Survivor 45.6 — “I’m Not Batman, I’m Canadian!”

Where has my Survivor coverage been!?

That’s a totally fair question.  I love Survivor, far more than Big Brother.  And every season, I try to write about each episode on this site.  Unfortunately, this year I missed out on recapping the first half of the season.  October is my busiest month of the year, as I not only write for this site but I also coordinate two separate “horrorthons” for two other sites.  If I hadn’t been covering Big Brother at the same time, I probably would have had the time to cover Survivor from the start.  Unfortunately, because of this year’s weird Big Brother schedule, I ended up with just too much on my plate. in October.  And so, I put off writing about Survivor until November.

And now it’s November!  So, let’s talk Survivor!

Well, if nothing else, I picked the right week to start talking about Survivor because, this week, the three tribes merged into one and the game became a contest of individual immunity.  Post-merge Survivor is always better than pre-merge.

Of course, it wasn’t a true merge.  Just as they did last season, the new tribe was split into two groups, which then battled for immunity.  The team that won immunity moved on to the merged tribe.  The members of the team that lost were all eligible to voted out at tribal council.

It was a classic tribal council, due to Kaleb playing his shot in the dark.  Thanks to Emily (who appears to have become a very clever and observant player after a somewhat shaky start), Kaleb knew that he was being targeted so he did the one thing that he could do.  He sacrificed his vote and played his shot in the dark.  And, for the second time since the shot in the dark was introduced to Survivor, it worked!  Kaleb won immunity and every vote cast against him did not count.  And that’s good because every single vote that was cast — all eleven of them — were cast for Kaleb.  If not for his shot in the dark, it would have been 11-0 to exile Kabel from the island.

This led to a re-vote, one in which no one could vote for Kaleb.  J. Maya tried to convince everyone to vote for Emily but what J. Maya apparently didn’t know was that, even before the Merge, the members of her own tribe had been talking about voting her out.  There were several whispered conversations.  J. Maya whispered to everyone to vote for Emily, which Emily shrugged off when she heard the news.  Apparently, after Kaleb played his shot in the dark, there wasn’t much doubt that J. Maya was going to be the target.  The new vote was 10-1, in favor of kicking J. Maya out of the game.  J. Maya voted for Emily while everyone else voted for J. Maya.

A few random thoughts:

1. I am still getting to know the players and I need to rewatch a few of the previous episodes on Paramount Plus.  Hopefully, I’ll do that tomorrow.  I like Emily, who has gone from being timid and lost to apparently being one of the strongest players on the beach.
2. I know that there’s a lot of idols out there and Bruce has one of them.  Honestly, I’m sick of idols.  Bruce seems to be awfully impressed with himself and I’m really hoping this isn’t going to be one of those season where he rides the idol all the way to the end,
3. Kendra is kind of scary.
4. Kaleb and Emily seem like they could be a strong team and they’ll need to be since they are the only two members of the original Lulu tribe left.

I’m looking forward to covering the rest of the season here at Reality TV Chat Blog!