Survivor Recap: Mind Your P’s and Q’s

On Game of Thrones Littlefinger said, “Chaos is a ladder.” It seems like that is something that Q has taken to heart. But remember, Littlefinger ended up being assassinated by the very people that he was caught conspiring against. The only way the ladder works is if no one knows that you’re the one making it. After this episode, Q might be Bhanu 2 point oh-no-you-didn’t. While Bhanu’s biggest fault was not playing Survivor enough, Q is an equally bad player for going at it way too hard. However, it did leave us with the best episode of the season so far and one of the best episodes of the show in quite a long time.

The episode starts with Q in a snit, and, well, that snit doesn’t go away for the whole episode. It’s just that the reasons keep changing. His first snit is after the first of the two votes last episode, when he wants to sit around and talk game with everyone just back from tribal. These people went through a stressful situation, and they don’t even know who else has been voted out yet. You can chill for about an hour, heck, you could chill all night, and it would be fine. Pick it up in the morning.

After an infomercial for the “Q Skirt,” which is just a hoodie tied around the waist with a pocket in the front, Q decides that everyone should play hide and seek, which is actually a pretty good idea that leads us to some silly places. However, both him and the producers insisting that the game was going to teach us things about everyone’s strategy seems a little bit far-fetched. Venus is annoying and playing an annoying game. Does that mean she’s going to hide … annoyingly? How would you even do that? By dumping out the contents of everyone’s backpacks and then crawling under their belongings?

Q’s next snit is the only one that I agree with. At the challenge, we get two classics for the price of one: the hanging on a pole challenge and the number of players who will sit out for a rice bargain. Unlike in the past there is no negotiation, it has to be four players out of 10 remaining. Though Jeff does offer an alternative: two people can give up their votes that night and can still compete. Though Liz and Q say they’re willing to give up their shot for the rice no one else follows and for the “first time in the new era” (yes I hate myself for typing that) they don’t take the rice.

Everyone is competing, and they get to the top of their poles (How does this happen? Ladders? Cherry pickers? Chaos, which is a ladder? Standing on Jeff’s shoulders and jumping?) Q and Liz are first down in about 20 seconds quickly followed by Kenzie, Ben, and Maria. This is what pisses me off about the rice bargaining: there are people who know they’re not going to win. If I was on Survivor I would know that I would not stack up against Hunter who, as Q later reminds us, hid 20 feet up in a tree for quite some time while playing hide and seek. Jeff would pull out that bag of rice and I would step forward without even a word being said. I’m out. Even if I knew I was going home that night, I also know that I do not have the strength-to-weight ratio to make this thing happen. (And, trust me, I have hung on a pole or two in my Fire Island days.) I might as well go out getting rice for my tribe. All of these players need to take an honest stock of themselves and say, “Know what? I can’t do this.” Those players include (sorry in advance) people like Ben, Kenzie, and Maria who didn’t even last a minute.

While we got some funny moments in the challenge, particularly from Charlie and Tevin, the best was when they asked Jeff how long he could have lasted in the challenge and he says, “Longer than 20 seconds.” Jeff! That is a dare. Get the ladder or chaos or whatever and get up there and let us see what you can do. Put your money where your Botox is. Anyway, Hunter obviously wins yet again.

Okay, here is when Q’s game glitches like a GameBoy dropped in a toilet. After the last tribal, where he got rid of Tim, a member of his The Six alliance, he gets Maria to recruit her real number one, Charlie. Now they still have six (Q, Tiff, Tevin, Hunter, Maria, and Charlie), and they want to go after Venus. However, Tiff makes an excellent point that Venus has no real power. No one wants to work with her, and everyone knows that she’s untrustworthy. Why get rid of her when there are people who are much more likely to gun for them? Q is mad because he doesn’t want to keep a goat to make it to the end because he’s playing some kind of new game that he’s made up in his mind. He says that if Tiff wants to keep goats, then they may not be as aligned as he thought. Then why is she, um, in your alliance?

When he talks to Tiff, she mentions that she’d rather get rid of Maria or Ben. As soon as she brings up Maria’s name, Q says that if she brings up someone in The Six, then she needs to go. Who does this guy think he is, Daisy Jones? Is he bigger than The Six? Also, need we remind Q that the last person he voted out was Tim, who was in The Six. Now he’s going after Tiff who is also in The Six. If he’s so protective of this alliance, why is it dwindling like a polar ice cap?

That’s the problem with his whole The Six scheme. When he proposed it at the journey, I thought it was a good idea because it was across tribal lines and no one would see it coming. The conception was great but the execution has been a mess. None of these people had worked together before and it turns out that they are all playing wildly different games that don’t intersect with each other at all.

Q’s fatal flaw, however, is that he doesn’t want anything to do with a plan that he didn’t invent. “The idea is to keep my alliance making moves I want to make under my control, under my rule. It’s almost like I’m a mob boss and they dare not say a name within my organization,” he says. He thinks this is a new way of playing, but that’s the only way that Boston Rob ever won: by finding a bunch of acolytes he could order around. But no one here wants to do Q’s bidding and Q isn’t nearly as good as four-time Survivor loser Boston Rob.

Q approaches what remains of The Six and tells them they need to get rid of Tiff because she said Maria’s name but also that Tiff has an idol. They think they can get Liz to vote with them, but Liz has no interest. She wants Tevin out because Tevin is taking credit for the Soda ouster and has too strong of a social game. Who gets to take responsibility for the Soda vote is my favorite B-plot of the episode. First there is the hilarious incident when Venus sits Tevin down to explain how she did it and to get him to say that he “respects her move” when Tevin is the one who whipped the votes and drew in Charlie and Maria to make it happen. She then asks what he wants to do moving forward, and he says, “I’m taking it minute to minute.” Venus then gives him some advice about how he can better his game, but “taking it minute to minute” is the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” of Survivor.

Meanwhile, Liz is pissed at both of them because she’s been hoping to make Soda go flat (I immediately apologize for that joke) since the very beginning. Okay, just cause Liz had the idea doesn’t mean she gets the credit. It’s a general idea. It’s like she said, “We should have lights inside at night instead of burning these messy candles all the time.” Then Tevin went and invented electricity and Liz said, “See, I made it happen. I said there should be lights.”

Liz quickly gets Tiff, Kenzie, Ben, and Venus on board with voting Tevin, putting her in striking distance of a majority, which means the rest of The Six, minus Hunter, are down with Tevin. Then Q goes to Hunter and tells him that they want to vote out Tevin, his number one. He gets upset about it and goes to the rest of The Six (minus Tiff, of course) and tries to get them to vote for Tiff instead. While this is happening, Venus pulls an MJ from The Traitors and goes to talk to the group, who ask her to leave. Hunter says, “Why don’t we vote her out?” Exactly? Why not vote her out? If there is this much confusion and descension, just do the easy thing this week. Everyone would have voted for annoying loner Venus and they could have sorted out the Tiff/Tevin thing next tribal.

As Hunter seems like he’s about to convince them to keep Tevin, Q says he doesn’t like a last-minute change of plan. Really? It seemed like last episode when he kept going back and forth between Tim and Ben he didn’t mind it so much. What Q doesn’t like is any plan that isn’t his. Sorry, buster, you can’t control the entire game. In the new era of Survivor, it’s about having control over the moves without seeming like you have control at all, or else people will kick you out faster than a 12-year-old at Studio 54 (unless you’re Drew Barrymore). Know the best way to look like you’re not controlling the game? To let someone else decide. It’s not a weakness, it’s a strength.

Since Q can’t let that happen, he has his biggest snit of the night at tribal council. He can’t even let Jeff control the conversation; instead, he says that he messed something up, so there are several people who don’t know which way to vote. Since it’s his fault he thinks they all should vote for him. Know what? Do it! Vote for him! Tevin is right, he is a grown man who makes his own choices and if he wants out then make like you were holding a fart in an elevator and let it out immediately.

One of my least favorite things about the new era is whispers at the tribal council. We want to know how and why someone was sent home, and the whispers obfuscate that. This time I will make an exception because Q really screwed up everyone’s games, and no one had any idea what was going to happen. The biggest event is when Q tells Kenzie and Tiff that Tiff is going to be voted out and that she didn’t have enough votes for Tevin. When she asks Charlie about this, he tells her it is the truth and also that Q told him and Maria she has the idol, effectively blowing up any game that Q has left.

I don’t know how anyone could trust Q again or want to work with him. Tevin says to Charlie and Maria, “If he’s this unhinged, he needs to go,” and Maria says she worries he’ll do it again. Oh, he for sure will. Survivor is an individual game, but until the final five there needs to be some degree of cooperation and compromise to make a group dynamic work. They will never have that with Q. As the votes roll in, it is nearly unanimous for Tevin, and the whispers did what they always do: make it unclear why everyone voted for him or why those who were going for Tiff chose Tevin instead. Q tried to use chaos as a ladder, but it seems like that ladder just landed square on his face and The Six, as T Swift stan Charlie would say, are never, ever, ever, ever getting back together.