‘Survivor’ Recap, S47 Finale: Fire-Firing Challenge Punches

Survivors

the last Stand

Season 47

Episode 14

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Photo: CBS

This is exactly why I hate the way the endgame plays out in the new era Survivors. I’ve said all season in these recaps that nothing should ever be left to chance; Nothing should be left to luck. That everything should revolve around the decisions players make and the consequences of those actions. We then see Sam and Teeny sitting down to make a fire. Who wins? The wind. The Wind won the challenge and should now sit alongside Sue and Rachel at the final Tribal Council. Sol spoke up: “Yes, my question is aimed at Wind. Why did you blow Teeny’s fire away from her rope and Sam’s right on top of it just as the clutch moment came?” The wind can’t respond because it is a force of nature without a voice, but it can blow through the tops of the trees, rattling the branches and leaves and drive away the group of bats that have been guarding the cursed immunity chain all season and whenever this happens, the wind will howl something that sounds like, “Please return back to a final.” twwwwwwoooooooooooo.”

How did we get to the final two? Well, first there was a challenge. The final four have to do a lot of nonsense, but the ultimate tiebreaker is that they have to solve a hanging bat puzzle that was about 17 billion times closer than the immunity chain’s prepared nightmare.

When the challenge begins, everyone has to crawl through the mud under a net and Sue is the last one out. “Come on, Sue! Let’s dig!” Jeff shouts at them. Um, Jeff, her digs. She’s only seconds behind Teeny and Sue is practically three times her age. This is what digging looks like for a 59 year old. Give the woman a moment of peace. Ultimately, Rachel wins the immunity challenge and, back at camp, tells the foursome that she’s taking Sue to the end and Sam and Teeny are making fire. This far into the finale, it seems like it’s Rachel’s game to lose.

At camp, Rachel, who is a huge superfan, gives Teeny a complete YouTube tutorial on how to start a fire, and Teeny seems to be on her way to victory. Sam tells everyone that he has no idea how to make fire, and although they think he’s lying, he actually doesn’t. Then it all begins, the tide seems to change, the wind picks up and we can see Sam reading a letter from his father: “(He wrote) he knew I would give everything I have out there and this He was too. “I’m not going to bet against myself, and the thought of him standing up for me showed me that you’re not the type to give up.” Yes, sir. The inspiring chats. They come from inside the house. That’s not a good sign.

Then the montage begins with Sam lighting a fire, the wind starting to rustle the kindling at his knees, and Sam saying, “The moment you give in to doubt is the moment you lose” , and that’s the kind of fridge magnet bullshit For Jeffrey Lee Probst, that’s like fast-acting Viagra. At that moment I knew Sam would win the fire making challenge.

After the tribe’s pleasantries, Teeny and Sam sit down at their stations, and Teeny immediately gets a spark, immediately makes a flame, and immediately starts sticking sticks into it. It works. But then Teeny, who can’t do one thing right in this game except vote wrong, looks at Rachel and asks, “Now what?” Rachel tells her to keep adding sticks. Sam barely has a flame at this point, while Teeny has a full fire, but the wind, Sam’s close personal friend, is blowing at a bad angle for them. She works at it, but the elements are against her. Sam begins to nurture his flame and it continues to grow. While it looked like a bust, now it’s a showdown and Jeff is excited, full of pablum and inspiration. Then, in a final attempt, Sam throws the rest of his kindling onto his fire, just as, as Jeffrey says, the wind blows Teeny’s fire away from her rope and Sam’s fire blows upward toward his rope.

The wind decided. The Fire Making Challenge was created to give players who had no chance in the game a final reprieve. It was essentially created to allow controversial winner Ben Driebergen a route to the final. I always thought it was a deception. It reduces the final phase of the game to a skill that Sam didn’t even have to try before the final day, a skill that he didn’t even learn better than Teeny; He simply landed on the lucky spot and literally had the wind at his back. He should have been unanimously voted out by the three women at that point in the game and should not have been there at all.

Teeny says this moment will haunt her for the rest of her life and I will be right there with her. We hear a great speech from her at the last tribal meeting about how Sam is the guy she always wanted to be in school, the one that all the teachers loved, the one who was good at sports, the one who got a lot of romantic attention from the ladies, and his confidence (some would say arrogance) may be somewhat undeserved. He’s the guy where it seems like the world around him is bending over backwards to make sure he has an easy path to victory. And here it happens again, when even the forces of nature say: “No, Teeny. Not today. You’re not good enough,” and while she may not have given the best performance, she certainly deserves to see a world where someone like Sam isn’t given every consideration.

His victory is so annoying. “Find a way, find a way!” he screams as if Joe Rogan was right in his ear. Yeah, I’ll find a way to control the weather, I think. Who should we all turn into? Storm in X Men? One of the final three is a man who had never eaten watermelon until he was traveling around the world and someone forced him to try it and he didn’t even really like it.

And the inspiration begins again. The jury tells us that Sam is a pariah with a rough game and that he definitely persevered. No, Sam was so bad at everything—overcoming challenges, finding idols, making friends—that while people spoke of him as a threat, there was always a bigger one. In his Final Tribal, he will try to show that he intentionally made Rachel look like more of a threat so people wouldn’t have to look at him. Dude, no one looked at you because you had a terrible track record.

When all the jurors say who they support, Teeny, Kyle and Sierra choose Sam. Sol, Andy and Genevieve pick Rachel; and Caroline and Gabe choose Sue. Well, I’m sure the producers sat down with everyone and asked them to give reasons why each of the three should win and they only chose those answers so we’re being manipulated through the editing, but it seems like they would create a showdown between Sam and Rachel that it really should be.

Sue shocks everyone when she tells them that she is 59 that day and beat them all. Kyle is still angry because she thinks she could have beaten him in a one-on-one competition at the Barrel Challenge. She’s twice his age! The fact that there was a showdown at all is astonishing.

That’s when I started thinking about what kind of games the jury would reward. Rachel absolutely came out on top, she won challenges, she found idols and advantages, and maybe she was on the wrong side of some votes, but like she said, she brought the alliance of Andy, Teeny, Sue and Caroline together and That’s what got her to where she ends up sitting. Yes, Andy screwed them over, and Sam was part of Operation Italy, but it wasn’t Sam’s plan, and even after they implemented it, Rachel’s idol play at the last tribal meeting sent Andy home and set the stage for her near decimation of all of them, until the wind came in and said, “Um, maybe not.” But that’s the kind of play we often see from men and the kind of play that is usually rewarded by men, especially Jeff. It’s muscular, it’s active, it’s risk-taking. But now people like Kyle, who voted for Sam, see Rachel and are angry that they were overtaken by a girl and they don’t want to vote for her.

Sam doesn’t like Rachel’s game either, but I think that’s because a woman played it. He says it was pure luck that she gained an advantage from Sol, bought the right item at the auction, and solved a puzzle while traveling. Um, no. She got that from Sol because he liked her and trusted her. This is called a board game. She held up the idol in front of everyone, which means ability. She had to solve a puzzle before it was swept into the sea. Rachel deserves all of this. The only other player with as many advantages as Rachel was Rome – look where he is and look where Rachel is. Even if she got it by luck, she used it cleverly to save herself and optimize it. As she says in her closing speech, everyone thought she was going home and praised her in front of the jury, and then she stood up at her own funeral, played immunity idol, and not only saved herself, but apparently got so upset very upset that it came to this would be on Sam’s side in the challenge of making a fire.

I would say Sam played like last year’s winner Kenzie Petty in failing to win anything. She was the underdog who made it to the end and won. Still, she also managed by making friends and giving her heart to every person she played with, while Sam pissed off at least Teeny and probably a few others, including Rachel, whose game he kept downplaying. I’m not saying one game is better than the other, and we’ve had players of different genders play it successfully. Still, the stink coming from the jury is that they’re not impressed by Rachel’s dominance and they’re impressed by Sam’s bravery, and that really gets on my nerves. (In this case, the goat is not Sue because she had the same right to be there as the other two, whereas Teeny would have been a classic goat.)

Luckily, there was no denying that Rachel played a dominant game after the merger. As she said, when she woke up when Sierra was voted out and realized she had no friends, she figured out how to play Survivors real quick. She did everything you’re supposed to do in the game: win challenges, find idols, make big moves, and find strong allies, including one who she took with her to the final two. I can’t imagine anyone who likes a muscular game Survivors (and even some of those who don’t) might vote against them. I’m glad that while Sam got the nod to play the underdog, Rachel has proven what it takes to truly win this game and she’s a great winner in what could be the New Era’s best season yet.