Australian Survivor – Sun, Sept 4

Our recorder has blown a gasket so I’m watching live tonight and, darn it, I missed the first few minutes.
Over at yellow shelter Sam and Conner are getting used to their new digs, while Nick (aka Aussie Rob C, but much brasher) and Tegan arrive at blue to find the shelter is soaking wet. Nice welcome.
“I’m out for blood,” says Nick, adding he was surprised Sue (the naughty Nanna) betrayed him.
I can’t wait to see what red tribe’s reaction to the swap is at the next challenge.
It’s night and a storm is lashing the island, leaving everyone – even Chester the chicken – soaking and dispirited. Except, that is, red tribe, because they finally won a challenge and got all of yellow’s previously won comfort items and gear. Cricketer Lee is obviously not used to losing so he’s stoked things are looking up.
Over at yellow, new tribe member Spidey Sam knows he’s no longer the top of the totem pole.
At blue, Flick knows she had a lucky escape. I’m really interested to hear Magic Matt’s take on all this. Nick’s strategy is to be super helpful around camp and he chops up a coconut with ease. We finally get to hear Tegan speak and straight away Brooke gets to work on drawing her into the pretty girl alliance. Tegan doesn’t seem to have much strategy and because she was weirded out by the truth or honesty test (and is a model/personal trainer) I’m thinking she’s a recruit rather than a student of the game. It’s actually in Tegan’s interest to distance herself from Nick, to make him a target should the team go to tribal again, but she doesn’t seem to be doing so consciously.

What the hell is it with Survivor and yoga? Is it compulsory to whip out Downward Dog at the auditions? Pigtails Kristy and Lawyer Phoebe are bending it on the beach and Kristy seems to have recovered from her paranoid “they moved my bag” freakout.


They have a chat about how expendable Model Rohan but Phoebe’s real bond is with El the army chick.
Suddenly Nick is sporting a brown fedora. Where did that come from? He gets to work ingratiating himself with his new tribe and seems to make headway with Magic Matt, who reveals he’s pissed off with the pretty girl alliance of Flick and Brooke.


At yellow, Conner is liking the yellow vibe (and we learn the chicken’s name is Apricot – clever) but he knows he’s in danger because he’s no super human and he thinks the tribe would rather keep Sam. With such big numbers I’d be ditching Sam and keeping Conner, who can more easily be won over to their side.
We finally get some Dreads Barry back story (about his time playing with the Wallabies), so he could be going tonight as he’s treating Survivor like a school camping and ignoring the Outwit and Outplay aspects of the game. And that’s what happen when you recruit people, even if it’s great to see cultural diversity in the cast.

It’s challenge time …
JLap does the “come on in” and red’s minds are blown to realise no-one went home and there was a tribal swap. The challenge contains a component that is a Survivor classic: binding sticks together to create a long pole that can then hook a key.
Conner said he sucked at challenges but, boy, the little fella had some speed on him racing out to the frame in the water.
Blue and yellow get their poles built quickly but they are quite bendy and blue drops their key on the sand and have to drag it. Red has made El and Kat the pole builders – setting Kat up to be in the firing line again? Blue are first to the firemaking station and Nick gets a spark straight away. They win immunity.
Yellow is having trouble getting their fire to build up enough (was Nick their fire starter?) but red still doesn’t have their key off. On the sidelines Lee, Phoebe and Rohan are slowly dying watching the girls try to hook it. Finally they get it but Lee and Rohan must be the best fire builders, otherwise they would have been on the pole building. Lee gets it started quickly and they are doing a good job building it up, sheltering the flame nicely. Well, I’m actually glad, for Kat’s sake, that she’s not in the firing line yet again, as she surely would have been. I just hope that when she is voted out she burns that monstrous leopard print cardy thing in the fire along with her buff.
So, the yellow tribe is going to tribal and Conner and Sam are going to be really worried – there’s no way JLap will be throwing in another twist tonight.

Interestingly they seem to be targeting Conner, without any talk of splitting the vote in case he or Sam has a secret idol. How do they know Kylie had the only one? Conner pitches to the majority alliance that he is desperate to stay and will be a loyal number in future. And it has an impact: Coma Girl Kate is swayed by Conner’s emotion. She throws Barry’s name out as a possibility and it seems some of the others are irritated by Barry’s refusal to “play” the game. And then there’s a curveball: Andrew (in a trilbly, because felt hats are totally suitable for the climate in Samoa) tells the camera he wants Craig out, because he’s a threat. He approaches Naughty Nanna Sue, seeking support. Finally! People who want to make moves and not just hold hands and sing Kumbaya.


At tribal council …
JLap awkwardly questions Sam and Conner about how much it sucks to be on a new tribe and then tries to get some dirt on last week’s Nick blindside. Then he reminds Craig and Baz how bad they were at building a fire in the challenge. JLap has been doing quite well until this episode as Survivor host, but his line of questioning tonight is stilted and they are draaaaggging it out. Not good editing.
I hope it’s Barry.
The votes are read and it IS Barry! Hooray. The question will be whether anyone clued Sam and Conner in to the vote (judging by the vote footage at the end, they did).

Tomorrow night
Kate has a horrible-looking lump under her arm that looks ready too explode, reminiscent of the last season of US Survivor when everyone was sporting pus-filled boils, which resulted in ice-cream maker Neale being ousted on medical grounds. I hope Kate stays – she seems a good egg. And that JLap puts his medical background to good use. Lance it, JLap – that would be grosser than any bug-eating challenge.

What did we think?
Well, it wasn’t as twisty as the last episode and tribal council was boring and awkward, but it’s always good when tribes don’t take the easy option and vote out the newest tribe members, especially when they are people who really want to play. I’m hoping Magic Matt and Nick build up a decent alliance over at blue and are able to pull Tegan away from the pretty girl alliance.



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39 Comments

  1. I stand corrected. Conner and Sam survived (thank goodness).

    I think the rest of the yellow tribe had a point, though. Barry never really looked like he actually wanted to be there (given the had all of 2 confessional scenes in the last 6 episodes). Even in his final speech, he seemed more relieved than upset or emotional.

    I don’t think they can throw too many more twists on us before the inevitable merge, although yellow tribe still has an immunity idol floating around in the jungle somewhere, and Matt has at least realised that Flick’s position of power might be likely to cause problems somewhere down the line.

  2. And if Sharky Andrew had approached Conner and Sam to go after Craig?

    I was glad when Agenor won because I wanted to see how the new tribes worked. Vavau may suck at clallenges these days but they are very good at tribal councils.

    I suspect a merge is a long way off. This is a long season and a big cast. They can twist the three tribes a bit further before a merge.

    I’ll also go out on a limb. We will see a long season from the US in the not too distant future.

    • I wish we’d seen more of the Sue-Andrew discussion. I was thinking the three tribes would go into two in another week or so? But who knows. The US would surely be watching with interest how the longer format goes. But given they do two seasons a year it might be hard for then to squeeze in two long ‘uns. Unless Jeff wants to cut back to one a year and they attempt to bring in another host? Hard to imagine US Survivor without Jeffy, although I’d love to see someone like Penner putting the screws on contestants at tribal. He’d be great at the talking bits.

      • I think Craig could be in trouble next time. Weak charges and strong at leadership is never a good combination in the pre-merge.

  3. Thanks for the great recap Juz.
    So Barry was a recruit. I was wondering if he’d ever watched the show since he said he didn’t want to strategise & wanted to pull a name out of a hat. He didn’t seem to have a clue how Survivor is played.
    It was funny seeing the red teams reaction to the other tribes & no one going home. That was incredible how they just came from nowhere to beat the other team. They looked like they had no chance. The other team’s fire looked like it was going to take but it just fizzed out. Just goes to show you never give up no matter how hopeless it seems. Good on them.

  4. I was a bit bummed that that team went to tribal because the two I like least are Pbeobe and Flick, so no chance of them going.
    I wish the orchestra at vote reading wouldn’t ruin the suspense by bringing the cescendo and making it obvious who is out.
    I am thinking that team might regret not sending Conner, but I didn’t care who left that tribe. Baz seemed like he is probably a nice guy. Too nice for Connivor.

    • Agreed Daisy – the music is very intrusive. And I really don’t like Phoebe or Flick as well!
      Conner played a smart game basically saying he’d be “loyal” and “grateful” (i.e. my vote can be bought) if he was kept in the game.

      • They should have figured; if Conner’s team ditched him, he was either untrustworthy or a big threat. Also since Connor chose Sam, they should assume they were tight, and they talk about tight couples being dangerous. But Connor is making it interesting for us.

        • He’s 19 and weighs, like, fifty kilos soaking wet. I don’t think they see him as a threat (certainly not after watching his various outbursts at the shared Tribal Council). I admit, whenever the camera cut to him last night, I was thinking, “Conner, shut up. Conner, shut up. Conner, shut up.” But he said and did all the right things last night, and they all probably realised that in the long run, his vote is going to be worth far more than Barry (who really didn’t even look like he wanted to be there).

          I agree that Conner is an adorably-handsome wild card, and I hope they keep the kid around.

          It’s Flick and Brooke I want to see at Tribal Council next. They’re just annoying me.

        • I think Conner played it really well at the swap TC – he made it look like he had no hard feelings, he implied that he was targetted because he called out a huge deception, and he gentlemanly offered to be swapped to save the tribe having to be split.

          He is very good at making himself look sweet and nice.

    • Jinx. Phoebe and Flick, for me, embody the worst of girl-style deception. I was yelling at the TV for Kate not to trust Phoebe. Fortunately she doesn’t seem to have swallowed Phoebe’s assurances without question.

  5. That really was a great comeback for the red team…i had Kat pencilled in for sure.
    Barry was a good choice, you cant go on this show and expect to not get caught up in some backstabbing…reckon he didnt have any idea about the game really!
    Yes, Andrew and Sue’s conversation was interesting, maybe a little too early for Craig to go, but at least they thinking about it…
    Really like Kate too, hope that they can lance that boil, looked pretty gross actually!

  6. I think they made the right choice, his comments at tribal council made it seem like he knew what was going on etc but not good to keep someone so unpredictable.

  7. This is Australian $urvivor, right? This is just a small point. I’m not a member of One Nation or anything.

    However many of the contestants talk like Americans and even wear baseball caps backwards. It’s like getting on my nerves hearing smackdowns that have been like done to death on US sitcoms.

    Talk like Aussies , ya pack of fuckin’ galahs. Yaz can’t survive shit, ya mongrels.

    Burke and Wills would be rolling and rotting in their graves trying to survive this being called “Australian”. **** me. It’s a good show, there’s plenty of encores on weekends. Zumbo, too.

    • Too bloody right Dave. Stone the flamin’ crows.
      Pretty sure that I did learn a lot of my lingo in the 70s from yanks like Cheech & Chong though. ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚ And I have been guilty of a few Maxwell Smartisms.
      We weren’t compelled to though; like with saying like.

    • Language changes at a fairly measurable, regular, and predictable rate. This has been happening for around 1000000 years. It is unlikely to end because a group us march down to the beach and order the tide to ebb when it is coming in. Many Romans complained bitterly about the Greek influence creeping into their language and then shut up when the flow reversed as Rome grew more powerful.

      Given the way our economy now rides on the dragon’s back we can confidently expect our children to complain that everyone sounds Chinese and why cant we back to good old Australian expressions such as ‘like’.

      • Then you get guys like Shakespeare who invent at least four hundred words just like by themselves that are still used like today. Like “sizzling” That sounds like better than “awesome”, hey?

        • Shakespeare proves my point. One quarter of all his words are neologisms. If Shakespeare had been frightened of the incoming tide and if he had followed the rules you have argued for then we would never have heard of him.

          ‘Awesome’ is a much older word than ‘sizzling’ and the allegedly new meaning is much closer to the way it was used originally than it has been in about 200 years.

          • Oh my goodness. Everything is “awesome” these days. I even heard a middle aged woman gush “awesome” over something trivial yesterday. I think it was the lady in the bakery getting her a pie. Really, an awe inspiring pie?

            Alan, whenever you have people changing language, you will still have old fogies like me saying, “stand up straight, close your mouth while you are eating, and enunciate your words when you speak”.
            Bloody hell…no old fogie emo.

          • The new meaning for “awesome” covers about everything from from great achievements to “Gee ,I took an awesome crap this morning”

  8. I hate twists like this – although I’m glad Connor is till around. But telling a group you’re going to tribal council then voting then telling them that their vote is about a tribe swap is too much manipulation.
    Agree about the Americanisms – what gets me is that wherever you go now, NO ONE can tell you a story without throwing in “like” every two seconds – grown men and women in corporate attire are afflicted as well. It’s no longer just the air heads from LA.
    Plus everyone is a guy now. Even the girls. Not men and women, not people. Just guys.
    And people are using American spelling for everything: it’s colour not color. It’s civilisation not civilization.

    Everything just sh!ts me.

  9. I kind of like that weird Kristie. She is like Sue Heck crossed with Orphelia Adams. A darkish female oddball. I think she makes good tv viewing.

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