“Survivor 45” recap: The best episode of the season

A Tribal Council shocker punctuates a riveting 90 minutes of television.

All killer, no filler. That’s pretty hard to do in an hourlong episode of television. It’s even harder to do on a 90-minute episode. But that’s exactly what we got on this week’s installment of Survivor 45. Absolutely every single thing worked. Everything.

Look, usually the top of these recaps are some sort of rambling nonsense — perhaps involving cheap beer, thigh-high knee socks, some tertiary character from an obscure 1980s action movie nobody has ever heard of (The Perfect Weapon, anyone?), or, failing all of that, the Medallion of Power. But not this week. This week, I bow down like Wayne and Garth and proclaim, “I AM NOT WORTHY!” at the top of my lungs because the best show on television just aired its best episode of the season. Yes, better than Kaleb’s Shot in the Dark play, for while that was an undeniably fantastic moment, this episode was filled with fantastic moment after fantastic moment.

And equal credit goes to both the producers for the new creative wrinkles, and the cast for giving us a shocking and devastating blindside. The new auction rules? Absolutely inspired. Probst taking a knife and cutting open the bag of rice to give the tribe a running clock to make a decision? Brilliant. Katurah continuing her epic anti-Bruce crusade? Hilarious. The Reba tribe shifting the vote last minute to blindside an absolutely distraught Kellie? Epic, and for my money even more dramatic than the J Maya exit.

This episode was Survivor at its best. Submit it for an Emmy. Hang it in the Louvre. Put a big DO NOT DELETE sign on your DVR. We must do everything in our power to preserve this masterpiece for future generations, so when they ask, “Hey, what was that show Survivor about anyway?” they can be shown this. And their first reaction will be: “That was awesome.” Well, that’s not entirely true. Their first reaction will be “Why does Katurah hate this Bruce person so much?” But their second reaction will be “That was awesome.” As it should be. Because this week’s episode was awesome in every way. Let’s count some of them.

Return of the auction

The auction was broken. That’s the reason Survivor had not aired one in 15 seasons. Once they introduced advantages into the auction, the smart players just started saving all their money to bid on those. A few seasons after that, everybody started saving their money and the auction became, essentially, pointless.

The fix seemed simple. And because I think I am so smart, I argued it right here in one of these recaps: Just bring the auction back and tell the players there are no advantages. There! Easy! Solved! And this, ladies and gentlemen, will now serve as Exhibit A as to why I am not qualified to be a television producer. Because while, yes, the powers that be that make Survivor did exactly that, they did more. So much more.

The first part of their plan was instead of just handing the players money, to have them go on a hunt for the cash. All the auction money was stuffed into 40 bamboo tubes hidden around the tribe camp. And different tubes contained different amounts of cash. This played out beautifully, with Bruce for some reason declining to hurry and scurry, leading to Katurah’s on-cue delight in seeing his empty basket. But behind that hilarity was a super solid game-mechanic of giving all the players differing amounts of cash to spend — a move that would come into play with the third big format change.

After greeting the players to the auction, Hostmaster General Jeff Probst delivered the news that he would pull a rock from a bag that told him — and only him — when the auction would end. Not only that, but the player with the most money left at the end of the auction would lose their vote at Tribal Council. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

The reason this wrinkle was so deliciously devious is that it pitted two directly opposing instincts against each other. A player had to worry about taking too much money into those final auction items, because if it suddenly ended and they had the most money, they lost their vote. HOWEVER, at the same time, if they did not have the most money on those final items, they would be outbid on them and be stuck and unable to get out of the auction. This meant Bruce with his measly $80 was completely powerless to do anything while Austin ($600 slice of pizza) Julie ($420 mouthwash) Jake ($340 chocolate cake), and Kellie ($200 margarita) each had to worry about being the top dog before mercifully getting out.

Probst totally milked it too, trying to fake players out by nodding yes before saying no, and then nodding no before telling Bruce that yes, the auction was indeed over and his vote was gone. There are few things I love more than a reality TV fake-out. As far as I am concerned, the height of modern-day culture was in those early years of American Idol when Simon, Paula and Randy would walk into a hotel ballroom filled with hopeful pop stars desperately waiting to learn if their group was about to be cut or had made it through to the next round and Simon would be all, “Hey, everyone. You know, we love our jobs here on American Idol. But there are parts of our job we don't love. And one of those parts is coming into a room of people and telling them their journey is over. And with that said, I’m very sorry to tell you that… YOU ARE THROUGH TO THE NEXT ROUND!”

Like, it would not even make any sense whatsoever. Why was he sorry to tell them they had made it through? None of it added up… which made me love it that much more. Anyway, Probst was totally channeling that energy here at the auction and I was 1,000,000 percent here for it. I don’t know how long this new auction approach will work because pretty soon other players will pull a Kendra and immediately try to give away all their money for a single beer to make sure they keep their vote, but it was a super clever solve for now, and will certainly work for season 46 as well (since they didn’t see this season prior to filming). And if and when producers have to tweak it moving forward, they will.

One other note about the auction: If there is one rule to always follow at the auction, it is this: Never bid on the second covered item. The first covered item is always a good one because they want that to then incentivize people to bid for follow-up covered items. Always bid on the first! But bidding on the second covered item is a sucker’s bet. And yet that is precisely what Katurah then went and did… and received giant fish eyes as a result. She should have known better. And I can’t help but be genuinely curious if Austin later puked that eyeball back up. Anyway, five stars for everything challenge-related this week.

Stabbing the rice

As great as the auction was, the challenge may have been even better. First off, this was a classic endurance competition where people had to hold on to a rope attached to a log holding a third of their pre-game body weight. Unlike some of the balance-something-on-a-part-of-your-body-for-as-long-as-you-can contests, this one translates so well to television. It’s so simple — just hold onto the rope. Yet you can see people struggling and pushing through the pain. THESE BASTARDS ARE DIGGING DEEP!

I love it. And I love a good surprise. I have no statistics on this to back me up, but I feel like these challenges where everyone has to hold a percentage of their body weight definitely favor skinny, athletic people. Like, say, a Tyson. That’s because they are holding so much less weight, obviously, but also those big muscular dudes tend to be fading in the strength department at this point due to a lack of fuel. Bigger people also tend to have lost a lot more weight by this point in the game, meaning the skinnier folks are working at a better percentage at this juncture. Which is why I had Julie pegged as a winner for this one.

Indeed, it came down to Julie against Bruce. And while Bruce probably has not been psyched to tune into Survivor each and every week only to hear everybody talk about how much they want to get rid of him, give it up to the crazy uncle for a super impressive performance here for the win.

But that’s not why this challenge was so amazing. For me, it was all about the fact that Probst attempted to murder a bag of rice. That’s not even a joke or an exaggeration. The host of the gold standard reality competition show of the twenty-first century went up to a bag of rice and stabbed it in the gut with a giant hunter’s knife. WHAT THE F---?!? What did that bag of rice ever do to Probst? By my count, this is the third most violent activity to take place against rice on this show, coming in just after the regrettable actions of Brandon Hantz and J’Tia Taylor.

But at least this time there was a method to the madness. Probst had just made his seasonal offer to contestants that he would give a big bag of rice to the tribe if four players would sit out and give up their chance at immunity. Dee immediately volunteered, and Emily followed suit. While the rest of the tribe talked it over all casual like, Probst decided to put some additional pressure on the decision-making process. Without any notice or warning, he took a ginormous knife and cut open the bag, causing the tribe’s rice to spill out — immediately sending Drew into a panic as he watched his tribe’s food supply dwindle before his eyes.

Drew agreed to sit out, but they still needed a fourth person. The longer they waited, the more rice they would lose. Probst’s move was so wildly unexpected and the panic that followed was beyond riveting. As a viewer, you could feel the tension as the rice kept spilling out of the bag while players hemmed and hawed. Eventually, Katurah volunteered to sit out. Would she have done the same thing had there not been such a rush to make a decision? Beats me. But what a masterful execution by the host and production team, ramping up the tension and not just forcing the players to make a difficult decision, but now having to make it under very difficult circumstances. Superb. Also superb? The reaction shots of Katurah when Bruce won immunity. As if there was anything else we wanted to see. The Katurah obsession with ousting Bruce is the finest wine since my boy Fishbach practically lost his mind trying to get Joe out on Survivor: Cambodia. It’s so good.

Blindside city

With Bruce now safe due to his immunity necklace that he would oh-so-humbly point out at Tribal Council, it appeared Jake was in major trouble. It didn’t seem likely that Bruce would give him his idol — his promise to “read the room” reading as hollow as the chocolate Easter bunnies I purchase from Holsten’s Ice Cream shop in Bloomfield, NJ, every spring. (It’s the same place where Tony Soprano may or may not have been killed after ordering onion rings and listening to Journey.)

But while Jake looked hopefully for an idol and started to calculate his Shot in the Dark odds, Drew started to contemplate another possibility. Instead of having to figure out a plan to protect his Reba alliance partners should Jake use one of those tools to make himself safe, what if they put the Jake vote off a few days until they had the numbers to split the vote between him and Bruce, thereby also flushing the idol? And what if they instead took a shot at Kellie?

It didn’t appear likely. For one thing, Dee and Julie didn’t seem to want any part of it. Maybe it was because of the alleged women’s alliance we heard about the top of the episode. Maybe it was because Julie wanted Jake out after he voted for her at the previous Tribal (the same way Dee was insistent on getting Kaleb out after he threw her name out at Tribal). Maybe it was because folks sensed Jake would have difficulty stringing two words together at Tribal Council later that night so they should just put him out of his misery.

Plus, Kellie — who has been a huge presence this season — did not get a big edit after the challenge and heading into this Tribal Council. The whole thing to move the vote over to her definitely felt like an aborted plan and a red herring. And I cannot tell you how much I love being drop dead wrong in situations like this.

Jake completely, inadvertently also sold how much the vote was going to be on him by giving the speech of a player that knows his proverbial goose is cooked. He started doing that thing that people do when they are on the bottom by talking about how “nobody is playing the game” even though they would never be saying that if they were in a position of power. The ironic thing about all of this, of course, is that while Jake was pleading with folks he perceived to be on the bottom to make a bold move, it was actually the folks seemingly in control of the game — the Reba four — that went ahead and actually made it. Whoops! Also his intentional slip (“If I pull out MY idol…”) was almost as blatant and transparent as Sifu just super casually bringing up that he had an idol to all his Reba tribemates. Not super convincing.

I was sure Jake was going. Positive. Convinced. Done deal. Apparently, Kellie felt the same way. Which is what made her blindside so absolutely captivating. I am going to say something now that may sound completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but here it goes: This was a more dramatic Tribal Council than Kaleb’s Shot in the Dark play. It was! Because as great as that was, we all knew that Kaleb would play it and J Maya would go home as a result. And J Maya knew it as well.

But look at the mixture of confusion and devastation on Kellie’s face as the votes started coming in. It’s like you can see all seven stages of grief cross her face as it happens and the realization hits her like a ton of bricks that her Survivor journey has abruptly come to an end. She’s asking Austin and Emily “Did you do this?” Kendra is sobbing. Katurah and Bruce look stunned. Jake is celebrating and then realizing he is celebrating too loudly so then trying to celebrate at an appropriate level. It’s an intoxicating blend of despair and bewilderment.

And the truly masterful and underappreciated thing about this scene? The silence. Go back and watch it. (I already have four times.) There is just the slightest hint of music as we are allowed to revel in the quiet awkward silence as Kellie confronts the people who just voted her out. “What the hell, guys?” she asks. And there are no answers. Some people stand to hug her. Others don’t. In her dazed state, Kellie has to ask if it’s even okay to hug someone and then shuffles absentmindedly like a zombie over to Probst… only she doesn’t even have her torch. Perfection.

You want to see the absolute devastation of Survivor in a single scene? This is it. This is the one. And the fact that Kellie has been such a key character this season and was seen as having a great shot at winning it all makes the impact hit that much harder. Which is why I stand by my statement that this was a more dramatic Tribal Council than Kaleb’s Hail Mary. In fact, the only thing wrong with this week’s Tribal — and the entire episode, for that matter — is that we didn’t get to see juror Kaleb walking in AFTER the tribe. C’mon, we have 21 extra minutes of airtime — we can’t spare 7 seconds to watch the jury walk in? BOOOOOOO!

And now the amulet has claimed its second victim. We faulted J Maya and Kellie for taking the amulets over the sandwich, arguing that it incentivized people to vote them out. Well, unlike my insistence that Jake was going to go tonight, it appears this time I was actually on to something as their games are both dunzo. And now Austin has yet ANOTHER idol in the game, putting him and Drew in the driver’s seat and the pole position and any other car-racing related analogies Drew may want to make because I know how much he loves that.

Do you know something else Drew loves? Talking in his sleep! And how do I know this? Because we have a hilarious exclusive deleted scene of him doing exactly that. Oh, and did you hear that Survivor 46 in 2024 is not only going to remain at 90-minute episodes, but will actually have some two-hour installments as well? Check out all the info right here. We also have the entire case revealing their most embarrassing moments ever, including the player that got busted passing gas by another contestant and Probst going behind the scenes of the auction return. Also make sure to enjoy our exit interview with Kellie. Allow that to fill you up for now, but save some room for next week’s Thanksgiving-sized scoop of the crispy! No auction dollars required!

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