the Olympics, except it happens four times a year instead of every four years.

It’s a deceptively simple challenge, and Jeff sees Maria carrying a full puzzle piece on her back and says, “This is how you do it on Survivor” for the first time this season. Everyone drink! There is a great twist on the challenge, though. The winners get their flint, pot, and machete; the second-place team gets to pick either the “sweat” or “savvy” challenge to get the rest of their supplies, and the losers get the challenge that’s left. This only seems fair and also keeps both tribes from picking the easier of the challenges and possibly both doing the same one. More consequences, better TV, everyone wins.

Well, not everyone. Only one team, and that is Nami. Siga comes in second, and Yanu comes in last. Siga chooses to do the savvy challenge, which requires brain over brawn, thinking that they will tire the other tribe out before the immunity challenge. This is an excellent strategy, except, well, did they think about whether or not they could solve the puzzle? When they get to their beach, no one seems like a natural puzzle solver, and no one really wants to step up. The task falls to Ben, a fedora that somehow became a real boy, and Charlie … a Swiftie. They have to decode a big board of letters to find the code to open the very familiar-looking Survivor lock with a rod in it bigger than most samurai swords.

They start by finding all the letters that spell out numbers and crossing them off, thinking that math will get them there. What they fail to realize is that the remaining letters spell out “Hey, assholes, it’s right here!” Just kidding. It actually says “Dig Under Lock” and while they look under the lock they do not dig. That’s a big fail.

Over at the Yanu, they are stuck with the sweat task where they have to fill two giant urns with water from two leaky buckets. Jelinsky volunteers to do the task that will take “several” hours, and he’s joined by Q (not to be confused with the true villain of this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race with the same exact name). I wonder if there was some rule about applying savvy to this task as well. My first thought is that I would have taken off my shirt, lined the bucket with it, and hopefully stopped or at least slowed the water from coming out of the bucket. Or what about combining the two buckets so that the holes were covered and having each dude take a turn walking? You have to do it twice as fast, but with more water, I feel like there would have been fewer trips.

I don’t think we’ll ever know because, after about 90 minutes of the task, Jelinsky decides that he’s had enough, and they’re never going to make it within the time limit. He says, “Last time I checked, several means seven.” Dude, what are they teaching you in Las Vegas? Everyone knows that “one” means one, “a couple” means two, “several” means three, “a bunch” means four to ten, and “shitloads” covers everything above ten. Jelinsky throws the hourglass across the beach. Bro, this is not six seasons ago when you could break the hourglass and all decisions are reversed. You’re stuck here.

Now, I am all for a considered surrender, especially when it comes to immunity challenges. When it’s an individual game and there is some balance challenge, I’m bailing after 30 seconds. I can’t balance for shit, and I’m going to save my body for the next challenge that I might have a shot at winning. The difference is that you don’t give up when it’s a team game, and you certainly don’t in the first challenge. That’s just setting up your character, and Jelinsky’s is already lacking. I mean, at the 23-minute mark, I already hate this guy more than I’ve hated any contestant since Russell Hantz, whom I hate more than I hate Teresa Giudice, and I hate her with the fire of a million suns.

After the tasks, we focus on meeting all the players and their insecurities and abilities. We get to another new thing about this season: everyone is naming their alliance. When Ben and Charlie can’t figure out the puzzle, they name themselves the Dumb and Dumber alliance. When Jelinsky and Kenzie team up, they call themselves the Shaggy and Daphne alliance. When Hunter and Tevin form a bond, they become the Andy Griffith alliance because they both love the classic sitcom. (They were voted “Alliance Brian Would Most Like to Snuggle Between in the Shelter” by Survivor Recappers magazine.) When the three girls at Siga add Charlie to their alliance, they call it Charlie’s Angels. When did we start giving alliances names? Is this Big Brother? And why are all of the alliance names based on TV shows and movies? I don’t like this one bit.

What I did like was getting time to meet the individual players, something the show has gotten away from in the past few years. There weren’t any super amazing moments, but the more we learn about these people (Liz is allergic to everything!), the more we understand them, and the more we will understand their moves in the game and the shifting alliances they’re a part of. That said, Bhanu already annoys me, and I would like to see very much less of him. The same goes for Kenzie and also Jelinsky, who I no longer have to worry about.

To fill up this two-hour episode, there is also a quest, and one member from each tribe must go. Nami decides to roll a shot in the dark die. Siga decides by a tournament of Roshambo (which is what people who are annoying on Twitter call Rock, Paper, Scissor.) Yanu just let Jelinsky decide to do it because they are weak and just let this guy keep volunteering for shit he can’t do.

When they reach the destination, they each have to pick a card; one has a torch, one has a skull, and one has a vote. The person who gets the torch card, which ends up being Maria from Siga, has to figure out which of the other two has the vote card. If she does, they both get an extra vote, and the skull loses his vote. If she doesn’t, the skull gets an extra vote, and the other two lose their votes for one tribal council. Jelinsky pulls the skull, and Tevin pulls the vote. At first, both Tevin and Jelinsky tell her they have the vote, but Jelinsky is very bad at this game and is clearly lying. Maria then tells them that if she is fooled by one of them, she’s going to go back to camp and tell the remaining players never to work with that person. That is enough for Jelinsky to give up even faster than he gave up his leaky bucket and even faster than the first of Britney Spears’s marriages.

When Jelinsky returns, he informs everyone exactly what happened, and they’re like, “Dude, you gave up again?” Usually, with one of these, one of the tribe mates will say, “We can’t trust what really happened. He might have an extra vote and is lying to us.” But no one said that. They know Jelinsky gave up and sucks more than several (not seven!) black holes, and they all know he doesn’t get a vote, honey. He’s worthless.

There’s even more action at the Yanu. Tiffany finds the Beware Advantage, which is a box with a key. It says there is an idol inside, but she won’t get the key until her tribe loses the first challenge. Then, she will get further instructions on finding a key. As is customary, she now loses her vote. I feel like it’s time for a change up on the Beware Advantages. Everyone knows that you lose a vote when you find one. Why not say, “Whichever player this idol is used on loses their vote at their next tribal council.” I’ve always thought there should be a penalty to using the idol, especially to stop a run like Ben from Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers, who went on finding enough idols to catapult him to the win with zero social game at all.

At the challenge, the teams must haul a 500-pound gecko through an obstacle course and then solve a puzzle. This will go down as the most adorable challenge in Survivor history. Can we have the geckos at every challenge this season? Can we have one just chillin’ at tribal council, keeping a watch on the jury? If I was on the show, I would have named my gecko Cirie and finally gotten her the win she so clearly deserves.

Once again, Nami dominates the whole challenge. It’s down to the puzzle between Siga and Yanu, which has Jelinsky and Jess on the puzzle. At one point, he even quits at that, just handing Jess pieces so she can find where they go as the rest of the team yells at him. Naturally, Yanu shit the bed. When they get back to camp, the first name out of everyone’s mouth is Jess, who hasn’t really connected with anyone and whose brain is a-fog from her ADHD and sleeplessness. We know it’s not her because the first person they decide on never goes home, which means it has to be Jelinsky, whose constant quitting annoyed everyone, especially the non-drag-queen Q.

This is clearly the right move. How can you trust someone who quits all the time and is also so dumb that he thinks several means seven? At tribal, he tells Jeff that neither he nor Q are quitters, and Jeff is like, “Girl, but you quit.” Then he changes his tune and says that he quit. How can you be an ally to a person who even quits his rebuttal about how he didn’t quit? They very rightly vote him out. Jelinsky says it is a blindside, which it couldn’t have been because Bhanu almost said out loud he was voting for Jelinsky. Then he says that when you get comfortable in Survivor, that’s when you go home, and that’s what happened to him. I’m sorry, but how comfortable can you be? You weren’t even there long enough to get over the let lag, my dude. But at least the third person to speak in the third person went home right away. We need to end this new trend immediately.