Last night’s Survivor was, in many ways, just another installment in the show’s “New Era.†Jeff Probst’s post-COVID reset of the game has included structural changes (the season now spans 26 days on the island, down from 39), a shitload of complicated new advantages, and no small amount of grumbling from longtime fans that the game is not what it used to be. They’re right, of course. New Survivor feels manic and impulsive; it’s cast almost exclusively with Survivor superfans who have been watching since they were kids and dream of pulling off an epic Tony Vlachos blindside, all basically tripping over one another to make the showiest never-saw-it-coming maneuver possible. We saw this play out in the current season’s premiere episode to the detriment of Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett, who became the season’s first boot mostly because he and his tribe mates opted not to vote out the obvious weak link and instead sought bigger, flashier prey.
One underrated aspect of the new Survivor, though, has come on the production end of things, where the show’s editors are employing increasingly baroque tweaks and tricks in order to zhuzh up the usual formula. Recent seasons have employed flashbacks to previously unaired footage and flash-forwards to Tribal Council in the middle of an episode (we’re two seasons at most from an episode starting in medias res with “That’s me — I bet you’re wondering how I ended up racing through the jungle in Fiji with an immunity necklace in my handâ€). But last night’s episode, “Is That Blood in Your Hair,†featured perhaps the most over-the-top editing flourish in Survivor history. It was awesome.
If you didn’t realize this season even had a Genevieve, you’re in good company. Up until now, the 33-year-old corporate lawyer from Winnipeg had been mostly ballast in the Lavo tribe, a loyalist to the annoying, showboat-y Rome but otherwise not a factor in any of the season’s story lines. With Lavo headed to Tribal Council for a second straight episode, that all changed. Tribe elder Sol (the man is 43 years old, I’m gonna need a moment) was shaping up to be the easy vote, but new Survivor doesn’t do easy votes. Rome turned off his tribe mates by being a huge dick to Sol, so Kishan — heretofore playing a strategically low-key game — decided it was time to make a move and rope in Genevieve and Sol for a blindside of Rome. This involved a good bit of maneuvering by Kishan (getting Rome to pitch Genevieve as the red-herring vote to Sol) and a whole lot of Kishan talking to the camera about wanting to shake up the game.
But downtime is the enemy of a good plan. Rome eventually spilled to Genevieve that it was Kishan who’d suggested they tell Sol to vote for her, a subtle but real hint that Genevieve was on some level expendable to Kishan. What followed was, as Parade’s Mike Bloom put it on X, a Keyser Söze–esque series of floating-head flashbacks to things Kishan had said that might make Genevieve question going along with his plan. Hilariously, half of these little Kishan bubbles were things he told the camera when no one else was around. But the scene nevertheless was emotionally true: Genevieve backed out of the plan to vote with Kishan and instead targeted Kishan because he was making a move to benefit himself and not her. To the absolute gobsmacked shock of Kishan (and Sol and poor clueless Teeny), Rome used his steal-a-vote advantage (sigh) to take Kishan’s vote at Tribal, and the 28-year-old ER doctor got snuffed.
The season lost a smart, fun, personable player in Kishan. But in that moment, Queen Genevieve was born, a player whose clairvoyance could summon her enemies’ words from the ether. Genevieve the all-knowing, all-seeing eye of Fiji. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was spending the first three episodes of season 47 convincing you she didn’t exist.