Survivor Season-Finale Recap: Sunrise, Sunset

For many episodes this season we’ve seen the remaining players all gather on the same log each morning and watch the sun come up. I was ready to joke that this finale was just like that ritual, all of us sitting around watching the boringly inevitable thing occur, but I was surprised to find that I enjoyed this last episode of a frustrating season more than I thought I would. Even though Kyle and Kamilla were the only two left who ever bothered playing the parts of the game that didn’t have to do with winning challenges or accruing advantages, these were all great characters I enjoyed spending time with, even if I thought their gameplay was as terrible as the diarrhea that most contestants deal with as soon as they eat their first proper meal after leaving the game.

Speaking of advantages, after watching the sun rise there is a game for everyone to win an advantage in the immunity challenge. They’re all given one of those weird giant bike lock things that the Beware Advantages were hidden in and told to decode them with the clues around camp. Eva eventually figures out the word is SECURE and gets her prize, which is skipping one easy step in the challenge. She doesn’t have to shoot a ball into a hoop, which seems like it only took most contestants one or two attempts to do anyway. Thanks for nothing, Jeff.

The real surprise at the challenge, which is the usual mud crawl and obstacle course with a puzzle at the end, is that Kamilla comes all the way from behind to win. The puzzle queen all season, she starts banging it out while Joe, Mitch, and Kyle all stand there in amazement as if Jeff asked them to read ancient Aramaic. This is the kind of surprise I was hoping for, getting Kamilla closer to the end. Kamilla also gets a reward where she can go to the Eyeroll Sanctuary (where Good! Eyerolls! Happen!). One thing that does not happen at the Sanctuary: showers. They make Kamilla and Overfed Eva, who Kamilla chose as her partner, sit there and eat pasta while absolutely covered in mud. Can’t we at least rinse these poor ladies off?

While Mitch approaches Kyle about getting rid of Joe because he is the favorite, both Kyle and Kamilla have a different idea. They’re more worried about Mitch getting votes at the end and think that he is the one who needs to go home. What? Are they kidding? Sorry to Mitch, but he is a goat. While “vote” may rhyme with “goat,” that is not something that people who do little in the game actually get. There have been 32 final three finales out of 48 seasons. Of those, there have been only five where all three players got votes, and the last one was Heroes Vs. Healers Vs. Hustlers, the same season where Jeff invented the fire-making challenge at the end so that he could personally hand Ben Driebergen the top prize. That was 13 seasons ago. Why so long? Because everyone takes a goat knowing they won’t get a vote. As they were hatching this plan I was screaming at the television that Joe is way more likely to spoil their game than Mitch, but I did appreciate that the final three ended up, like the menu at a vegan restaurant, being goat-free. And, lo and behold, for the first time in 13 seasons we see all three players getting votes to win.

Kamilla and Kyle decide to do the humane thing and tell Mitch that he will be the one to leave. As Kyle is sitting next to Mitch on the beach telling him why he needs to go home, Mitch literally says, “I should have made a move.” Yes, Mitch, you should have. That should be the motto for this season: Survivor 48: I Should Have Made a Move. All of this makes the rest of the day and the tribal that night kind of moot, even though they still make everyone vote. Eva also plays her idol, since it’s the last time she can, and I was more than slightly annoyed that she didn’t look at Star, thank Star, or even spit a few bars in Star’s honor considering that lady gave Eva a whole immunity idol.

The next day, the final four walk into the challenge and see the iconic Simmotion machines. You know the ones, the big twisty mazes that contestants have to place balls into on a rotating basis and if one of the balls hits the ground they’re out. They all know just what they’re in for. “I like seeing your smiles when you know what the challenge is,” Jeff says. But should he? I’m all for iconic challenges, but Simmotion didn’t start out as an icon. It started out as a new challenge. The problem with doing so many repeating challenges is it doesn’t leave any room for the new icons to emerge. We see this same thing happening on RuPaul’s Drag Race, where the challenges are so repetitive that contestants can plan for them in advance, but also fans can get bored. Hey, Jeff, since we’re doing fan polls for Survivor 50, why not ask if we want to see all new challenges? I bet we do!

Kyle ends up victorious and he tells Joe that he’s going to take him to the final three, leaving Eva and Kamilla to make fire. Earlier in the day, Kamilla told Kyle that if she won the challenge she was going to the end against Joe and Eva, because she thought she and Kyle would split their votes and neither of them would win. Kyle concurs. This annoys me slightly, and I don’t think it would have if my girl Kamilla made it to the very end. This whole time Kamilla did way more to help Kyle’s game than Kyle ever did to help Kamilla’s. Yes, he helped get rid of David, who wanted her out, but since then she’s just been supporting him, lying for him, and putting herself on the line to further his game. Why couldn’t Kyle have turned on Joe and/or Eva to cement both of them getting to the finals so they didn’t have to split the votes? This, however, is my only problem with Kyle’s gameplay.

The afternoon is spent with the two women practicing fire, and as it started I took out my phone and started scrolling through Instagram because the only thing I hate more than watching the fire-making challenge is watching people practice for it. Yawn! But then came the biggest surprise of the episode. As Eva is struggling we see Kyle and Joe in the shelter listening to her not cry, not sob, but wail, actually wail, that she can’t figure it out. Joe goes to check on her and, just as he did after her episode earlier in the season, he calms her down.

What transpires is not only a distillation of their unique relationship but something like a metaphor for parenting. Joe tells Eva that he’s just going to do the fire-making challenge himself so that she doesn’t have to, but she insists she is going to take it on. She has to prove to herself and everyone on the jury that she is capable, that even when things get difficult she can make it through. “You can’t do it,” she tells him. “I’m going to do it. But you can help me prepare.” How hard that must have been for her to say and how hard for Joe to hear. He just wants to help her, to take the pain away, to make it better, but he can’t. Just like any parent, he needs to trust that the skills he has given her so far will enable her to succeed. So that’s what he does, he helps her prepare, giving her an excellent lesson on building a fire that only a man who puts them out professionally could.

When they get to the challenge, Kamilla starts talking about how she is cramping, her hands won’t work, she can’t even get a spark to form. While Eva makes an initial fire, it starts to fade and she has another freakout. “It won’t go up, guys,” she shouts. “What am I doing wrong?” Then Kamilla reassures her, “Girl, you’re doing so much better than me… Girl I can’t even catch a flame.” Eva recovers and wins the challenge. Huh. An exciting and engaging fire-making challenge. Will the Survivor wonders never cease?

Now we’re on to the final tribal, and thank the Catholic Jesus for it because stupid David has a stupid chance to stupid embarrass himself stupid again. “Knock Knock,” he asks the assembled contestants. There are about 17 minutes of crickets before someone says, “Who’s there?” He then responds, “Not me.” This was his big stunt? This was his big play? This is what he spent more than a week sitting at Ponderosa thinking about? No wonder his girlfriend dumped him. Of all the blessings I have in my life, the one I will count first tonight is that I never have to see stupid David on my stupid television ever stupid again.

While David’s performance is laughably awful, both Eva and Kyle do very well. Joe, well, he kinda bombs. He doesn’t say much, lets Eva and Kyle hog the floor, and never makes a great case for why he deserves the money other than that he won a bunch of challenges, has spent his life taking care of other people, and would like the money so he can take care of his family for once. That is actually a pretty good case. I take it back. Still, it has nothing to do with his game.

Eva does a great job defending herself. When asked about their weaknesses, she talks about her autism and how it made her game tougher, though she still doesn’t see it as a weakness. In her final plea to the jury she says that this was an unconventional season and that she is an unconventional winner. She points out that there have been lawyers who played the middle and won, there have been physical threats who have won, but never anyone like her. Then she puts the cherry on top: “I made Jeff cry.” She’s right, she did. Honestly, if I was on that jury it would have swayed me. All of her answers are articulate and well thought out and, yes, she did make Jeff cry, which no one has managed to do.

But these are not answers about gameplay, and honestly neither are Joe’s. When it comes to a question about what differentiates Eva and Joe, Eva explains that for the Shauhin vote, she found out that he was gunning for her, then went to Joe to formulate a plan to get rid of him. Everyone is talking and Kamilla is trying to pipe up and even has to raise her hand to get heard. Knowing what is about to happen, she asks Kyle what his perspective on that vote was.

Kamilla had already been mouthing to Kyle, “I got you,” before lobbing him this pitch, and he hits it out of the park. He says the only reason Eva knew is because he and Kamilla lied to Eva and Joe about Shauhin gunning for them. In fact, he and Kamilla were working together the whole game and they also created the lie about Shauhin having the idol, which Kamilla backed up and everyone believed because they didn’t know about their secret alliance. Kyle says that everyone thinks Eva and Joe were the best duo in the game, but they were just the most public, that it was actually K-Squared that was really running the game the whole time and no one knew it. Then he gets in his kill shot, saying, “The perception was that Joe was the muscle, Eva was the heart, and Shauhin was the brains.” He needed to change that perception, so he took out the brains.

That right there is literally the only talk about gameplay during the entire tribal, and it is what clinched Kyle’s game. Why? Because Kyle is the only one who really played. He didn’t make many moves, but he made at least one, and that is one more than Eva and Joe made. Yes, they might have won lots of challenges and gotten all the advantages, but it was Kyle who showed true skill playing Survivor. That’s why he is a deserving winner and, as frustrating as it was to watch him get there, it put a satisfying ending on an otherwise lackluster season.