There was a strange undercurrent throughout season 43 of Survivor, which wrapped up last night with a massive three-hour finale. As fans of Survivor, we make peace with the fact that we’re seeing mere hours of a monthlong endeavor, but all season, we’ve wrestled with feeling like we were missing information. Votes don’t add up, and alliances and friendships crop up without much explanation. In hindsight, maybe they were warning us of such an unpredictable ending.
Buckle up, because we’ve got a lot to unpack.
Going into the finale, Jesse had just used Cody’s own idol to expel him from the game. After such an audacious move, Gabler, Karla, Cassidy, and Owen were all sure they’d be able to vote him out next. Of course, Jesse had Jeanine’s idol hidden in his buff and his spot in the final four secured, but no one — not even anyone on the jury — had any idea. It was his saving grace and the only chance he had at getting into the final four.
Prior to the final-five immunity challenge, the castaways are sent to another island to build a camp for a few days. I can’t exactly tell you why this has become a staple of the new seasons, because we didn’t even get to see any of the new beach. If the goal is to push them further toward the brink of exhaustion, show us how hard it was for them to build shelter again. Instead, we jump right into the next morning where Tree Mail reveals a hidden advantage on the island. The scrambled clue leads Karla and Owen on a mad dash, with Karla swooping in to grab it, just inches away from Owen’s hand.
But even without the advantage in the challenge, Owen pulls out a fantastic immunity win at the final five. A man after my own heart, he cites his Wordle skills in helping him complete the insanely overwhelming word-scramble challenge. Back at camp, all hell breaks loose between our two remaining women. Like Jesse, Karla has also revealed herself to be a bit villainous these last few weeks. She was always a cutthroat player, but her turn against Cassidy comes across as spiteful. Was there another big blowup between them we never saw? Or was Karla so genuinely offended that she was going to lose that she couldn’t look past her former ally having a hand in it? With her back against the wall, Karla does what she feels she needs to do. She blatantly threatens to tank Cassidy’s game to the jury if she votes her out, even before the knowledge of Jesse’s idol is revealed. This dissolution of their relationship hurts a little more, considering Cassidy was the only person the entire season to bring up the historic number of women voted out pre-merge.
At Tribal that night, Jesse stuns the crowd by revealing Jeanine’s idol. Everyone is shocked, but Jeanine is absolutely floored. The fact that Jesse looked her in the eyes and consoled her after Dwight “left with her idol†crushed her. But everyone, Jeanine included, respects the move. I’m not sure why Jesse doesn’t have everyone vote for him just to reveal his single vote, but in any case, Karla votes for Jesse while everyone else votes for Karla.
With Jesse’s guaranteed spot in the final four, he is just as guaranteed to make fire. He is the only person in the final four never to win individual immunity, and after Cassidy cinches her third immunity win, it seals his fiery fate. No one would ever choose to sit next to him, so why he didn’t practice making fire from the moment he returned from Cody’s vote out is beyond me. Jeff has said it a million times by now, but maybe Jesse forgot that fire represents your life in Survivor, never more true than in the years since this final challenge was instituted in Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers in 2017. It was brutal to watch his million-dollar blunder against Gabler and, even worse, to watch him break down and cry as the reality set in. There’s a lot to dislike about the final-four fire-making challenges, but this was not a new twist this season. Jesse knew it was coming, and he failed, sending Gabler to the final three along with Cassidy and Owen.
Final Tribal Council
It wasn’t just Gabler’s record-breaking fire that led to his win. It’s one thing to threaten to poison the jury, as Karla did, but it’s another thing to do it. While we’ll never know what conversations happened at Ponderosa, based on the FTC reactions, I’m assuming there were more than a few bitter jurors. Sami claimed during the reunion that the jurors had come up with checklists for the final three: If they could correctly hit exactly what the jury wanted to hear, they’d win. But judging by the way questions were formed, Cassidy had an uphill battle compared to Gabler, while Owen really had no chance at all. Gabler was asked questions like “Was your strategy on purpose or by accident?†(Shockingly, he said it was on purpose.) Meanwhile, when Cassidy is given a chance to argue her biggest strategic vote, she can’t even finish her answer without being discounted.
There were plenty of frustrating moments during this Final Tribal Council, but Ryan interrupting Cassidy might’ve been the most infuriating. First, Cassidy should’ve been given a chance to finish her answer without being interrupted. A simple request! The vote in question was the double-elimination episode, during which we saw James voted out in a big move by Noelle, followed by Ryan being voted out by Jesse, Cody, Cassidy, and Gabler. She’s attempting to argue that this move set the stage for her endgame, that saving herself here and getting Ryan out was important to her game. (She’s right.) But before she can even finish the thought, Ryan turns to Cody and Jesse, and they give a convincing but untrue account of this vote. According to the men, Ryan was always the vote, especially if James was voted out first. Here’s what Jesse actually said at the time; let’s roll the tapes:
“If it is Owen, maybe we’d want to keep trust with James and get rid of Ryan and keep Cass … If it’s James, maybe we just cut Cass because then Karla’s on her own completely.â€Â
Cassidy was able to convince them she was the better person to keep in the game, despite her strong social and physical game. It sounds like she saved her own ass, despite not necessarily helping Jesse and Cody’s game. I’ll even be dramatic and say they were gaslighting her into thinking she had no agency in this vote or in the game in general. And I think this situation indicates how differently the men and the women saw this season. Cassidy did not get to the final three by accident, as much as Jesse and Cody may want to think. She won a third of the immunity challenges, voted correctly every single vote, and stayed strong to her biggest until she was forced to cut the tie. Instead of being rewarded for this clear strategy, she is punished.
Over and over, Gabler refers to his removal of Elie as his biggest move. His vendetta against this woman is clearly rooted in something deeper because, at this point, it was a million years ago. It may have been after the semi-merge, but she wasn’t even on the jury! It speaks volumes that this was the move Gabler was most proud of. The only time he manipulated the vote to go his way was with an over-the-top and completely unsubtle strategy. He may have voted correctly at nearly every vote, but how many of those were his idea? Instead, he was a puppet, an anonymous extra vote for Jesse and Cody or whoever he was aligned with that week.
Overall, I think the sour mood at Final Tribal Council was the only natural ending to this season. Throughout the entire game, being “subtleâ€Â was rewarded. Men talked about needing to “crack [women] into line†and anyone who tried to make a big move had their torch promptly snuffed. I’ve disagreed with so many decisions this game; I should’ve seen the anticlimactic Gabler win coming.
Idol Thoughts
• There are a lot of little tweaks to post-COVID Survivor that fans don’t love, but immediately reading the votes in Fiji has definitely had a negative impact on the culture of the game. Survivor has always been billed as the ultimate social experiment, and without seeing how the season played out on TV, the castaways are lacking the perspective to really dig into what just happened. The final three haven’t even had a chance to take a shower yet! Expecting them to have the clarity to even see what went wrong is a lot to ask. Instead, we have to watch Owen and Cassidy having a miserable night, forced to drink Champagne and celebrate without the time to process anything. It doesn’t help that these are both superfans who dreamed of playing Survivor their whole lives.
• Cassidy made one comment during FTC, and no further discussion was had. All season, I’ve spent hours talking and writing about the icky, subtle misogyny that bubbled under the surface. I would’ve loved some perspective on the situation, especially from the women voted out pre-merge. Going into the jury portion of the game, it was an 8-4 split between men and women, the most dramatic gender bias at the merge since Millennials vs. Gen X. There’s no way to definitively say this had an impact on the endgame (or on the reception to Cassidy’s FTC argument) because no one involved talked about it at all. As frustrated as I was to watch the jury smile and laugh every time Gabler opened his mouth, only to scowl and shake their heads at Cassidy’s responses, I cannot even imagine how she was feeling.
• Based on the winners’ edits from the past three seasons, something has got to change in the editing room. The fans accept and celebrate an under-the-radar winner, but we should be shown enough to see why they go on to win before Final Tribal Council. If Gabler is going to reference an alliance by name, we should’ve seen this alliance throughout the season — what the hell is this “Ride or Die†alliance that had such an impact on the game? I’m happy for the veterans who will benefit from Gabler’s win, and I really respect him not using his plan to donate his winnings as an argument in his favor. But ultimately, this was a disappointing end to a disappointing season.